scholarly journals Translation

Target ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-327
Author(s):  
Alison Sealey

AbstractThis article contributes to the developing recognition that the challenges raised by the enterprise of translating between languages extend beyond human language. It suggests that there are parallels between the political issues recognised by translation scholars – of exclusion, misrepresentation and speaking for ‘the other’ – and those raised by biosemiotics, the study of signs in all living systems. Following a discussion of convergence in current developments in translation studies, semiotics and human-animal studies, the article presents an analysis of empirical data, with specific reference to the different meanings of the verbhear. The findings demonstrate the anthropocentric assumptions that are embedded in the way hearing is routinely represented, and an argument is presented for the recognition of these in communications about the semiotic resources relevant to non-human life forms. The paper concludes with some reflections on the implications of these issues for the enterprise of translation.

Vivarium ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 22-50
Author(s):  
Peter Adamson

AbstractGiles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power (De ecclesiastica potestate), a polemical work arguing for the political supremacy of the pope, claims that the papacy holds a ‘plenitude of power’ and has direct or indirect authority over all aspects of human life. This paper shows how Giles uses themes from natural philosophy in developing his argument. He compares cosmic and human ordering and draws an analogy between the relations of soul to body and of Church to state. He also understands the pope’s power to be ‘universal’ in nature, another idea taken from Aristotelian physics. Further, Giles views the pope’s right to intervene arbitrarily in the affairs of the Christian community as mirroring God’s ability to work miracles. We thus see that Giles, no less than intellectuals on the other side of this debate such as Dante and Marsilius of Padua, believed that Aristotelian natural philosophy could be enlisted in the service of political thought.


1993 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 480-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gose

There is a strange and unacknowledged paradox in the historiography of the Incas. On the one hand, few would deny that theirs was a typically theocratic archaic state, a divine kingship in which the Inca was thought to.be the son of the Sun. On the other hand, the standard descriptions of Inca political structure barely mention religion and seem to assume a formal separation between state and cult.1I believe that these secularizing accounts are misguided and will show in this essay that the political structure of the pre-Columbian Andes took form primarily around a system of sacred ancestral relics and origin points known generically ashuacas. Each huaca defined a level of political organization that might nest into units of a higher order or subdivide into smaller groupings. Collectively they formed a segmentary hierarchy that transcended the boundaries of local ethnic polities and provided the basis for empires like that of the Incas. However, these huacas were also the focus of local kinship relations and agrarian fertility rituals. The political structure that they articulated therefore had a built-in concern for the metaphysical reproduction of human, animal, and plant life. Political power in the pre-Columbian Andes was particularly bound up with attempts to control the flow of water across the frontier of life and death, resulting in no clear distinction between ritual and administration.


Author(s):  
Antonio Hermosa Andújar

In this work the author holds the thesis that with Maquiavelo, in accordance with Tucidides, the complete humanization of history and human life arose. Man has become the complete owner of his destiny when conquering fortune by virtù, that is, the entirety of social forces, concrete or diffuse, that oppose to the exercise of his will. It is only nature that remains as a region still inaccessible to human will. This is the reason why in Maquiavelo the concepts which should organize the explanation of human behavior are not, as considered until now, virtù/fortune but virtù/nature. Even though, there are two antagonic limits to the emancipatory virtuos action: on the one hand, its still nondemocratic condition, since only the Prince is capable of such virtù. On the other, the political liberty, something that in principle appears external to the subject, but once known he won´t forget ever, that is, political liberty becomes a constitutive feature of the human being at which every virtuos action of the Prince directed to extirpate it, fails.


2017 ◽  
Vol 137 ◽  
pp. 213-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Kindt

AbstractThis article reviews several books published since the turn of the millennium that explore the role and representation of animals in different areas of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Despite differences in focus and outlook, these books herald the arrival within classical studies of the questions, concepts and methods of human/animal studies as an emerging field of enquiry. This article takes their publication as an opportunity to take stock and to outline the relationship between these disciplines. I explore how current research on ancient animals resonates both in existing debates in classical scholarship and within the context of the larger interdisciplinary debate. I also suggest how this debate can point to productive avenues for further enquiry in classical studies. More specifically, I argue that the interdisciplinary debate sets an important agenda, which should be embraced more fully by classical studies. Classical scholarship on the role, function and perception of animals in different areas of ancient Greek and Roman life can provide important insights into one aspect of the heritage – Western conceptions of humanity and the place of the animal within it – which has not yet received the attention it deserves. I conclude that classical scholarship can make a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary debate, helping it deliver on its stated goal of examining and challenging Western concepts of self, as well as the ideologies of ‘the other’ underpinning them.


Author(s):  
Eric Daryl Meyer

Inner Animalities analyses the human-animal distinction as a discursive theme running ubiquitously through Christian theological anthropology. Arguing that historically pervasive disavowals of human animality create ineradicable contradictions within accounts of human life and also install an anti-ecological impulse at the heart of Christian theology, this project constructively imagines a theological anthropology centered upon human commonality with fellow creatures. This constructive work perceives divine grace at work in human instincts, desires, and enmeshment in quotidian relations (rather than in rationality, language, and transcendence). The broadest arc of the book’s argument is that only a thickly articulated self-understanding rooted in creaturely commonality can provide an adequate basis for responding to ongoing ecological degradation. The conjunction of Critical Animal Studies with constructive theology in this study, then, aims to generate a new approach to ecological theology. The book’s analysis places ancient Christians such as Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus along with contemporary theologians such as Karl Rahner and Wolfhart Pannenberg in critical conversation with theorists of human-animal relations from Jacques Derrida and Kelly Oliver to Valerie Plumwood and Giorgio Agamben.


