Scholars, Transmitters, and the Making of Talmud

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moulie Vidas
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Babylonian Talmud ◽  
Torah Study ◽  
Ancient Mesopotamia ◽  
The One ◽  
Two Bodies

This chapter examines three passages that associate with the “conservative,” transmission-oriented aspects of Torah study the occupation with the two bodies of knowledge that the rabbis received: the Written Torah (Scripture) and the Oral Torah (rabbinic tradition). These passages are all premised on a dichotomy between the “received” knowledge of Scripture and oral tradition, on the one hand, and the innovative, creative aspects of study on the other. Building on the work of Daniel Boyarin, Jeffrey Rubenstein, and others who showed that the Babylonian Talmud places a high value on dialectic and analysis at the expense of tradition and memorization, the chapter demonstrates the centrality of this preference to the self-perception of the Talmud's creators and situates it within a polemical conversation among Jews in late ancient Mesopotamia.

Stories and the Self

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Krause ◽  
Markus Appel
Keyword(s):  
Meta Analysis ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Lower Degree ◽  
Contrast Effects ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Self Perceptions ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Implicit And Explicit

Abstract. Two experiments examined the influence of stories on recipients’ self-perceptions. Extending prior theory and research, our focus was on assimilation effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in line with a protagonist’s traits) as well as on contrast effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in contrast to a protagonist’s traits). In Experiment 1 ( N = 113), implicit and explicit conscientiousness were assessed after participants read a story about either a diligent or a negligent student. Moderation analyses showed that highly transported participants and participants with lower counterarguing scores assimilate the depicted traits of a story protagonist, as indicated by explicit, self-reported conscientiousness ratings. Participants, who were more critical toward a story (i.e., higher counterarguing) and with a lower degree of transportation, showed contrast effects. In Experiment 2 ( N = 103), we manipulated transportation and counterarguing, but we could not identify an effect on participants’ self-ascribed level of conscientiousness. A mini meta-analysis across both experiments revealed significant positive overall associations between transportation and counterarguing on the one hand and story-consistent self-reported conscientiousness on the other hand.

The Tricksters of Karamoja

2007 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 421-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
The One

Karamojong oral tradition provides several trickster characters such as the rabbit, the self-appointed moral guard. This rabbit pretends to defend the weak and the powerless, yet secretly steals from them, but in the end gets exposed for what it really is. Then there is the clever fox, which skilfully tricks people with its clever manipulations, convincing them that it is honest and upright, not unlike the rabbit, but then it too gets caught stealing. Napeikisina, the one-breasted villain trickster, the symbol of humanity's penchant for evil, masquerades her insatiable cannibalistic propensities and desire for recognition, but her penchant for evil eventually becomes apparent, thus frightening people, and like all the other tricksters she too gets caught.Ben Knighton seems to possess some of the attributes of some of these tricksters. With amazing legerdemain, he skilfully manages to conjure up oral and written texts in an attempt to persuade people to believe that what they read is authentic, in order to offer himself as the paramount authority on all matters Karamoja. But he too ends up getting caught, like all the Karamojong tricksters.

Keeping Company with Sondheim’s Women

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacy Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Married Couples ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

This chapter examines the eight female characters inCompany, what they do in the musical, and how they function in the show’s dramaturgy, and argues that they elicit the quintessential challenge of analyzing musical theater from a feminist perspective. On the one hand, the women tend to be stereotypically, even msogynistically portrayed. On the other hand, each character offers the actor a tremendous performance opportunity in portraying a complicated psychology, primarily communicated through richly expressive music and sophisticated lyrics. In this groundbreaking 1970 ensemble musical about a bachelor’s encounters with five married couples and three girlfriends, Sondheim’s female characters occupy a striking range of types within one show. From the bitter, acerbic, thrice-married Joanne to the reluctant bride-to-be Amy, and from the self-described “dumb” “stewardess” April to the free-spirited Marta,Company’s eight women are distillations of femininity, precisely sketched in the short, singular scenes in which they appear.

Let the Witness Speak: From Archi-writing to the Community to come

Derrida Today ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-270
Author(s):  
Francesco Vitale
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Metaphysics Of Presence ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
The Sacrifice

The paper aims to present a reading of the question of Testimony rising in Derrida's later works (from Faith and Knowledge to Poetics and Politics of Witnessing): the experience of Testimony as the irreducible condition of the relation to the Other, of every possible link among living human singularities and, thus, of the thinking of a community to come. This thinking is able to divert the community from the economy grounding and structuring it within our political tradition governed by the metaphysics of presence, which demands the sacrifice of the Other in its multiple theoretical and practical forms. We intend to read this proposal and to point out its rich perspectives by bringing it into the articulation of an ethical-political archi-writing. So we suggest going back to Derrida's early analyses of phenomenology and to De la grammatologie in order to present a reading of archi-writing as the irreducible condition of the relation to otherness and, thus, of the experience through which a living human singularity constitutes itself, a singularity different from the one our tradition compels us to think of within the pattern of the absolute presence to the self, free from the relation to the other.

