The Death Drive

2019 ◽  
pp. 56-85
Author(s):  
Marika Rose
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
The Social ◽  
Union With God

This chapter examines Žižek’s account of the relation between desire and the death drive and gives an account of the ways in which this central Žižekian notion is ontologized and how this model inherits and transforms certain key theological terms, offering resources not for escaping but for confronting the antagonisms of Christian theology. It traces the key notion of the death drive through Freud, Lacan, and Žižek, examining how Žižek takes up this psychoanalytic notion to give an account of the social order. In contrast to Dionysius’s Neoplatonic account of eros and ontology, Žižek’s materialist ontology of failure is one in which both desire and being are irreducibly particular and contingent. It is precisely out of the cracks in being that unity is impossible, out of the failure of every identity that newness is generated. Division is a good in itself, not merely something to be undone in order to return to union with God; and the desire for union is itself a false and unrealizable dream.

scholarly journals The Common Good As A Social Debt and Patrimony of the Person

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Ilboudo SJ
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual

Aristotle’s statement that the individual human being is a social or a political animal can be misguiding if we understand it as meaning that relationships between the individual and the society are natural and obvious. Individual’s dream of autonomy and ruthless struggle to access to scarce resources on one hand and liberal and competitive societies where there is no room for “lame ducks” on the other hand, can make relationships between the person and the society conflicting and violent. The consequences can be marginalization from the social order or rebellion against it.How can we strive to make person-society relationships more integrative and fecund? In other words, what skills, social ethics as a field of Christian theology and Catholic tradition does provide for the social integration of the person and the awakening of his or her social responsibility?  This paper would like to suggest and defend that the concept of the common good is a common ground for the person and the society mutual flourishing. The paragraph 26 of Gaudium et Spes defines the common good as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.” Interestingly also, Laudato Si’ builds up on the common good and defines it as “belonging to all and meant for all.” (Paragraph 23) In a more complex way, Thomas Aquinas elaborates the common good and locates it at the junction of distributive justice and piety as one’s love of his or her country. In the light of his thought, the common good as a dynamic interaction between the person and the society, becomes the cement of what Thomas Aquinas calls “civil communion.”

Bleeding women and theology from below

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-36
Author(s):  
Alease Brown
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Social Order ◽  
First Century ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Physical Force ◽  
The Social ◽  
African Student ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Student Protest Movement

Dishonour is heaped upon dishonour for those who have been deprived of material conditions for life, often due to historical legacies of racialized inequality and oppression. Rather than villainizing those engaged in protests that produce disorder and defacement, identifying and articulating the sacredness of seemingly profane aspects of such contemporary movements is a singular and imperative task of Christian theology today. Through a close reading of the narrative of the bleeding woman in Mark’s Gospel, this essay argues that the South African student protest movement of 2015-2016, which included regular eruptions of destructive physical force, is an example of activism that represents the Gospel’s injunctions towards the securing of dignity by the marginalized unheard and unhelped. First, the essay will discuss the milieu of honour/shame which pervaded the first-century Palestinian context of the Gospels. Following this, the essay undertakes a close reading of the biblical narrative of the bleeding woman in Mark’s Gospel. It will be demonstrated that the woman’s intentional transgression of the social order resulted in her approbation by Jesus.

scholarly journals Fat, Queer, Dead: ‘Obesity’ and the Death Drive

Somatechnics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Ray White
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Fat Studies ◽  
Public Health Campaign ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Health Campaign ◽  
Obesity Epidemic ◽  
The Social ◽  
Potential Alternative ◽  
The Uk

