The Relationship between the Materiality of the Book and the Invisible Gaps

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-40
Author(s):  
Do Hee Kim ◽  
Byung Hak Ahn
Open Theology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 547-556
Author(s):  
Martin Nitsche

AbstractThis study focuses on various phenomenological conceptions of the invisible in order to consider to what extent and in what way they involve moments of hiddenness. The relationship among phenomenality, invisibility, and hiddenness is examined in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Henry, and Merleau-Ponty. The study explains why phenomenologists prefer speaking about the invisible over a discourse of the hidden. It shows that the phenomenological method does not display the invisibility as a limit of experience but rather as a dynamic component of relational nature of any experience, including the religious one. Special attention is paid to topological moments of the relationship between the visible and the invisible.


2018 ◽  
pp. 121-136
Author(s):  
Adam Grener

This essay analyzes the relationship between empire and ecology in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846-48) in order to identify problems of representation that accompany the Victorian novel’s effort to grasp global systems, highlighting the methodological differences between ecological and symptomatic readings of the novel. Although Dombey’s failure to directly represent the “invisible regions” of empire problematizes its rhetoric of economic and domestic reform, this essay argues that its reliance upon the atmosphere and weather as mediating images foregrounds the imaginative structures necessary to understand the imperial underpinnings of domestic locales. The logic of the novel’s atmospheric and meteorological imagery shows the ways in which realism relies upon both metaphor and metonymy to represent systematic interconnection on a global scale.


Author(s):  
Michael E. Pregill

This chapter examines the main narrative of the Golden Calf found in Exodus 32, as well as other allusions to this episode from Israel’s history from what became the canonical Hebrew Bible. The account of the Calf in Exodus appears to have been shaped by polemical imperatives in the earliest stages of its development, and reflects complex questions surrounding sanctioned forms of divine worship, the status of different priestly groups, and the relationship of those groups to the Israelite monarchies and the cult forms they sponsored. The conception of the Calf in Exodus appears to reflect ancient ideas about the sanctioned means of worshipping the God of Israel, with an older form of Israelite cult practice—the use of bulls or calves to suggest the invisible divine presence—being critiqued here. However, rather than corroborating the Exodus narrative’s presentation of the affair, the version of the episode preserved in Deuteronomy reflects the profoundly different imperatives of a later age. While the Exodus narrative ultimately hearkens back to a time in Israel’s history in which the making of the Calf was perceived primarily as a lamentable cultic infraction, the reframing of the narrative in Deuteronomy embeds it in a larger discourse in which the making of the Calf appears as the pre-eminent example of idolatry, a distinctive ideological construction of the exilic and post-exilic periods that marked all forms of religious practice not sanctioned as “orthodox” as betrayals of the covenant and regression to the worship of false gods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 259-272
Author(s):  
Joanna Warmuzińska-Rogóż

Le récit/the story entitled Lʼhomme invisible / The Invisible Man (1981) by Patrice Desbiens, a bilingual Franco-Ontarian writer and poet, encourages us to reflect on a bilingual original and to rethink the relationship between the centre and the periphery in the translational context. Bilingualism is an integral part of the book: Patrice Desbiens builds his identities on “two mother tongues” by juxtaposing the two versions of his text. A detailed analysis of the story in French and English shows important differences between them. What is more, only a simultaneous reading of the two versions makes it possible to fully understand the idea of the story and the complicated relations between the two cultures. The article is a reflection on the impossibility of translating an original built on the presence of two languages, an inherent and specific feature of Desbiens’ text.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Vernadakis

In E. M. Forster’s ‘The Story of the Siren’ (1920), humility and the humble are highlighted by the empowering status bestowed on an embedded story told by an illiterate Sicilian boatman to a sophisticated English tourist and prospective Cambridge Fellow. The latter, who is also the narrator of the embedding narrative, proves to be transformed by the qualities (philosophic, ethical and literary) promoted by the humble status of the embedded one. As the existence of the Siren of the title is problematic – she never shows up – and the story offers a case of structuring a full intrigue on the invisible, there may be a connection between the humble and the invisible. In order to investigate this assumption, I propose to explore the way in which the myth of the siren, a myth that relates to desire, is brought into dialogue with Frazer’s evolutionary theory and Plato’s theory of ideas. The interplay between philosophy, anthropology and desire provides a critique of Edwardian society and a self-criticism based on Socratic irony, itself an irony of humility. I shall eventually suggest that the humble but desirable Sicilian storyteller functions like an avatar of the Siren. Instead of writing a dissertation on the Deist Controversy and becoming an academic, the homodiegetic narrator allows himself to be seduced by the ‘Siren’s song’ – the young Sicilian’s story – and (ironically) become a writer. For, as I will attempt to demonstrate, the relationship between this short story and the life of E. M. Forster is highlighted by the figure of metalepsis, a device that reveals the author, rather than the narrator, at work.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Braxton D. Shelley

