scholarly journals “What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes”: Relational Theology and Ways of Seeing in Blade Runner

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 625
Author(s):  
Leah D. Schade ◽  
Emily Askew
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
The Other ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
Relational Theology ◽  
Humanitarian Crises ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Sallie Mcfague

This paper examines the theme of relational theology in the Blade Runner science fiction franchise by exploring the symbolism of eyes and sight in the films. Using the work of ecofeminist theologian Sallie McFague, we explore the contrast between the arrogant, detached eye of surveillance (what we call the “gods’ eye view”) which interprets the other-than-human world as instrumental object, and the possibility of the loving eye of awareness and attention (the “God’s eye view”) which views the other-than-human world as an equal subject with intrinsic value. How the films wrestle with what is “real” and how the other-than-human is regarded has implications for our present time as we face enormous upheavals due to climate disruption and migration and the accompanying justice issues therein. We make the case that the films are extended metaphors that provide a window on our own dystopian present which present us with choices as to how we will see the world and respond to the ecological and humanitarian crises already upon us.

scholarly journals Rat Cities and Beehive Worlds: Density and Design in the Modern City

2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 722-756
Author(s):  
Jon Adams ◽  
Edmund Ramsden
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Social System ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Efficient Operation ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Nestled among E. M. Forster's careful studies of Edwardian social mores is a short story called “The Machine Stops.” Set many years in the future, it is a work of science fiction that imagines all humanity housed in giant high-density cities buried deep below a lifeless surface. With each citizen cocooned in an identical private chamber, all interaction is mediated through the workings of “the Machine,” a totalizing social system that controls every aspect of human life. Cultural variety has ceded to rigorous organization: everywhere is the same, everyone lives the same life. So hopelessly reliant is humanity upon the efficient operation of the Machine, that when the system begins to fail there is little the people can do, and so tightly ordered is the system that the failure spreads. At the story's conclusion, the collapse is total, and Forster's closing image offers a condemnation of the world they had built, and a hopeful glimpse of the world that might, in their absence, return: “The whole city was broken like a honeycomb. […] For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky” (2001: 123). In physically breaking apart the city, there is an extent to which Forster is literalizing the device of the broken society, but it is also the case that the infrastructure of the Machine is so inseparable from its social structure that the failure of one causes the failure of the other. The city has—in the vocabulary of present-day engineers—“failed badly.”

The Animistic Way: Contemporary Paganism and the Posthuman

Poligrafi ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
Victoria Dos Santos
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
The Other ◽  
Relational Ontology ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Contemporary Paganism

This article aims to explore the affinities between contemporary Paganism and the posthuman project in how they approach the non-human natural world. On the one hand, posthumanism explores new ways of considering the notion of humans and how they are linked with the non-human world. On the other hand, Neopaganism expands this reflection to the spiritual domain through its animistic relational sensibility. Both perspectives challenge the modern paradigm where nature and humans are opposed and mutually disconnected. They instead propose a relational ontology that welcomes the “different other.” This integrated relationship between humans and the “other than human” can be understood through the semiotic Chora, a notion belonging to Julia Kristeva that addresses how the subject is not symbolically separated from the world in which it is contained.

scholarly journals Cognition on the Relation between the “Ego” and the “Other” in Science Fiction Movies

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Yan Jun
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship

Mankind is always trapped in the introspection in one’s identity and the relationship with others, about which, many philosophers and psychologists like Feud and Lacan, have established various theories. Many science fiction movies can function as allegorical stories for the interpretation of those theories about the two concepts and their relation. Deep probing and comprehensive analyses of those movies in light of Feud’s and Lacan’s theories about the “ego” and the “other” make it easy to see that the “ego” has an intricating relation with the “other”, which symbolizes both other people, the world and the ego itself. The “other” is intimidating to the “ego”, but the integrity with it is also what the ego pursuits. So, for the harmony between the “ego” and the “other”, the “ego” should pursuit its integrity with the “other”, while confirming its own identity.

scholarly journals Translation, Interpretation, and Common Meaning: Victoria Welby’s Significal Perspective1

