(Dis)Enchanted Ufology

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-86
Author(s):  
Benjamin E. Zeller
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Religious Other ◽  
Scientific Worldview ◽  
The Way

This article examines how adherents within the self-styled scientific side of the UFO subculture implicitly challenge the assumed dichotomy between a rationalized disenchanted modern scientific worldview, and a non-rational religious other. After providing background on the origin of the UFO subculture, ufology, and more explicitly religious forms of ufology, the article turns to the largest scientific ufological organization, MUFON, and the way in which participants within that organization engage and delineate social boundaries between religion, science, secularism, and spirituality. I argue that an enchanted ufology lurks just under the surface of this secular, scientific, rational disenchantment.

Vérités et Mensonges

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-224
Author(s):  
Erik Gunderson
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Self ◽  
Faithful Representation ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Concrete Reality ◽  
Hermeneutic Process ◽  
The Way

This is a survey of some of the problems surrounding imperial panegyric. It includes discussions of both the theory and practice of imperial praise. The evidence is derived from readings of Cicero, Quintilian, Pliny, the Panegyrici Latini, Menander Rhetor, and Julian the Apostate. Of particular interest is insincere speech that would be appreciated as insincere. What sort of hermeneutic process is best suited to texts that are politically consequential and yet relatively disconnected from any obligation to offer a faithful representation of concrete reality? We first look at epideictic as a genre. The next topic is imperial praise and its situation “beyond belief” as well as the self-positioning of a political subject who delivers such praise. This leads to a meditation on the exculpatory fictions that these speakers might tell themselves about their act. A cynical philosophy of Caesarism, its arbitrariness, and its constructedness abets these fictions. Julian the Apostate receives the most attention: he wrote about Caesars, he delivered extant panegyrics, and he is also the man addressed by still another panegyric. And in the end we find ourselves to be in a position to appreciate the way that power feeds off of insincerity and grows stronger in its presence.

Why Phenomenology?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Present Approach ◽  
The Self ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Pure Intuition ◽  
The Way

This chapter sets out the rationale for adopting a phenomenological approach to the devout life literature. Distinguishing the present approach from versions of the phenomenology of religion dominant in mid-twentieth-century approaches to religion, an alternative model is found in Heidegger’s early lectures on Paul. These illustrate that alongside its striving to achieve a maximally pure intuition of its subject matter, phenomenology will also be necessarily interpretative and existential. Although phenomenology is limited to what shows itself and therefore cannot pass judgement on the existence of God, it can deal with God insofar as God appears within the activity and passivity of human existence. From Hegel onward, it has also shown itself open to seeing the self as twofold and thus more than a simple subjective agent, opening the way to an understanding of the self as essentially spiritual.

The Well-Mannered Auditor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Deaville
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
The Way

The chapter explores the way English-language etiquette books from the nineteenth century prescribe accepted behavior for upwardly mobile members of the bourgeoisie. This advice extended to social events known today as “salons” that were conducted in the domestic drawing room or parlor, where guests would perform musical selections for the enjoyment of other guests. The audience for such informal music making was expected to listen attentively, in keeping with the (self-) disciplining of the bourgeois body that such regulations represented in the nineteenth century. Yet even as the modern world became noisier and aurally more confusing, so, too, did contemporary social events, which led authors to become stricter in their disciplining of the audience at these drawing room performances. Nevertheless, hosts and guests could not avoid the growing “crisis of attention” pervading this mode of entertainment, which would lead to the modern habit of inattentive listening.

Kierkegaard, Metaphysics, and Love

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Alternative Reading ◽  
The Way

AbstractNoting Heidegger’s critique of Kierkegaard’s way of relating time and eternity, the paper offers an alternative reading of Kierkegaard that suggests Heidegger has overlooked crucial elements in the Kierkegaardian account. Gabriel Marcel and Sharon Krishek are used to counter Heidegger’s minimizing of the deaths of others and to show how the deaths of others may become integral to our sense of self. This prepares the way for revisiting Kierkegaard’s discourse on the work of love in remembering the dead. Against the criticism that this reveals the absence of the other in Kierkegaardian love, the paper argues that, on the contrary, it shows how Kierkegaard conceives the self as inseparable from the core relationships of love that, despite of death, constitute it as the self that it is.

