scholarly journals Melusine as Emblem of Truth: Philosophical tentacles, themes and approaches explored in the audiovisual essay The Mystery of Melusine

Author(s):  
Cecilia Inkol

This article introduces the philosophical underpinnings, themes and approaches explored in the audiovisual essay The Mystery of Melusine (2021). Its footage consists of a dramatic performance in which I am enacting the contents of a philosophical poem authored by myself as the titular character. The narrative of the film essay explores the nature of truth and espouses an ontology of magic through a re-interpretation of the myth of Melusine. In European folklore, Melusine is the reclusive and mysterious wife who agrees to marry upon the condition that she is granted her privacy every Saturday. On Saturdays, she spends her solitude secretly bathing her fish tail until one day her husband peeps through the keyhole of her bathing chamber. She learns he has broken his promise to not impede her privacy, and so she evanesces. In my film essay, Melusine is a metaphor for the secretiveness and elusiveness of truth, and the way life unfurls itself in secretive and clandestine ways. The notion of truth as elusive and secretive derives its inspiration from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and this film essay can be considered a mythic interpretation of some of his ideas. In addition to a mythic interpretation of truth, the film essay provides a narrative for the way life meets itself through otherness and recounts the journey of personal transformation in which the querent must reconcile to truth; this is elaborated as a process of self-seeing and self-recognition that takes place through the alien other.

Author(s):  
Saitya Brata Das

This book rigorously examines the theologico-political works of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, setting his thought against Hegel's and showing how he prepared the way for the post-metaphysical philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig and Jacques Derrida.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 105-117
Author(s):  
Richard Colledge ◽  

If Martin Heidegger is a thinker of Being par excellence, he is also one of the west’s key thinkers concerning the nothing. This paper has two main aims. The first is to highlight the continuity of the way in which Heidegger develops the theme of the nothing, in its close kinship with Being, throughout the long arc of his thought: from Sein und Zeit (1927) and his summer 1928 lecture course on Leibniz, through his famous treatment in the inaugural lecture “Was ist Metaphysik?” (1929), his subsequent “Nachwort” (1943) and “Einleitung” (1949) to that work, to his extended letter to Ernst Jünger, published as “Zur Seinsfrage” (1955). However, the second aim of the paper is to bring this extensive thematic thread into close association with Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander, especially his summer 1932 and winter 1941 lecture courses. What emerges is a striking account of the nothing as the Seinsvergessenheit, but also as the “the unlimited” origin of all beings in their “stepping forth” into appearance, and that to which they return. Thus, τὸ ἄπειρον effectively becomes for Heidegger another name for the nothing, or Being in its lethic or “hidden essence”: i.e., the hyperbolic or abyssal excess that is the ἀρχή of the appearance of beings. I conclude with some brief reflections on the sense in which Heidegger considers the vocation of “courageously” and “thankfully” thinking this nothing as perhaps the fullest expression of human freedom.


2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Hockey ◽  
Rachel Dilley ◽  
Victoria Robinson ◽  
Alexandra Sherlock

This article raises questions about the role of footwear within contemporary processes of identity formation and presents ongoing research into perceptions, experiences and memories of shoes among men and women in the North of England. In a series of linked theoretical discussions it argues that a focus on women, fashion and shoe consumption as a feature of a modern, western ‘project of the self’ obscures a more revealing line of inquiry where footwear can be used to explore the way men and women live out their identities as fluid, embodied processes. In a bid to deepen theoretical understanding of such processes, it takes account of historical and contemporary representations of shoes as a symbolically efficacious vehicle for personal transformation, asking how the idea and experience of transformation informs everyday and life course experiences of transition, as individuals put on and take off particular pairs of shoes. In so doing, the article addresses the methodological and analytic challenges of accessing experience that is both fluid and embodied.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-84
Author(s):  
David Whitley

This paper will examine the way poetry – and particularly the performance of poetry by adolescent characters – is represented in film. The paper argues that film offers a space within which it is possible to reflect in particularly probing ways on the relationship between poetry’s often contradictory roles in both expressing cultural norms and enabling repressed, neglected or forbidden aspects of individuals’ experience to be articulated. In particular, the performance of poetry by adolescents in films often takes place in dramatized contexts where the exercise of institutional authority is being questioned and individuals are undergoing difficult forms of personal transformation, awakening or development. Analysis and comparison of some exemplary instances in which the performance of poetry plays a central role in such struggles reveals much about the continued potency of poetic forms in an era when mainstream poetry itself has come to be widely perceived as either marginal or irrelevant to most ordinary people’s lives.