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Petrilli
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
Theory Of Value ◽  
The One

Abstract As she worked through the nineteenth century Victoria Welby elaborated a fascinating theory of translation based on her theory of sign and meaning, which she designated with the term significs. This means to say that, on the one hand, Welby’s theory of translation took account of the vastness and variety of the world of signs, therefore of the unbounded nature of translative-interpretive processes which cannot be limited to the mere transition from one language to another. The condition for interlingual translation in the human world is the larger context where translative processes converge with life processes and maybe push beyond in what would seem to be an unbounded cosmic dimension. On the other hand, that Welby should have related her translation theory to her theory of sign and meaning also implies that she founded her translation theory in a theory of value recognizing the inevitable importance of the latter when translating within a single language as much as across different languages in a plurilingual and intercultural world. Ultimately, in the properly human world, to translate means to interpret, that is, to translate transfiguring and transvaluating significance.

Philosophy of Inequality in the Context of Post-Humanism

2021 ◽  
Vol 35.5 ◽  
pp. 194-199
Author(s):  
Natalya N. Rostova
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Russian Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Today ◽  
The World ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
Human World ◽  
West European ◽  
Post Humanism

In the article the author examines humanism criticism that does not result in post-humanism. The author shows that post-humanism is the reaction to the humanistic idea of man as the center of the world that was typical for west-European philosophy. At the same time post-humanism doe not negate the logic of humanism, but extrapolates it to the whole of non-human world. On the contrary, Russian philosophy is free from the original premises of humanism and it views the crisis of humanism in a different perspective. The author shows that Russian philosophy is not anthropocentric, but on the contrary – anthropologic. Its feature consists in viewing the man in the perspective of his ontological expansion. The idea of such ontological expansion is based on the philosophy of inequality. When west-European philosophy today conceptualizes total world democracy on the other side of man, Russian philosophy turns to the idea of metaphysical gaps that substantiate the idea of man’s freedom and anthropological necessity of self-restrictions.

Cultural Engineering: A Theme in Science Fiction

Hard Reading ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 89-102
Author(s):  
Tom Shippey
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Engineering ◽  
The World ◽  
Sword And Sorcery ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
Near Future

As a form, science fiction conceals homogeneity beneath apparent diversity. The diversity can be seen by looking at the range of paperbacks in any bookshop. One finds lumped together ‘end of the world’ stories, galactic empire stories, stories of the near future and, via time travel, of the very far past, as well as stories that have nothing to do with science at all but depend on magic, or the fantasy type known as ‘sword and sorcery’. One might well think that the inclusion of all these under one heading is just a mistake, that the diversity is genuine. There are two reasons for thinking that is not so: that there is something holding all this diversity together. One is temporary and practical; the other is an element that regular readers recognise, something that forms a large part of the genre’s appeal....

Isaaс Grigoryevich Morgenstern (1932-2008). Tribute to the memory of the researcher

2018 ◽  
pp. 112-119
Author(s):  
Tatiana Mokovaya ◽  
Yulia Razina
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Reading Room ◽  
Social Informatics ◽  
State Institute ◽  
Digital Version ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
Book Studies ◽  
Personal Library

The article is prepared on the occasion of the 10-th death anniversary of Isaac Morgenstern, an outstanding researcher bibliographer, Doctor of Science in pedagogy, professor, Honored Higher School Worker, an expert in bibliographic science, social informatics, and book studies. The experience of the Scientific Library of Chelyabinsk State Institute of Culture in exploring the researcher’s personal library and archives is discussed. The vectors of the memorial exhibition activities are described. One of the significant projects of the Year of the Memory of Morgenstern was the release of the unique in its kind calendar-almanac "Homo Informatus - Homo Informans". Among the other memorial events are: the long-lasting themed exhibitions (“From a concept to implementation”, “We commemorate…” “The world of his interests” “The human world panorama”), the bibliography of inscribed publications, organization of the archive of journal and newspaper clippings collected by Isaac Morgenstern. At the Library’s www-site in the “Collections” section, you will find information on the collection of bibliographer’s personal library, in “Publications”- the almanac digital version, in “Exhibitions” section - virtual exhibitions similar to the traditional ones displayed in the reading room named after Isaac Morgenstern.