Clothing and the oceanic identity in Melville’s Redburn

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 29-43
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Traber
Keyword(s):  
Outer Layer ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Visible Sign ◽  
The Way

Herman Melville’s Redburn approaches the topic of corporeal coding via the outer layer of clothing. Throughout the novel, the young protagonist consciously uses clothing as a means of self-representation and expression, deploying fashion to create and position himself in different contexts; for example, taking pride in his ragged clothes amongst well-dressed ship passengers becomes a form of social protest. But Redburn is also used to comic effect because his choices are often based on incorrect assumptions of propriety, such as his notion of the way a sailor is supposed to dress not matching the onboard reality. The rules of appearance that construct and restrain an identity are paradoxically bolstered at the same time they are broken, which allows Melville the opportunity to explore rebellion alongside the performative aspect of the self as a body constituting both a visible sign and a living vehicle for the mores, beliefs and ideologies that shape a society.

EEN UURTJE MET DIRK COSTER

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-133
Author(s):  
Mathijs Sanders
Keyword(s):  
French Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Literary Magazine ◽  
Cultural Mediator ◽  
The Way

AN HOUR WITH DIRK COSTER The self-fashioning of a literary informant In 1927, the French literary magazine La Nouvelle Littéraire published an interview with the Dutch writer Dirk Coster by the renowned critic Frédéric Lefèvre in the series ‘Une heure avec ...’. Coster used the opportunity to present himself as an international cultural mediator and as a spokesman of a humanistic conception of literature. This article analyses the interview by focussing on the way Coster was portrayed in front of a French audience and by interpreting his statements concerning both Dutch and French literature.

The Missing Piece

Divine Bodies ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Candida R. Moss
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Scholarship ◽  
The Way

The resurrection of the body is a key place to think about who we are and which facets of ourselves are integral to ourselves. The introduction to this book places the resurrection of the body within the context of ancient anxieties about the self: What makes us who we are? It also reviews the history of scholarship on this question and traces the way that ideas about resurrection have been divorced from broader thinking about the self.

scholarly journals An interdisciplinary perspective on the value of envy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Lange ◽  
Sara Protasi
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Interdisciplinary Collaboration ◽  
The Self ◽  
Instrumental Value ◽  
The Public ◽  
Multiple Components ◽  
Interdisciplinary Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Investigations ◽  
The Way

The public and scholars alike largely consider envy to be reprehensible. This judgment of the value of envy commonly results either from a limited understanding of the nature of envy or from a limited understanding of how to determine the value of phenomena. Overcoming this state requires an interdisciplinary collaboration of psychologists and philosophers. That is, broad empirical evidence regarding the nature of envy generated in psychological studies must inform judgments about the value of envy according to sophisticated philosophical standards. We conducted such a collaboration. Empirical research indicates that envy is constituted by multiple components which in turn predict diverse outcomes that may be functional for the self and society. Accordingly, the value of envy is similarly nuanced. Sometimes, envy may have instrumental value in promoting prudentially and morally good outcomes. Sometimes, envy may be non-instrumentally prudentially and morally good. Sometimes, envy may be bad. This nuanced perspective on the value of envy has implications for recommendations on how to deal with envy and paves the way toward future empirical and theoretical investigations on the nature and the value of envy.

scholarly journals As mulheres do império: uma leitura de Ana de Amsterdam / Women’s Empire: A Reading of Ana de Amsterdam

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (61) ◽  
pp. 145
Author(s):  
Naira Almeida Nascimento
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
Second Moment ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Work Narratives ◽  
The Way