That contemporary discourses of the ‘obesity epidemic’ are engaged in the construction of fatness as pathological, immoral and socially undesirable has been the subject much recent critical inquiry within Fat Studies. This paper contributes to that literature with a re-reading of obesity discourse via what queer theorist Lee Edelman (2004) has called ‘reproductive futurism’. Edelman contends that queerness figures the social order's death drive, and is thus abjected in order to assure the reproduction of that social order. This paper argues that, like the queer, fatness is increasingly being figured as anti-social and as that which must be eliminated in the name of a viable future. Framing obesity in this way makes possible an analysis of the presumed ‘threat’ of obesity, frequently referred to, but seldom unpacked, in the existing literature. A comparative analysis of the UK government's Change 4 Life (2009) public health campaign and nineteenth century theories of degeneracy is used to illustrate the cultural anxieties about immorality, disease, civilization and death that undergird both discourses. This analysis suggests the centrality of rationality and self-control, understood as moral, to the reproduction of the social order. Furthermore, reading the ‘obesity epidemic’ as couched in the logic of reproductive futurism opens up potential alternative approaches to fat politics. In the light of Samantha Murray's (2008) critique of the liberal humanist underpinnings of fat activist discourse, this paper considers whether Edelman's advocacy of ‘future-negating’ for queers, offers a productive trajectory for fat politics.

The Social Order Yields to Functional Analysis

1958 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 158-160
Author(s):  
LAWRENCE SCHLESINGER
Keyword(s):  
Functional Analysis ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Social

Sex and the Social Order.

1946 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgene H. Seward
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
The Social

George Hoggart Toulmin: politics and geology

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-481
Author(s):  
ROY PORTER
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Great Distance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Christian View ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
History Of

The physician George Hoggart Toulmin (1754–1817) propounded his theory of the Earth in a number of works beginning with The antiquity and duration of the world (1780) and ending with his The eternity of the universe (1789). It bore many resemblances to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" (1788) in stressing the uniformity of Nature, the gradual destruction and recreation of the continents and the unfathomable age of the Earth. In Toulmin's view, the progress of the proper theory of the Earth and of political advancement were inseparable from each other. For he analysed the commonly accepted geological ideas of his day (which postulated that the Earth had been created at no great distance of time by God; that God had intervened in Earth history on occasions like the Deluge to punish man; and that all Nature had been fabricated by God to serve man) and argued they were symptomatic of a society trapped in ignorance and superstition, and held down by priestcraft and political tyranny. In this respect he shared the outlook of the more radical figures of the French Enlightenment such as Helvétius and the Baron d'Holbach. He believed that the advance of freedom and knowledge would bring about improved understanding of the history and nature of the Earth, as a consequence of which Man would better understand the terms of his own existence, and learn to live in peace, harmony and civilization. Yet Toulmin's hopes were tempered by his naturalistic view of the history of the Earth and of Man. For Time destroyed everything — continents and civilizations. The fundamental law of things was cyclicality not progress. This latent political conservatism and pessimism became explicit in Toulmin's volume of verse, Illustration of affection, published posthumously in 1819. In those poems he signalled his disapproval of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic imperialism. He now argued that all was for the best in the social order, and he abandoned his own earlier atheistic religious radicalism, now subscribing to a more Christian view of God. Toulmin's earlier geological views had run into considerable opposition from orthodox religious elements. They were largely ignored by the geological community in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, but were revived and reprinted by lower class radicals such as Richard Carlile. This paper is to be published in the American journal, The Journal for the History of Ideas in 1978 (in press).

Issues of non-standard employment: social and hygienic aspects

2020 ◽  
pp. 392-398
Author(s):  
S. A. Druzhilov
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Precarious Employment ◽  
Employment Conditions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Labor Safety ◽  
Typical Model

