scholarly journals Foucault’s Concept of Confession

2021 ◽  
pp. 6-21
Author(s):  
Philippe Büttgen

Setting out from the difficulty of translating the Foucauldian notion of aveu, this paper proposes an account of Foucault’s concept of confession in the years 1979-1983 surrounding the writing of Confessions of the Flesh. I focus on Foucault’s relative failure to bring together the complementary dimensions of confession as confession of sins and confession of faith in early Christianity. Foucault’s attempts to tackle this challenge nonetheless reveal a number of crucial aspects of his thought throughout the 1970s, e.g., the critique of the notion of ideology and the role that critique played in the setting of Foucault’s “critical philosophy of veridictions”. A comparison with the lectures given at Louvain and the Collège de France suggests that Foucault took an original and rather solitary path in Confessions of the Flesh, which may explain the surprises awaiting the reader. Finally, I propose an explanation of Foucault’s final shift away from Christian confession towards Greek parrhesia, pointing to the key role of the idea of a “duty of truth”. This idea led Foucault to an original approach to confession and the illocutionary force of statements.

2013 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacobus Kok

In this article, James 5:13–20 is investigated. This section deals with the confession of sins in the community of faith and the subsequent healing that will result. James will be compared to Philodemus, a philosopher who comes from Galilee, just like James. It is not argued that James was influenced by Philodemus but that a comparison between the two might open up fresh perspectives for the interpretation of James 5:13–20. This will especially become clear when the themes of moral exhortation, community health, communal confession and the role of the psychagogue are discussed.


2000 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 29-48
Author(s):  
Michel Magnien

Hellenist, philologist, historian, friend and counsellor to the King, mythical founding member of the Collège de France, as well as family man, Guillaume Budé appears to us as a hero of humanism and compels our collective admiration because he could lead simultaneously a contemplative and an active life. How was he perceived by his contemporaries? A few months after the death of the humanist (August 1540), while still in mourning, his disciple Loys Le Roy — a future bright light in the study of Greek — published the G. Budaei Vita. This biography is a virtual hagiography of a lay saint, endowed with a high mission, who sacrificed his health, even his life, to the cause of knowledge and the service of the King. This paper analyzes how a young humanist defines the role of humaniores litterae in an ordered society through their greatest incarnation.


Author(s):  
Judith Herrin

This chapter discusses the place of icons in worship, their character, and the way they came to symbolize the holy and mediate between earth and heaven. In particular, as icons became a vivid focus of devotion, they began to embody human relations with God the Creator and Ruler of the entire Christian world. It is argued that women played a notable part in this developing cult of icons. The chapter concentrates on some features of Late Antique Mediterranean culture, shared by Jews and Gentiles, pagan and Christian alike. These provided a common social experience within which the artistic evolution of the Christian church took place. In particular, the first part of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of funerary art, for this represents one of the most striking ways whereby Christians transmitted pagan rituals and artistic forms to their new faith. The second part examines some of the reasons for the preservation of these forms, once assimilated to a Christian mode, when they came under attack in the East. It asks how much that response informs us about the role of women in the cult of icons.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alister Wedderburn

This article interrogates the role of tragedy within the work of International Relations theorists including Michael Dillon, Mervyn Frost, Richard Ned Lebow and Hans Morgenthau. It argues that a tragic sensibility is a constituent part of much thinking about politics and the international, and asks what the reasons for this preoccupation might be. Noting that a number of diverse theoretical appeals to tragedy in International Relations invoke analytically similar understandings of tragic-political subjectivity, the article problematises these by building on Michel Foucault’s intermittent concern with the genre in his Collège de France lecture series. It proposes that a genealogical consideration of tragedy enables an alertness to its political associations and implications that asks questions of the way in which it is commonly conceived within the discipline. The article concludes by suggesting that International Relations theorists seeking to invoke tragedy must think carefully about the ontological, epistemological, ethical and political claims associated with such a move.


Robotica ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.J. Parnis ◽  
P.J. Drazan

SUMMARYThe use of ultrasonic range transducers is an inexpensive method of obtaining information about the environment surrounding a robotic System. However, ultrasonic ranging suffers from various shortcomings, one of the major being the production of unreliable data caused by specular reflection.This work presents an original approach to overcoming the problem of unreliable ultrasonic range data which is caused by specular reflection of the ultrasonic beam. The approach is shown to discriminate between reliable and unreliable data, thus enhancing the role of the ultrasonic range transducer in robotic applications.


2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-168
Author(s):  
Samuel Byrskog

AbstractRichard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is a remarkable achievement which rightly places the role of eyewitnesses in early Christianity on the international scholarly agenda and points to its historical and theological significance. Just as Bauckham has previously challenged form criticism on its uncritical reference to Gospels communities, he has now decisively undermined the romantic idea of the existence of creative collectives determined by impersonal laws of how tradition originates and develops. The present essay questions his confident use of the names mentioned in the Gospels and asks for clarification as to the precise relationship between eyewitnesses and history and the nature of their recollection. It also points to and exemplifies the rhetorical character of the Gospel of Mark as an indication of how reports about the past were interpreted, rhetoricized, and narrativized and asks how precisely to account for the infl uence of eyewitnesses when they were not longer present in the transmitting groups and the Christian communities.