This article presents an analytical paradigm that employs the repetitive musical cycle known as “the vamp” to illuminate the interrelation of form, experience, and meaning in African American gospel music, focusing on music performed by gospel choirs with soloists. I argue that, more than just a ubiquitous musical procedure, the gospel vamp functions as a ritual technology, a resource many African American Christians use to experience with their bodies what they believe in their hearts. As they perform and perceive the gospel vamp's characteristic combination of repetition and escalation, these believers coproduce sonic environments that facilitate the communal experience of a given song's textual message. Through close readings of four canonical songs from the gospel choir repertoire—Kurt Carr's “For Every Mountain,” Brenda Joyce Moore's “Perfect Praise,” Richard Smallwood's “I Will Sing Praises,” and Thomas Whitfield's “I Shall Wear a Crown”—the article examines the phenomenological implications of gospel's communal orientation, outlines the relationship between musical syntax, musical experience, formal convention, and lyrical content in this genre, and suggests that analyzing gospel offers a way of studying how many black Christians come into contact with the invisible subjects of their belief.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 104
Author(s):  
Bradford Littlejohn

Amidst the plethora of approaches to ecumenical dialogue and church reunion over the last century, a common theme has been the depreciation of the classic Protestant distinction between the “visible” and “invisible” church. Often seen as privileging an abstract predestinarianism over the concrete lives and structures of church communities and underwriting a complacency about division that deprives Christians of any motive to ecumenical endeavor, the concept of the “invisible” church has been widely marginalized in favor of a renewed focus on the “visible” church as the true church. However, I argue that this stress on visible unity creates a pressure toward institutional forms of unity that ultimately privilege Roman Catholic ecclesiologies at the expense of Protestant ones, and thus fails of its ecumenical promise. Renewed attention to Reformational understandings of the relationship between divine grace and human action and the centrality and uniqueness of Christ as the foundation of the church, I argue, dispels some misunderstandings of the church’s “invisibility” and demonstrates the indispensability of the concept. I argue that this Reformational framework, which refuses to accept the empirical divisions of the Church as definitive and summons us to an ecumenism that belongs to the church’s sanctification, provides the best theological ground for ecumenical endeavor.


2022 ◽  
Vol 37 (71) ◽  
pp. 054-072
Author(s):  
Victoria Andelsman

The present article explores how cycles are brought into being through the practices and affordances involved in period-tracking with apps. Based on thirteen in-depth semi-structured interviews with period-tracking app users living in the Netherlands, it expands on literature discussing the relationship between embodiment, apps, and quantification. The contributions of this article are two-fold. Theoretically, it argues for the use of Karen Barad’s notion of apparatus to understand how bodies are (re)configured in relation to self-tracking technologies (1998). Empirically, it exposes how bodies emerge in localized period-tracking practices, within material-semiotic arrangements that both resist and reproduce cultural ideals about menstruating bodies. Period-tracking with apps, this study finds, brings the body’s interior processes into being in a “systematic” way, (re)configuring the cycle as either a series of phases or an interval with a certain (normative) duration. In all cases, periodtracking with apps becomes a means for users to access their internal body and to materialize the invisible processes of the cycle in ways that can be acted upon.


PhaenEx ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothea Olkowski

In chapter four of The Visible and the Invisible, titled “The Intertwining -- The Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty considers the relation between the body as sensible, which is to say “objective,” and the body as sentient, that is, as “phenomenal” body. He makes this inquiry in the context of interrogating the access of such a sensible-sentient or objective-phenomenal body to Being. “Objectivity” and the objective body, as Merleau-Ponty defines it in the Phenomenology of Perception, are to be determined in relation to experience. Objectivity requires knowing how it is possible for determinate shapes to be available for experience at all. But the possibility of determinate shapes is also called into question by Merleau-Ponty insofar as the body is experienced as a point of view on things; thus every body would experience a different point of view, even though things are given as abstract elements of one total world. Since the two elements form a system, an intertwining, in which each moment (that of a body with a particular point of view and that of things in the totality of their world) is immediately expressive of each other, objectivity would seem to be hard to achieve. The relationship between body and things, point of view and world, if the relata continually express one another, would appear to be anything but determinate and the question of how objectivity is possible remains unanswered. This essay will explore this question in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s (mis-) reading of Henri Bergson and from the point of view of Sartre’s original expression of the relation of intertwining.


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