The Rise of Prophecy: Figural Neuter, Desert of Allegory

Sodomscapes ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Late Modern

Chapter two lingers on Maître François’ design, treating its suggestive ambiguity as a premonitory witness to the twentieth-century postwar turns to the Sodom archive in Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas’ delicate yet fraught philosophical conversation about the ethical aptitude of artworks. The Sodom archive’s figural suggestiveness guides Blanchot and Levinas’s shared predisposition to identify the primordial affinity of artworks with the disruptive urgency of prophecy and its figural analogue, the desert. Lot’s wife’s subliminal association with the prophecy/desert nexus becomes the site of an ecumenical settlement between Blanchot and Levinas over the captivating and dislocating aesthetic power of artworks. On this note, Maître François’ image and the late modern moment of philosophical hospitality between Blanchot and Levinas speak to each other across centuries. Through different registers of discernment, the two scenes conjure the figure of Lot’s wife as the material remains of a thinking beyond the limit of the phenomenal face of appearances and cognition, so as to give witness to the radiant and interruptive force of artworks’ worlding and unworlding dimensions.

Jewish Displacement as Experience and Metaphor in 20th-Century European Thought

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Liska
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
The Earth ◽  
European Thought

This chapter examines discursive developments in twentieth-century European thought with respect to the question of the reality, metaphoricity, and exemplarity of Jewish displacement. Throughout the centuries, the Jews have been the epitome of the displaced, wandering, and exposed stranger, the rootless intruders, or an example embodying the forfeiting of fixity, dominance, and ownership associated with territorial emplacement. In modernity, Jewish exile, beyond being a theological, historical, and political issue, became a discursive theme, a literary motif, and a loaded philosophical concept. As an embodiment of discreditable rootlessness, it appears in the antisemitic depictions of the wandering, homeless outsider rejected from the nations of the earth. The chapter considers the views of European thinkers such as George Steiner, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard, Jonathan Boyarin, and Paul Celan regarding displaced Jews.

scholarly journals The Stranger as Friend: The Poetics of Friendship in Homer, Dante, and Boccaccio

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franco Masciandaro
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Natural Extension ◽  
Divine Comedy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Philosophical Method ◽  
The Divine Comedy ◽  
The One ◽  
The Stranger

The principal aim of this study is to participate in the current renewed discourse on the meaning of friendship, initiated in 1994 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida with his Politics of Friendship, by combining the philosophical method of inquiry with the hermeneutical approach to poetic representations of friendship in the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and the Decameron. It examines friendship not only as the unique love between two persons based on familiarity and proximity, but as the love for the one who is far away, the stranger, for this is a natural extension of the implicit love of the distant other, of the other-as-stranger – what Emmanuel Levinas has called "the infinity of the Other" – which is concealed in our friend, and which, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, puts us "authentically in relation" with him or her.

Subjectivity and Transcendence

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Wahl
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
The Future ◽  
Unpublished Letter ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
Raymond Aron ◽  
The One

Featuring replies and letters by Raymond Aron, Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Gabriel Marcel, and many others, Wahl’s 1937 “Subjectivity and Transcendence” should be included among the most important debates in twentieth-century European philosophy. It is essential for understanding the secularization of Kierkegaard, and it provided a crucial forum in which to discuss and shape the future of existentialism. While revealing Jaspers’s and Heidegger’s debt to Kierkegaard, Wahl at the same time worries that any attempt to provide a philosophy of the insights that stem from Kierkegaard’s life would threaten either to fall into abstraction or to harbor implicit theological presuppositions. He also sets the stage for dialogue about the nature of transcendence by developing the concepts of “transascendence” and “transdescendence.” This chapter concludes with a previously unpublished letter Wahl wrote to Heidegger in which he provides a more detailed response to Heidegger’s contribution to the debate than the one given in “Subjectivity and Transcendence.”