Disability and Narrative

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 568-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bérubé
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Radioactive Fallout ◽  
The State ◽  
Premature Aging ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
World War ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
Animated Films ◽  
The World

After a decade of working in disability studies, I still find myself surprised by the presence of disability in narratives I had never considered to be “about” disability—in animated films from Dumbo to Finding Nemo; in literary texts from Huckleberry Finn to Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays; and, most curiously, even in the world of science fiction and superheroes, a world that turns out to be populated by blind Daredevils, mutant supercrips, and posthuman cyborgs of all kinds. Indeed, I now consider it plausible that the genre of science fiction is as obsessed with disability as it is with space travel and alien contact. Sometimes disability is simply underrecognized in familiar sci-fi narratives: ask Philip K. Dick fans about the importance of disability in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and you'll probably get blank stares. But the Voigt-Kampff empathy test by which the authorities distinguish humans from androids was, Dick tells us, actually developed after World War Terminus to identify “specials,” people neurologically damaged by radioactive fallout, so that the state could prevent them from reproducing. That aspect of the novel's complication of the human-android distinction is lost in the film Blade Runner, but the film does give us an engineer with a disability that involves premature aging, which links him intimately to the androids who have life spans of only four years.

scholarly journals Żyć mocą Ducha Bożego w Kościele

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 56-86
Author(s):  
Jacek Neumann ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Theological Interpretation ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Human World ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Church

Our life as the Christen in the community ecclesial is the announcement about God, which gives the people the gifts of love, freedom, friendship and truth. Through the forgiveness and the activity of the salvation of God, love and friendship in man’s life makes the human world more divine. This Jesus accents in His proclamation about the kingdom divine, specially in the parables, where He presents the model of the world based on love, hope, faith and freedom as the world of deeds based on God. Therefore, with the power of God’s Spirit, man has to make his life based on the norm of divine, because only in God, with God and through God exists for man the possibility to life now on earth, and afterwards in the future in heaven. In this situation, the answer of the man of faith has to be the motivation to take up the “deed” of the renovation of self-life and the imitation of God. This constitutes as the Christian thought that the central point of the theological interpretation of the value of salvation is realized – hic et nun – as the historical and existential value of the human life in the right of the kingdom divine. The proclamation of Jesus about the “new life”, presents to man the values of the divine existence in the spiritual of the Church. On one hand, it is the gift of freedom and the liberation from sin, where the love of God is absolutely necessary. On the other hand, the “new life” opens for man the space of liberty of life, where God forgives the human offences and the sins, both past and present. Well now the resume of the call to imitate God is the acceptance of the divine gift, which changes the man himself, and all the people, who seek the help and good councils to live the norm divine. These witnesses in the human mentality the consciousness of the existence based on the divine laws, which have in themselves the dimension eschatological.

scholarly journals Boundaries and Otherness in Science Fiction: We Cannot Escape the Human Condition

Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 212-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabella Hermann
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Extreme Conditions ◽  
Social Challenges ◽  
The World ◽  
Future Challenges ◽  
Border Conflicts ◽  
Real State

The article explores the construction of boundaries, alterity and otherness in modern science-fiction (SF) films. Boundaries, understood as real state borders, territoriality and sovereignty, as well as the construction of the other beyond an imagined border and delimited space, have a significant meaning in the dystopian settings of SF. Even though SF topics are not bound to the contemporary environment, be it of a historical, technical or ethical nature, they do relate to the present-day world and transcend our well-known problems. Therefore, SF offers a pronounced discourse about current social challenges under extreme conditions such as future technological leaps, encounters with the alien other or the end of the world. At the same time the genre enables us to play through future challenges that might really happen. Films like Equilibrium (2002), Code 46 (2003), Children of Men (2006) and District 9 (2009) show that in freely constructed cinematic settings we are not only unable to escape from our border conflicts, but quite the contrary, we take them everywhere with us, even to an alternative present or into the future, where new precarious situations of otherness are constructed.

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