Authors of Law and Life

2021 ◽  
pp. 303-345
Author(s):  
Ioannis Ziogas
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Normative Discourse

This chapter examines the biopolitical force of Augustan legislation vis-à-vis Ovid’s love poetry. Ovid, the ‘father of poems’, pits himself against the prince, the ‘Father of the Fatherland’ (pater patriae). Poet and emperor are involved in the production of normative discourse (legal or literary) that aims at generating biological or conceptual offspring. Their roles are both parallel and antithetical. Augustus’ laws aim to increase the population, while the elegiac legislator sees pregnancy as undermining attractiveness. Yet both poet and prince cast themselves as auctores, a word that can refer to a proposer of law, an author of poems, and a father. As auctores, Ovid and Augustus aspire to create a zone of indistinction between the biological and the political, between law and life. The capacity of Ovid’s art to become life parallels and contrasts with the power of Augustus’ laws to become flesh.

Between the spaces: Experts on Islam in Russia

Ethnicities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 752-768
Author(s):  
Kristina Kovalskaya
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Construction ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Normative Discourse ◽  
Different Characteristics ◽  
Islam In Russia ◽  
Contemporary Context ◽  
The Way

This paper discusses the question of knowledge construction on Islam in contemporary Russia through the lens of the category of space. Many everyday categories used by Muslims to characterize their identity are linked to spatial references. Starting from the idea of locality and ending in the search of traditional forms of Islam, these categories are highly politicized in the contemporary context. The aim of this paper is to explore the intermediary space between the political and the religious fields, the space of circulation between these fields in which experts on Islam are situated. Indeed, numerous academic specialists engage in expertise on Islam by creating or recycling categories, which circulate between the secular and the religious spaces. These experts have different backgrounds, different profiles and different strategies. Their impact on religious and political processes varies too. In addition, the experts of Islam have different characteristics according to the space they act in. We will compare these experts’ discourses in various regions (Moscow, Tatarstan and Dagestan) to analyse their strategies and the way in which they relate to their environment. Besides blurring the border between the secular and the religious by ensuring a permanent circulation of categories, the experts on Islam activate political and religious notions in a different manner according to their spatial affiliation. This concerns the reference to the local or international Muslim space as well as their normative discourse on acceptable forms of Islam.

The Transformation of Pride in Augustan Poetry

2020 ◽  
pp. 182-226
Author(s):  
Yelena Baraz
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Political ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
The Public ◽  
Good Fortune ◽  
Augustan Poetry ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter follows the analysis of the Aeneid with an examination of the role that pride plays in the poetry of Vergil’s contemporaries, also engaged with the changing meaning of the concept alongside the political changes. Pride, especially associated with triumph, is an indication that excess of good fortune might lead to disaster in book one of Horace’s Odes and in Augustan love poetry, where Propertius develops a way of conceptualizing such pride as justified by the beloved’s qualities and not necessarily disproportionate. The most radical version of this development takes place in the metapoetic sphere, where the first positive reconceptualization of pride takes place: Horace’s attribution of positive pride to his Muse and Propertius’s response to the claim that his fatherland, Umbria, should be proud of his achievement. The concluding part of the chapter shows the poets’ pulling away from extending this rehabilitation of pride into the public sphere.

Negative Discourse Analysis and utopias of the political

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phil Graham
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Language ◽  
The West ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
The World ◽  
Normative Discourse ◽  
Utopian Thought

Abstract This paper puts forward an argument about the relation between utopian thought and political discourse. It demonstrates how utopias frame normative discourse in general and political discourse in particular. The argument is informed by Kenneth Burke’s theory of the negative command and its place at the basis of all human language. I argue that utopias are necessarily based in the hortatory negative and are, in literary terms, like religious texts in general being ‘words about words’ designed to coordinate “the tribe”. Burke calls such texts ‘logological’. The argument I put forward here points to a rapidly crumbling utopia that has beset much of the world and all of the West since at least the Reagan-Thatcher era in which a new corporatist political economy was given global impetus.

Vulnerability and the Countersovereign Voice

Love's Wounds ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia N. Nazarian
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Political Allegory

This book examines the imagery of violence in early modern European poetry. Petrarch's lyric collection, Canzoniere, has shaped the ways in which others wrote and thought about desire for three centuries and more. Among Petrarch's later imitators, love seemed to take on a curious destructiveness: early modern European poets described their feelings as torture, massacre, or wounding and their ladies as bloodthirsty tyrants or jailers. This book asks why their love poetry was more brutal than Petrarch's own work. It explores Petrarchism's emphasis on voice produced under conditions of duress as well as the ways it employs metaphors of violence, vulnerability, pain, wretchedness, and inarticulacy for political allegory and criticism. It also discusses Petrarch's use of parrhēsia in both his political and amorous writings and suggests that countersovereignty emerges among Petrarch's sixteenth-century imitators who amplified the abjection and vulnerability experienced by the poet-lover while also concentrating power and violence in the hands of a cruel Beloved to whom they ascribed the political attributes of sovereignty.

The Social Origins and Provenance of the English Bishops during the Reign of Edward II

1959 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 51-79
Author(s):  
K. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Early Career ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Origins ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
The Social ◽  
Complete Study ◽  
History Of

During the last twenty or twenty-five years medieval historians have been much interested in the composition of the English episcopate. A number of studies of it have been published on periods ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further paper might well seem superfluous. My reason for offering one is that most previous writers have concentrated on analysing the professional circles from which the bishops were drawn, and suggesting the influences which their early careers as royal clerks, university masters and students, secular or regular clergy, may have had on their later work as bishops. They have shown comparatively little interest in their social background and provenance, except for those bishops who belonged to magnate families. Some years ago, when working on the political activities of Edward II's bishops, it seemed to me that social origins, family connexions and provenance might in a number of cases have had at least as much influence on a bishop's attitude to politics as his early career. I there fore collected information about the origins and provenance of these bishops. I now think that a rather more careful and complete study of this subject might throw further light not only on the political history of the reign, but on other problems connected with the character and work of the English episcopate. There is a general impression that in England in the later middle ages the bishops' ties with their dioceses were becoming less close, and that they were normally spending less time in diocesan work than their predecessors in the thirteenth century.

Democrazy—Dem Go Craze, O: Monitoring the 1999 Nigerian Elections

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-33
Author(s):  
Darren Kew
Keyword(s):  
Transition Program ◽  
The Political ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Soccer Match ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Military

In many respects, the least important part of the 1999 elections were the elections themselves. From the beginning of General Abdusalam Abubakar’s transition program in mid-1998, most Nigerians who were not part of the wealthy “political class” of elites—which is to say, most Nigerians— adopted their usual politically savvy perspective of siddon look (sit and look). They waited with cautious optimism to see what sort of new arrangement the military would allow the civilian politicians to struggle over, and what in turn the civilians would offer the public. No one had any illusions that anything but high-stakes bargaining within the military and the political class would determine the structures of power in the civilian government. Elections would influence this process to the extent that the crowd influences a soccer match.

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