Great Risk for the Kingdom

2016 ◽  
pp. 236-248
Author(s):  
Mark Alan Charles Jennings
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Great Risk ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Prosperity Theology ◽  
Charismatic Christianity ◽  
Late Modern

Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity (“PCC”) has successfully navigated the challenges modernity poses to religion, growing rapidly in the twentieth century. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, neoliberalism began its ascent to its current hegemonic status. Neoliberalism reconfigures social institutions as marketized practices with a measurable ‘payoff'. PCC adapted to this challenge in the form of a “growth churches,” adopting many of the characteristics of neoliberalism. In adopting a homogenous model and method of ‘best practice' in order to facilitate growth; offering a ‘prosperity' theology that fits well with the development of human capital; and endorsing the universalization of risk through modelling “pastorpreneur” leadership, it is argued in this chapter that growth churches are a paradigmatic example of a late modern religious phenomenon accommodating neoliberalism in a largely uncritical manner. The chapter concludes with some observations that critique this association between neoliberalism and growth churches.

The Theological Mediation

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-41
Author(s):  
Richard Viladesau
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Theology Of The Cross ◽  
Reformed Tradition ◽  
Hans Urs Von Balthasar ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Reformation Theology ◽  
Late Modern

This chapter examines late modern reappropriations of the classical theology of the cross. In continuity with medieval and Reformation theology, these hold that Christ’s suffering was a divinely willed redemptive act, in vicarious satisfaction for human sin. The neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, in line with the Reformed tradition, emphasizes election and covenant. The theme of divine kenosis, found in nineteenth century German an English thinkers, is taken up into Orthodox trinitarian soteriology by the Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov, with strong attention to Patristic dogma. Hans Urs von Balthasar stresses Christ’s “descent into hell” as the central symbol of the divine entry into the lost human condition. Jürgen Moltmann sees the suffering of God as the only possible theological response to the horrors of the twentieth century, especially the Holocaust.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
East European ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Late Modern

This is a critical study of late modern ethical thought in Europe, from the French Revolution to the advent of modernism. I shall take it that ‘late modern’ ethics starts with two revolutions: the political revolution in France and the philosophical revolution of Kant. The contrast is with ‘early modern’. Another contrast is with ‘modernism’, which I shall take to refer to trends in culture, philosophy, and politics that developed in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and lasted into the twentieth century—perhaps to the sixties, or even to the collapse of East European socialism in the eighties....

“A Fall of Snow Maintains the Warmth of the Earth”

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-72
Author(s):  
Hanoch Ben-Pazi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Jewish Involvement ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract This essay attempts to shed light upon the European Jewish partnership in the second half of the twentieth century, through an analysis of the persona of the philosopher Léon Brunschvicg, one of the major teachers of Emmanuel Levinas. Beyond the inherent interest in his intellectual stature and prominence as a philosopher, our study will reveal an additional aspect of the French-Jewish partnership at the turn of the century, and will reconsider the import of assimilation—as an enabler of Jewish involvement in Western civilization. The moral and intellectual appreciation that Emmanuel Levinas had for his teacher, Léon Brunschvicg, motivated him to call for a return to Jewish cultural discourse, and to honor the role models whose Judaism found expression not through their national or religious commitments, but rather through their universal concerns.

Later Empiricism and Logical Positivism

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Logical Empiricism ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Late Modern

The empiricist approaches to mathematics discussed in this article belong to an era of philosophy which we can begin to see as a whole. It stretches from Kant's Critiques of the 1780s to the twentieth-century analytic movements which ended, broadly speaking, in the 1950s—in and largely as a result of the work of Quine. Seeing this period historically is by no means saying that its ideas are dead; it just helps in understanding the ideas. That applies to the two versions of empiricism that were most prominent in this late modern period: the radical empiricism of Mill and the “logical” empiricism associated with the Vienna Circle positivism of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Mill and the logical positivists shared the empiricist doctrine that no informative proposition is a priori.

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