Hypatia’s Murder—The Sacrifice of a Virgin and Its Implications

Keyword(s):  
Derrida Today ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Polish

In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from (other than human) others that calls for an account of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat(s) in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-308
Author(s):  
Abigail L. Palko

During her lifetime, Dorothy Macardle was a prominent public intellectual in both her native Ireland and post-war Europe. Her passionate engagement in Irish nationalism found expression in her writing; in her only collection of short stories, Earth-bound: Nine Stories of Ireland, published early in her writing career, she protests Irish women's socially restricted status and offers literary models of female solidarity to her audience (her fellow prisoners in Kilmainham Gaol, where she was imprisoned during the Civil War). Complex and ambiguous messages regarding maternal attitudes and female sexuality are encoded within the collection, particularly in the two Maeve stories (as I have labelled them because of their shared narrator), ‘The Return of Niav’ and ‘The Portrait of Roisin Dhu’, in which she offers coded expressions of the realities of women's lives in early twentieth-century Ireland that the larger public would have preferred remain unspoken, particularly with regard to expressions of maternal inclinations and female sexuality. Earth-bound, driven by her reactions to the many ways that the Irish struggle for national autonomy was purchased by the sacrifice of female autonomy, becomes a vehicle through which she explores socially taboo issues, most notably mothering practices and both heterosexual and homosexual expressions of female sexuality.


Alloy Digest ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  

Abstract CANNON-MUSKEGON H-11 is an air-hardening hot-work cast tool steel used for hot applications requiring good toughness combined with good red-hardness and for cold applications where toughness is required at the sacrifice of some wear. A higher silicon content is permissable in this cast steel than in AISI H-11 (wrought) tool steel. This datasheet provides information on composition, physical properties, hardness, elasticity, and tensile properties as well as fatigue. It also includes information on casting, heat treating, machining, and joining. Filing Code: TS-251. Producer or source: Cannon-Muskegon Corporation.


Author(s):  
Randall Fuller

The nature and meaning of sacrifice were fiercely contested in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Historians have documented a long struggle by veterans to ensure the continuing remembrance of their sacrifice. At the same time, American politicians tended to demur from acknowledging these sacrifices, as doing so would reopen the rift that had prompted war in the first place. This chapter probes the work of three Civil War poets—Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—to uncover the meaning of sacrifice during and after the war. Dickinson’s verses about psychic pain and dislocation are increasingly understood as simultaneous expositions of the personal and political: Melville’s knotty, multi-perspectival poems about the war, Battle-Pieces, question the ideological freight of sacrifice, and Whitman sought to honour the sacrifice of soldiers through a poetics he hoped would heal the body politic. Ultimately only Whitman’s consolatory poetry would find a postwar audience.


Author(s):  
Paolo Xella

Phoenician polytheism—its structure and rites—is not completely unknown to us. There were mythological traditions common to the area, as well as a structure common to the pantheons of the Phoenician cities. At the top there is a divine couple consisting of a male god and a goddess, his spouse, and a divine assembly. The same basic structure is detectable in the Punic world, Carthage and elsewhere, although with differences and innovations. In turn, every Phoenician city had its own tutelary deities: the diversification of gods and cults was a powerful means of cultural identity and identification. As for Phoenician mythology, a theme emerges from available sources, which ultimately dates back to the Late Bronze Age, as exemplified by Ugaritic Baal: Among the ceremonies, particularly important was a solemn feast, called egersis (“awakening”) in Greek sources, which commemorated annually Milqart’s death and return to life. The chapter also discusses the tophet and its rites, both bloody and not, related to the fulfilment of vows concerning severe individual or collective crises, which in some cases involved the sacrifice of children to the gods.


2020 ◽  
pp. 003329411989606
Author(s):  
Štěpán Bahník ◽  
Emir Efendic ◽  
Marek A. Vranka

When asked whether to sacrifice oneself or another person to save others, one might think that people would consider sacrificing themselves rather than someone else as the right and appropriate course of action—thus showing an other-serving bias. So far however, most studies found instances of a self-serving bias—people say they would rather sacrifice others. In three experiments using trolley-like dilemmas, we tested whether an other-serving bias might appear as a function of judgment type. That is, participants were asked to make a prescriptive judgment (whether the described action should or should not be done) or a normative judgment (whether the action is right or wrong). We found that participants exhibited an other-serving bias only when asked whether self- or other-sacrifice is wrong. That is, when the judgment was normative and in a negative frame (in contrast to the positive frame asking whether the sacrifice is right). Otherwise, participants tended to exhibit a self-serving bias; that is, they approved sacrificing others more. The results underscore the importance of question wording and suggest that some effects on moral judgment might depend on the type of judgment.


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