Author(s):  
Michael Lundblad

The introduction to this volume calls for the end of “animal studies” broadly conceived as an umbrella term encompassing such diverse fields as animality studies, posthumanism, human-animal studies, critical animal studies, and species critique. While these fields attempt to move beyond the human in various ways, they often have rather different ends in mind, if not explicit conflicts with each other. Lundblad thus argues that this range of work can be characterized more productively as falling under the three general categories of human-animal studies, posthumanism, and animality studies, with a common focus on what he calls “animalities”: texts, discourses, and material relationships that construct animals, on the one hand, or humans in relation to animals, on the other hand, or both.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Soula Marinoudi

This article examines the lives of queer people as performed in the biographies of ten interlocutors who participated in the queer political scene during the decade 2000–10. In recent years, a wide range of queer/feminist subjectivities, groups and spaces have emerged within collective social movements in Greece. These new approaches to radical feminism and queer life-forms often convey a sense of discontinuity with the recent past, as queer voices have been marginalized in the anti-authoritarian and the radical leftist political scene until recently. I argue that the anti-authoritarian and leftist political space in and around the various social grassroots movements constituted – in their own right – disciplinary fields as well as gender-constructing mechanisms. Gendered subjectivities, either entirely excluded or included on restrictive terms, exposed the limits of the political body. In this article, I explore how these new queer contexts can work through the traumas out of which they have emerged, and I argue that the emergence of a queer political scene in Greece signals a shift from passionate attachments to new modes of relationality. These new modes of relating expose vulnerabilities and emerge as negotiations of intimacy between the self and the other.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (53) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kasper Opstrup

From surrealism’s beginnings around a Parisian séance table, it oscillated between the occult and the political. One of its key methods, automatism, provided access to both the esoteric and the exoteric: it took form in the mid-19th century as a spiritualist technique for communicating with the other side while, simultanously, this other side could address political issues as equal rights, de-colonisation and a utopian future with an authority coming from beyond the individual. By tracing the development of automatism, the article shows how automatism in surrealism became a call for both a re-orientation of life and an institutional re-organisation by becoming a divination tool for a future community looking back to hermeticism to find a way forward. The article argues that not only can surrealism fruitfully be understood in the light of an occult revival in reaction to crises but, additionally, that it marks the return of and a reaction to a kind of magical thinking in the modern – due to waning religious and socio-economic orthodoxies – that echoes eerily into our own big data contemporary of social medias where we tend to substitute equations with associations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 38 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Redmalm

<p>Edited by Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrö and Steve Hinchliffe (Routledge, 2017)</p><p>Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics captures the way a decentralized form of governing measures and mobilizes life itself through a number of technologies, such as demographics, surveillance and health initiatives, with the aim to prolong and enhance the lives of a population. According to Foucault, this biopolitical form of governing characteristic of modernity implies a detached and technical stance towards individual lives. In short, biopolitics turns individual lives into <em>life </em>as a mass noun. Interestingly, when human life is treated as a resource, human’s self-proclaimed position as the crown of creation is unsettled and humans find themselves part of the same biopolitical nexus as many other animals. The technologies and consequences of the biopolitization of humans and other animals is the subject of the volume <em>Humans, Animals and Biopolitics</em>, edited by Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrö and Steve Hinchliffe. It is a book that should be required reading for Foucauldian theorists and human-animal studies scholars alike.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jopi Nyman

In recent years, Canadian/US singer, songwriter, and author Neil Young’s production shows increased signs of environmental awareness, manifested in his promotion of biofuels, critique of genetic manipulation, biotechnology, and ecocide, as well as in his warm attitude to non-human animals. These issues are dealt with in detail in his recent memoir Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars (2015), as well as on his recently released albums such as The Monsanto Years (2015) and Earth (2016). While this interest in the natural world could be seen as a simple expression of a 1960s countercultural hippie world view, this essay will propose a different reading of the meaning of animals and the non-human in Young’s Special Deluxe by placing it in the context of human–animal studies and its critique of anthropocentrism. By reading the memoir’s representations of non-human animals in tandem with the emphatic role of the environment on Young’s recent albums, this essay argues that Young’s recent work reveals an increased concern for relationality and non-humans in human life and thus problematizes modernity’s insistence on anthropocentrism and human mastery over nature. Based on the critique of modernity and its anthropocentric hierarchies presented by human–animal studies scholarship (Haraway 2008; Armstrong 2008; Marvin and McHugh 2014), it is suggested that Young’s work foregrounds an explicit concern with the non-human world through its increasing focus on the relationality of the human and the non-human, and their mutual interdependence. The importance of non-human others, especially dogs, to the memoir’s narrator is addressed in detail, and the close transspecies relationship seen as an example of the emotional significance of non-human others in everyday life.   Keywords: Neil Young, Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars, environmentalism, human–animal studies, anthropocentricism


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