Author(s):  
Peter Joseph Fritz

Martin Heidegger provides positive impetus for fresh thinking on divine revelation. Objections could immediately be raised. While it is contested whether Heidegger observes some sort of ‘methodological atheism’, at the very least he demotes theology—serious thinking based on belief in God—as ‘ontic’ (occasional, region-specific), whereas philosophy enjoys ‘ontological’ status. Heidegger refuses the revealed idea of creation as a distortive axiom for Western thinking that prepares the way for the world’s modern, technological framing. And of course there is Heidegger’s political bias, a concern that has reignited with the publication of his Schwarze Hefte. Nevertheless, this chapter’s primary thesis holds that Heidegger can help to reinvigorate Christian understanding of divine revelation in at least three respects: (1) by centring the theology of revelation on the allied themes of fundamental truth and freedom, (2) by encouraging theologians to continue pursuing renewed interest in apocalyptic, and (3) by bringing to light the revelatory character of inconspicuous, everyday phenomena.


Author(s):  
Gregory N. Siplivii ◽  

This article is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenology “Nothingness” by Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Through research of existential phe­nomenology, the article also touches on the topic of “mood” as philosophical in­tentionality. Various kinds of “moods”, such as faintness (Verstimmung), ennui (Langeweile), burden (Geworden), inquisitiveness (Neugier), care (Sorge) and conscience (Gewissen), by Martin Heidegger’s and nausea (la nausée), anxiety (l’anxiété), dizziness (le vertige) by Jean-Paul Sartre, is considered in the context of what they may matter in an ontological sense. The phenomenologically under­stood “mood” as a general intentionality towards something is connected with the way in which the existing is able to ask about its own self. In addition, the ar­ticle forms the concept of the original ontological and phenomenological “in­completeness” of any existential experience. It is this incompleteness, this “al­ways-still-not” that provides an existential opportunity to realize oneself not only thrown into the world, but also different from the general flow of being. This “elusive emptiness” is interpreted in the article in accordance with the psychoan­alytic category of “real” (Jacques Lacan).


Author(s):  
Roland Végső

The chapter examines Hannah Arendt’s critique of martin Heidegger and concentrates on the way Arendt tries to subvert the Heideggerian paradigm of worldlessness. While for Heidegger, the ontological paradigm of worldlessness was the lifeless stone, in Arendt’s book biological life itself emerges as the worldless condition of the political world of publicity. The theoretical challenge bequeathed to us by Arendt is to draw the consequences of the simple fact that life is worldless. The worldlessness of life, therefore, becomes a genuine condition of impossibility for politics: it makes politics possible, but at the same time it threatens the very existence of politics. The chapter traces the development of this argument in three of Arendt’s major works: The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and The Life of the Mind.


Author(s):  
Elliot R. Wolfson
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
To Come ◽  

This chapter addresses the co-dependence of people's conceptions of end and of beginning. To comprehend the beginning, one must think of it from the perspective of futurity, from the perspective, that is, of the ultimate end. Consequently, the beginning lies not in the past but, rather, in the future. The chapter then relates this mode of philosophizing with the way people understand Jewish eschatology, which lies at the center of Jewish theorization about time. In Jewish eschatology, what is yet to come is understood as what has already happened, whereas what has happened is derived from what is yet to come. Martin Heidegger has dismissed Judaism as a religion that by its very nature cannot experience temporality authentically. Yet his own understanding of temporality accords well with rabbinic conceptions of temporality and later kabbalistic eschatologies.


1978 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 586
Author(s):  
Leon Rosenstein ◽  
J. L. Mehta
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. e021211
Author(s):  
Francielly Zilli ◽  
Stefanie Griebeler Oliveira ◽  
Franciele Roberta Cordeiro ◽  
Juliana Graciela Vestena Zillmer

Introduction: The illness of an oncological disease provides experiences capable of modifying the body and the subjects' ways of life. Objective: To analyze how the knowledge of the self occurs facing the experience of illness by cancer and palliative care. Methods: This is a qualitative case study research based on post-critical theories, specifically in Foucault Studies. The participants were six patients who were experiencing cancer and palliative care, linked to a home hospitalization service. The data were collected from March to June 2018, based on open interviews, participant observation, and speech instigation through the use of occupational therapist therapeutic activities. The analysis occurred based on problematizations. Results: From the statements, different ways of getting sick were identified, from diagnosis to their approach to death, causing changes in the body, way of living, and in the perception of oneself from a life-threatening disease. Conclusion: Finally, we concluded that different ways of experiencing cancer and palliative care provided different modes of subjectivation. The lack of self-recognition was confronted by bodily changes and consequently by limitations, so the way this experience was lived reflected in the way they thought about the end of life.


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