scholarly journals „Es war kein Job, es war eine Berufung“ – Gouvernementale Führung, fragmentierte Subjekte und <i>contre-conduite</i> in der nichtstaatlichen Entwicklungspraxis

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-181
Author(s):  
Kirsten Linnemann
Keyword(s):  
Critical Distance ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Development Professionals ◽  
Western Values ◽  
The One ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Good Cause ◽  
Development Practice

Abstract. With their donation appeals aid organisations procure a polarised worldview of the self and other into our everyday lives and feed on discourses of “development” and “neediness”. This study investigates how the discourse of “development” is embedded in the subjectivities of “development” professionals. By approaching the topic from a governmentality perspective, the paper illustrates how “development” is (re-)produced through internalised Western values and powerful mechanisms of self-conduct. Meanwhile, this form of self-conduct, which is related to a “good cause”, also gives rise to doubts regarding the work, as well as fragmentations and shifts of identity. On the one hand, the paper outlines various coping strategies used by development professionals to maintain a coherent narrative about the self. On the other hand, it also shows how doubts and fragmentations of identity can generate a critical distance to “development” practice, providing a space for resistant and transformative practice in the sense of Foucauldian counter-conduct.

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.

Entreprenøren som figur under neoliberalismen - Kapitalisme, individ og velfærdsorganisering

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luise Li Langergaard
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Entrepreneurship ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Economic Innovation ◽  
The One ◽  
The Welfare State

The article explores the central role of the entrepreneur in neoliberalism. It demonstrates how a displacement and a broadening of the concept of the entrepreneur occur in the neoliberal interpretation of the entrepreneur compared to Schumpeter’s economic innovation theory. From being a specific economic figure with a particular delimited function the entrepreneur is reinterpreted as, on the one hand, a particular type of subject, the entrepreneur of the self, and on the other, an ism, entrepreneurialism, which permeates individuals, society, and institutions. Entrepreneurialism is discussed as a movement of the economic into previously non-economic domains, such as the welfare state and society. Social entrepreneurship is an example of this in relation to solutions to social welfare problems. This can, on the one hand, be understood as an extension of the neoliberal understanding of the entrepreneur, but it also, in certain interpretations, resists the neoliberal understanding of economy and society.

Uncommon Measure

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoon Sook Cha
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Relative Power ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
Special Character ◽  
The One

This chapter, a reading of “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force,” considers Weil’s claim about the special character of force, that in being assumed and redeployed by those whom it subjects, flattens the relative power of humans. The chapter argues that the claim directs us to the possibility of a new relationality that forfeits sovereign modes of power without that forfeiture thereby signifying an equitable power between the self and the other, such as it is in supplication. Referencing Maurice Blanchot, it is argued that supplication establishes an “uncommon measure” between the suppliant and the one supplicated, not by virtue of any power the suppliant has, but by laying bare his human presence. In this context, one’s subjection to force offers a certain opening to the other even as it marks the precariousness of one’s own human being.

Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers

2019 ◽  
pp. 82-103
Author(s):  
Miriam Driessen
Keyword(s):  
Wage Differentials ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fundamental Interest ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
Employment Security ◽  
Speed Up ◽  
Moral Superiority ◽  
The One ◽  
Chinese Managers

Whereas Chinese road builders are modest about improving their own lives, they are confident about their ability to transform the lives of Ethiopian others. This chapter discusses Chinese management’s attempts to fashion young Ethiopian men into industrious laborers, modeling them on the self-sacrificing worker subject that helped realize China’s economic miracle throughout the 1990s and 2000s. What Ethiopian laborers lack, in Chinese managers’ eyes, is a sense of urgency and a drive to develop the self. Yet their attempts to fashion Ethiopians into committed laborers are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, management seeks to enhance the productivity of the local workforce and speed up the building works. On the other hand, they have a fundamental interest in upholding the image of the Ethiopian worker as indolent, for it confirms Chinese moral superiority and justifies wage differentials and inequalities in employment security.

scholarly journals Remarks on the self-shrinking Clifford torus

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (765) ◽  
pp. 139-170
Author(s):  
Christopher G. Evans ◽  
Jason D. Lotay ◽  
Felix Schulze
Keyword(s):  
Mean Curvature ◽  
Mean Curvature Flow ◽  
Curvature Flow ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Local Entropy ◽  
Clifford Torus ◽  
Infinitesimal Deformations ◽  
Rigid Motions ◽  
The One

AbstractOn the one hand, we prove that the Clifford torus in {\mathbb{C}^{2}} is unstable for Lagrangian mean curvature flow under arbitrarily small Hamiltonian perturbations, even though it is Hamiltonian F-stable and locally area minimising under Hamiltonian variations. On the other hand, we show that the Clifford torus is rigid: it is locally unique as a self-shrinker for mean curvature flow, despite having infinitesimal deformations which do not arise from rigid motions. The proofs rely on analysing higher order phenomena: specifically, showing that the Clifford torus is not a local entropy minimiser even under Hamiltonian variations, and demonstrating that infinitesimal deformations which do not generate rigid motions are genuinely obstructed.

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