PASCAL AND MELANCHOLY

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 339-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHAD A. CÓRDOVA
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Anthropological Perspective ◽  
Medical Status ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Therapeutic Protocols ◽  
Theories Of Subjectivity ◽  
Large Corpus

This article shows how two concepts for which Blaise Pascal'sPensées(1670) are best known—divertissementandennui(often mistranslated as “boredom”)—inherited and transformed medical conceptions of melancholy along with one of melancholy's signature therapeutic protocols: diversion. Instead of limiting the genealogy of Pascal's concepts to more obvious textual sources (St Augustine, Montaigne, etc.), here they are read against the background of an epistemological paradigm dominant in his time: Galenic medicine. Drawing on a large corpus of early modern French medical texts, this article discloses how melancholy, stripped of its overt medical status, remerges in Pascal's analysis of subjectivity, which valorized melancholicennuiagainst the values of a nascent civil society subservient to the monarchic order. Once used to describe outlying temperaments and exceptional pathologies, the discourse on melancholy becomes fundamental to the human being per se in Pascal's theological and anthropological perspective. Thus transformed, the older forms of melancholy and its remedies ensured the possibility of their survival—disguised and unrecognized—in modern theories of subjectivity and psychology. Understanding melancholy's latent presence in thePensées, in other words, sheds new light on the affective aspects of Pascal's social critique and invites us to investigate the modern afterlife of early modern melancholy.

scholarly journals A Truly Free State in the Congo: Slavery and Abolition in Global Historical Perspective

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-76
Author(s):  
John Donoghue
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic Of Congo ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
History Of

The differences between slavery now and then are less important than the historical links that bind them, links in an awful chain of bondage that bind the history of the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to the resurgence of slavery in Africa today. As this article illustrates, nowhere is this truer, both in historical and contemporary terms, than in the Congo. The links binding the Congo to the history of human bondage were first forged in the crucible of early modern capitalism and they have been made fast by the proliferation of “free market reform” today, which despite the fundamentalist cant of its advocates, has hardly proven to be a force of human liberation; instead, placing the last 500 years of the Congo region in global context, we can see how capitalism has proven to be the world’s greatest purveyor of human bondage. The article concludes with an argument that the reconstruction of civil society in the Democratic Republic of Congo after decades of war, dictatorship, and neo-colonial rule depends crucially on the continued success of an already impressive Congolese abolitionist movement. Without making an end to slavery, once and for all, civil society can hardly prosper in a country where slavery has historically brought about its destruction.

Fantasizing about Revenge

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-108
Author(s):  
Emily L. King
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
Poor Treatment ◽  
English Identity

Chapter three examines the relation between fantasy and civil vengeance through the figure of the vagrant. Insofar as vagrants are presumed responsible for major social problems, civil society justifies its poor treatment as retribution. Reading Jack Cade’s rebellion in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, the chapter proposes that normative society’s fantasy of its own victimhood produces vagrant bodies that are constructed to withstand extreme forms of labor and punishment, and the resulting bodies then sustain an expanding nation-state. Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton reveals the dynamic at work on the international stage in its attempts to define early modern Englishness against not only the Continent but also cosmopolitanism. While the impoverished vagrant offers social cohesion to normative subjects within the domestic project of nationalism, the affluent cosmopolitan vagrant and his eventual recoil from other cultures offers the fiction of a secure English identity.

Explorations through Early Modern English Medical Texts

2010 ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Anu Lehto ◽  
Raisa Oinonen ◽  
Päivi Pahta
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Early Modern English

The Qur’anic Calf Episode Between Orientalism and Islamic Tradition

2020 ◽  
pp. 265-317
Author(s):  
Michael E. Pregill
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The West ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Golden Calf ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Western Scholarship ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Radical Revision

This chapter discusses the qur’anic Golden Calf episode as it is traditionally interpreted in both Muslim exegesis and Western scholarship. The qur’anic references to the image worshipped by the Israelites are usually understood as depicting the Calf as alive or at least possessing some semblance of life—as ? lowing image of a calf, as the Qur’an puts it. Further, the Qur’an seems to posit that the Calf was made and animated by a character called al-sāmirī—the “Samaritan”—and not Aaron as in the biblical story. Western scholars and traditional Muslim commentators have always agreed on this interpretation of the qur’anic version of the episode. However, this chapter shows that Western scholars have generally relied upon the explanation of the episode in Muslim exegesis or tafsīr, misunderstanding the role that early Muslim commentators played in introducing a radical revision of the story that was quite different in major details from the account found in the Qur’an itself. This can be demonstrated by examining historical translations of the Qur’an in the West, beginning with some of the earliest translations and commentaries of the medieval and early modern periods in Europe. In the specific case of the Calf narrative, Western scholars’ reliance on tafsīr has typically been motivated not by a desire to validate the claims of Muslim authorities, but rather by the assumption that Islam is at its root thoroughly dependent upon Judaism. This assumption has colored not only the overarching approach to the qur’anic narrative per se, but also the characterization of a number of rabbinic traditions that have been cited as the sources of that narrative.

Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Dirk Moses
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Post War

This article describes the genocide concept of Raphael Lemkin. Genocide is a curious anomaly in the post-war regime of international humanitarian law, which is dominated by the discourse of human rights with its emphasis on individuals. It embodies the social ontology of ‘groupism’, because genocide is about the destruction of groups per se, not individuals per se. Lemkin thought that the Nazi policies were radically new, but only in the context of modern civilization. Wars of extermination have marked human society from antiquity until the religious conflagrations of early modern Europe, after which the doctrine that dominated was that war should be conducted against states rather than populations. Given that forty-nine members of his family died in the Holocaust, Lemkin's ecumenical approach to human suffering is at once astonishing and exemplary.

Democracy and Civil Society in the Early Modern Period: The Rise of Three Types of Civil Societies in the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-81
Author(s):  
Maarten F. Van Dijck
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Craft Guilds ◽  
Civil Societies

This article proposes to refine the concept civil society by discerning three distinct forms of civil society in the past. This refined conceptual framework counters the criticism that civil society suffers from its growing popularity and its broad definition. The usefulness of these three forms of civil society—which are based on the later work of Jürgen Habermas—are applied in this article on the seventeenth-century Low Countries. The central question is how these forms of civil society acted as schools of democracy in the seventeenth-century Spanish Netherlands and Dutch Republic. The three types of civil society are identified that developed through time and built a cumulative tradition of civil society. These are the medieval craft guilds (liberal civil society), the early modern civic militia (republican civil society), and the modern Enlightenment sociability (deliberative civil society). Data about the associational life in two cities in the Low Countries, Mechelen and Rotterdam, show that different forms of civil societies had different functions according to the societal context. Furthermore, the data show that societies with civil societies characterized by social inclusive boards and high mutation ratios had less political impact when they lacked links with existing political institutions. This implies that civil societies did not as a rule serve as schools of democracy.

scholarly journals Medicinal Mercury in Early Modern Portuguese Records: Recipes and Methods from Eighteenth-Century Medical Guidebooks

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 1017-1042 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Walker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
Eastern Hemisphere ◽  
Asian Medicine ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract This chapter will present and explicate rare information regarding circumstances and techniques for the application of medicinal mercury in the Portuguese medical context during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through the use of Portuguese medical texts (including translated excerpts), the chapter will provide insight into how early modern Portuguese practitioners processed and employed mercury to treat various ailments. Of interest, too, will be that these remedies were developed at several disparate locations throughout the Portuguese imperial world (China, India, Angola, Brazil, and Portugal), and often drew upon, and blended, indigenous medical substances from the region where each remedy originated. Regarding the use of mercury in South Asian medicine, medical scholars have noted that, from the sixteenth century onwards, much of the intra-Asian (and global) mercury trade was conducted through Portuguese merchants and agents. This work asserts that Portuguese merchants and shippers had unique access both to mercury at the commodity’s main sources in Spain and Peru (Almadén and Huancavelica, respectively), but also to established, developed colonial trade routes throughout the eastern hemisphere. Most of the information presented here is excerpted from two little-known eighteenth-century Portuguese primary sources: a Jesuit compilation medical and apothecary guide in manuscript, and a published physician’s treatise regarding fevers and other illnesses encountered during a posting of nearly a decade in Angola.

scholarly journals Life Writing “from Below” in Europe: Authors, Archives, Avenues, Arenas

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. LWFB10-LWFB48
Author(s):  
T. G. Ashplant
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Individual Potential ◽  
The Public Sphere

Drawing on a large body of scholarship from the last forty years, this article offers an overview of the diverse forms of life writing “from below” (by authors from low down in a class or status hierarchy) in Europe since the early modern period (including autobiographies, diaries, letters, as well as transcripts of oral testimonies); and the varied and developing national traditions of collecting and archiving which have developed since the mid-twentieth century. It locates such writing within a field of force between an exteriority pole constituted by the state (or by organisations of civil society, or informal community pressures) which compel or otherwise elicit life writings from below, and an interiority pole of the impulse of someone hitherto excluded to narrate their life in some public sphere; and examines diverse ways (state compulsion or solicitation; citizen engagement, challenge or resistance) in which these pressures give rise to the production of texts. It identifies the roles of intermediaries within civil society (patrons, sponsors, commercial publishers, collaborators) as links between individual (potential) authors and the public sphere.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document