Resumo: Enquadrado no bojo da produção identificada como “literatura dos retornados”, o interesse principal de Ana de Amsterdam (2016a), de Ana Cássia Rebelo, não recai nas imagens traumáticas do retorno ou na violência praticada entre colonizadores e colonizados, como é recorrente no gênero. De forma até sintomática, as lembranças de África são esporádicas na menina de cinco anos que deixou Moçambique junto à família. Em seu lugar, a exuberância de uma Índia portuguesa sonhada e projetada por ela ocupam as lacunas de um presente insatisfatório, dividido entre a criação dos três filhos de um casamento em crise e o emprego burocrático desempenhado numa Lisboa pouco atrativa. Em ambos, tanto na Goa portuguesa como no trajeto para o trabalho, despontam narrativas de mulheres que constituem a síntese entre o diário íntimo de Ana e a escrita testemunhal da diáspora. Numa primeira parte do estudo, recupera-se a gênese do romance no formato do blog assinado pela autora, evidenciando a “escrita do eu”, nos moldes dos estudos de autobiografias, diários e afins. O segundo momento volta-se para a escrita testemunhal no lastro da narrativa pós-colonial e também da pós-memória. Em comum, os dois planos tratam da perspectiva feminina, seja na batalha contemporânea da cosmopolita Lisboa, seja nos desdobramentos silenciados do pós-colonialismo, em meio às histórias duplicadas de outras tantas Anas.Palavras-chave: Ana de Amsterdam; Ana Cássia Rebelo; diário íntimo; literatura de testemunho; blogs.Abstract: Framed in the center of the production identified as “literature of the returnees”, the main focus of Ana de Amsterdam (2016a) by Ana Cássia Rebelo, does not lie in the traumatic images of the return or in the violence practiced between colonizers and colonized, as it is usually the case in this genre. Somehow, even symptomatically, African memories are sporadic in the five-year-old girl who left Mozambique with her family. Instead, the exuberance of a Portuguese India, dreamed and projected by her, occupies the gaps of an unsatisfactory present, dividing herself to raise three children of a marriage in crisis and work in the bureaucratic employment situated in an unattractive Lisbon. In both, Portuguese Goa and on the way to work, narratives of women emerge and represent the synthesis between Ana’s private diary and the testimonial writing of the diaspora. In a first part of the study, the genesis of the novel is recovered in the form of a blog signed by the author, emphasizing the “writing of the self”, in the molds of autobiographies, journals and etc. The second moment turns to the testimonial writing in the basis of the postcolonial narrative and also of the post-memory. In common, the two plans deal with the feminine perspective, whether in the contemporary battle of cosmopolitan Lisbon or in the silenced developments of postcolonialism, in the middle of the duplicate stories of so many Anas.Keywords: Ana de Amsterdam; Ana Cássia Rebelo; diary; testimonial literature; blogs.

scholarly journals Computer Gameplay and the Aesthetic Practices of the Self: Game Studies and the Late Work of Michel Foucault

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
The Self ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Practices Of The Self ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This paper aims to critically introduce the applicability of Foucault’s late work, on the practices of the self, to the scholarship of contemporary computer games. I argue that the gameplay tasks that we set ourselves, and the patterns of action that they produce, can be understood as a form of ‘work on the self’, and that this work is ambivalent between, on the one hand, an aesthetic transformation of the self – as articulated by Foucault in relation to the care or practices of the self – in which we break from the dominant subjectivities imposed upon us, and on the other, a closer tethering of ourselves through our own playful impulses, to a neoliberal subjectivity centred around instrumentally-driven selfimprovement. Game studies’ concern with the effects that computer games have on us stands to gain from an examination of Foucault’s late work for the purposes of analysing and disambiguating between the nature of the transformations at stake. Further, Foucault’s tripartite analysis of ‘power-knowledge-subject’, which might be applied here as ‘game-discourse-player’, foregrounds the imbrication of our gameplay practices – the extent to which they are due to us and the way in which our own volitions make us subject to power, which is particularly pertinent in the domain of play.

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