Drastic transformations of the social and labor sphere have led to the emergence of new health risks and sanitary and hygienic problems associated with unreliability of employment. A new socio-economic and psychological phenomenon “precarity” has emerged, which has aff ected the employment conditions of employees, so the description of the phenomenon “precarity” needs to be clarifi ed.The forms of labor employment that diff er from the typical model and worsen the employee’s situation are considered. The criteria based on which non-standard employment is considered unstable are given.Generalized types of unstable employment are identifi ed, the specifi city of which is determined by a combination of two factors: working time and the term of the contract. Unstable working conditions are possible not only in informal employment, but also in legal labor relations. Unreliability and instability of labor has an objective character and is a natural manifestation of the emerging economic and social order. The phenomenon of “precarity of employment” appears as a new determinant of the health of employees. The main feature when referring employment and labor relations to the phenomenon of “precarity” is their unreliability.Specifies the terms used: “precariat”; “precarious work”; precompact; the precariat. An essential characteristic of precarious employment is the violation of social and labor rights and lack of job security. A significant indicator of precarity is underemployment. Precarity induces the potential danger of dismissal of the employee and the resulting stress, psychosomatic disorders and pathological processes in the psyche.Precarious employment and related labor relations have become widespread. Many employees are deprived of social guarantees, including those related to labor safety, payment for holidays and temporary disability, and provision of preventive measures. Th is leads to a violation of the state of well-being, as well as the deterioration of individual and public health.

Richard Mackenney, Venice as the Polity of Mercy: Guilds, Confraternities, and the Social Order, c. 1250–c. 1650. Toronto Italian Studies. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2019, xiii, 471.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 551-552
Author(s):  
Thomas Willard
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
Italian Studies ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social ◽  
University Town ◽  
The University

Shakespeare is well known to have set two of his plays in and around Venice: The Merchant of Venice (1596) and The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1603). The first is often remembered for its famous speech about “the quality of mercy,” delivered by the female lead Portia in the disguise of a legal scholar from the university town of Padua. The speech helps to spare the life of her new husband’s friend and financial backer against the claims of the Jewish moneylender Shylock. The play has raised questions for Shakespearean scholars about the choice of Venice as an open city where merchants of all nations and faiths would meet on the Rialto while the city’s Senate, composed of leading merchants, worked hard to keep it open to all and especially profitable for its merchants. Those who would like to learn more about the city’s development as a center of trade can learn much from Richard Mackenney’s new book.

Conclusion: Rethinking Punishment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didier Fassin
Keyword(s):  
Social Inequality ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ideal Language ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Ideal

If punishment is not what we say it is, if it is not justified by the reasons we invoke, if it facilitates repeat offenses instead of preventing them, if it punishes in excess of the seriousness of the act, if it sanctions according to the status of the offender rather than to the gravity of the offense, if it targets social groups defined beforehand as punishable, and if it contributes to producing and reproducing disparities, then does it not itself precisely undermine the social order? And must we not start to rethink punishment, not only in the ideal language of philosophy and law but also in the uncomfortable reality of social inequality and political violence?

An Ancient Dream Manual

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Thonemann
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Dream Interpretation ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Road Map ◽  
The Social ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Life Career

Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica (‘The Interpretation of Dreams’) is the only dream-book which has been preserved from Graeco-Roman antiquity. Composed around AD 200, it is a treatise and manual on dreams, their classification, and the various analytical tools which should be applied to their interpretation. Artemidorus travelled widely through Greece, Asia, and Italy to collect people’s dreams and record their outcomes, in the process casting a vivid light on social mores and religious beliefs in the Severan age. This book aims to provide the non-specialist reader with a readable and engaging road-map to this vast and complex text. It offers a detailed analysis of Artemidorus’ theory of dreams and the social function of ancient dream-interpretation; it also aims to help the reader to understand the ways in which Artemidorus might be of interest to the cultural or social historian of the Graeco-Roman world. The book includes chapters on Artemidorus’ life, career, and worldview; his conceptions of the human body, sexuality, the natural world, and the gods; his attitudes towards Rome, the contemporary Greek polis, and the social order; and his knowledge of Greek literature, myth and history. The book is intended to serve as a companion to the new translation of The Interpretation of Dreams by Martin Hammond, published simultaneously with this volume in the Oxford World’s Classics series.

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