Ontogeny

2021 ◽  
pp. 121-162
Author(s):  
Christopher Coker

Unlike any other animal we have a history. We live in historical time thanks to culture and culture is largely technological in nature, whether the technologies we identify are languages, cities or machines. History as the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus told us, is the story of constant change. In the case of war, our behavior has witnessed three major historical transitions: from the primate stage of evolution to one that was recognizably human; from the hunter – gather stage of existence to the emergence of agrarian societies; and finally the transition from the agricultural to the industrial era. And if war is universal – if it transcends both time and culture – different societies have different ways of thinking about war and conducting it. Indian, Chinese and European ways of thinking were all different from each other and were different again from the Meso– American. Uniformity has finally arrived with the digital era.

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-141
Author(s):  
Anne Lounsbery

This chapter explains how Ivan Turgenev's oeuvre forms a crucial part of the provincial trope, with its focus on the relationship between provintsiia and the problem, or the hope, of a specifically Russian temporality. When Turgenev is writing about Russian space, he often seems to be thinking just as much about Russian time, often posing or implying the question, “Is Russia 'behind'?” Analyzing spatial relationships in his texts reveals how these relationships condition ways of thinking about historical time (what counts as ahead and what counts as behind, for example). In Turgenev's view, it seems, Russia is not “modern,” but it is not simply “backward,” either. Hence his focus on the gentry estate: estates were places where Russian elites could work to rethink their relationship to historical time, moving beyond the assumption that centers (capitals) are ahead and peripheries (provinces) are behind.


Author(s):  
Christopher Crosbie

This chapter situates Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a late sixteenth century atomism increasingly shorn of its atheist metaphysics and Epicurean ethics. Making available new ways of thinking about matter as theoretically compatible with theistic ideas, early modern atomism provides a set of ontological assumptions that governs the playworld and shapes the course of Hamlet’s revenge. Paying special attention to two strands of atomist thought – namely, the body as particularized and the functions of perception, memory, and time as material imprints – this chapter reads Hamlet’s understanding of the dissolvable body and his attempt to remold the court's collective memory, the most proximate record of historical time, as of a piece. Hamlet's revenge, consonant with his prior ways of conceptualizing embodied existence, functions as a kind of material accretion to the past. In his brooding and revenge, Hamlet seeks comfort, then, in the prospect of a reassuringly enduring materiality but a comfort that remains theoretical and contingent. The most intense poignancy of his tragic demise emerges from Hamlet’s surprisingly persistent refusal to abandon the tantalizing, if elusive, consolations proffered by the material world itself.


2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jhih-Syuan Lin ◽  
Yongjun Sung
Keyword(s):  

2010 ◽  
pp. 227-243
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Krzywiec

The life of Julian Unszlicht (1883–1953) illustrates the case and process of the assimilation of Polish Jews. However, Unszlicht’s case is special as it shows that holding anti-Semitic views, which were to be a ticket to a Catholic society, guaranteed neither putting the roots down permanently nor gaining a new identity. The biography of a priest-convert allows to look closer at the processes of effacement and convergence of anti-Jewish rhetoric. The modern one, of the turn of 19th and 20th centuries, with Catholic anti-Judaism, which was constantly excused by religious reasons and at the same time, it often spread to the ethnic-racial mental grounds. Contrary to common definitions and distinctions, those two ways of thinking perfectly complemented and strengthened each other, both living using the other’s reasoning. The Holocaust added a tragic punch line to the embroiled story of the priest-convert


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.


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