Author(s):  
Nikolai Andreevich Popov

The subject of this research is defined by the following question: what allows a person to differentiate time phenomenon from all other; is inconsistency of materialistic world alone enough for encountering the time phenomenon; what are the sources of inseparable link between time with action and space; what is duration and how it differs from time; what is the substantiation for all properties assigned to time; what is the nature of qualities attributed to space? The author proposes an original approach towards solution of the problem of time: before speaking of one or another nature of time, it should be clearly realized which phenomenon is in question, what is the distinctive feature allowing its identification, and what are the form, way and conditions of its manifestation. The article determines an inseparable link of the time phenomenon with the function that people unconsciously assign in the course of their practical activity to sequence of occurrences, formed by the shift in current states of rotation of the Earth. Active role of brain of the subject in “organization” of time phenomenon is revealed alongside. The affiliation of the concept of time to the range of concept-statuses alongside general specificity of the objective concept of such concepts are determined. The conclusion is made that there was a time when time did not exist. The author provides definitions to the fundamental time concepts based on the revealed objective content of these concepts. The fact is stated on the emergence of a completely new concept of time that gives the key to unraveling all of its mysteries.  


2019 ◽  
pp. 42-63
Author(s):  
Marrigje Paijmans

In his late lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault underpins the pre-eminence of art as the modern site of parrhesia. He omits, however, the aesthetic question: how does parrhesia work through art? A compelling question, firstly, because “truth-telling” seems to be at odds with art as an imaginative process. Secondly, because parrhesia implies a transformation in the listener, while Foucault’s limited notion of discourse precludes transformation beyond discourse. This essay hypothesizes that parrhesiastic art effects a transformation in the imagination, without dismissing this transformation as unreal. As Foucault’s utterances about the imagination are restricted to his earliest publications, this essay features a combined reading of Foucault’s early and late discussions of art. To further analyze the elusive role of the imagination in the late discussions, the essay employs the Deleuzian notion of “dramatization”, an epistemological method that draws on the imagination to escape representational thought. The essay thus aims to demonstrate that parrhesia mirrors the artwork in its intuitive and dynamic relation to truth. Subsequently, it argues that Foucault and Deleuze, respectively proceeding from a limited and an unlimited mode of thinking, come infinitely close in their thinking of art.


Problemos ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 84 ◽  
pp. 153-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jūratė Baranova

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama Kanto nužymėtos ir Deleuze’o eksperimentiniame mąstyme rekonstruotos vaizduotės kaip vieno iš trijų proto gebėjimų raiškos lauko alternatyvos. Siekiama atsakyti į paties Deleuze’o išsikeltą kantišką klausimą: kokia yra giliausia paslaptis? Aptinkamos kelios atsakymo alternatyvos. Šiame tyrime paaiškėjo, kad Deleuze’o atsakymai į paties išsikeltą klausimą „kokia yra giliausia vaizduotės paslaptis?“ patiria metamorfozes, kurios apsuka ratą. Nuo pradinės pozicijos, kai vaizduotė veikia tik paklusdama intelektui ar protui, ji juda link laisvo trijų nepriklausomų sugebėjimų – intelekto, proto, vaizduotės atitikimo, paskui – link jų nedarnios dermės, jų kovos, kuri skatina kiekvienos naują atsiskleidimą, galiausiai – prie vaizduotės anihiliacijos, kuri leidžia užgimti naujai minčiai, taigi, ratas apsisuka ir grįžtama prie jų dermės naujame lygmenyje, moderuojant filosofiniam skoniui. Tačiau visas šias metaformorfozes jungia viena bendra Kanto suformuluota prielaida: vaizduotė niekada neišvengia triadinės priklausomybės, ji neveikia viena; ji galima tik santykyje su intelektu ir protu, t. y. kitais trimis jai paraleliais ir simultaniškais sugebėjimais.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: Kantas, Deleuze’as, vaizduotėKant and Deleuze: What is the Deepest Secret of Imagination? Jūratė Baranova Abstract The paper discusses the problem of possible philosophical understanding of imagination from the Kantian-Deleuzean point of view. At the begining of his philosophical carreer, one can say, “early Deleuze” in 1963 published the book „Kant’s Critical Philosophy“ (La philosophie critique de Kant). The same year he wrote an essay “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Esthetics”. In both texts returning to Kant’s book Critique of Pure Reason, Deleuze notices, that it is widely acknowledged that schematizing is an original and irreducible act of imagination: only imagination can and knows how to schematize. Nevertheless, the imagination does not schematize of its own accord, simply because it is free to do so. It schematizes only for a speculative purpose, in accordance with the determinate concepts of the understanding; when the understanding itself plays the role of legislator. This is why it would be misguided to search the mistery of schematizing for the last word on the imagination in its essence or in its free spontaneity. “Schematizing is indeed a secret, but not the deepest secret of imagination,” – writes Deleuze. Some questions arise at this point. The first one – who speaks here: Kant or Deleuze? The second one – what is this deepest secret of imagination, as an intrigue of this kantian-deleuzean voice? How many possible answers to this question one can discern passing from “early Deleuze” to “late Deleuze”? In this article the author discoved some possible metamorphosis or twists of imagination in the experimental reading of Deleuze. It starts from the submissive position being directed by Understanding or Reason, to the free accord of three independent faculties, towards their discord, even fight, even death of the imagination for the sake of the thought and at least – the whirl closes and comes to the same point but from a different point of view: imagination, together with understanding and reason participate as an integral part of philosophical taste in later Deleuze. But one point united all these different adventures of imagination. Imagination always acts only in relation to the understanding and reason, it never plays free. It could never be able to play alone. Keywords: Kant, Deleuze, imagination.


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