Capitalism as Religion, Debt as Interface: Wearing the World as a Debt Garment

Author(s):  
Gregory J. Seigworth

Taking its lead from St. Francis of Assisi, this essay elaborates the theme of the “debt garment,” one that offers both the promise of recognition—that of one’s worldly belongingness to all other humans and nonhumans—and the threat of burdens that crush some more harshly than others, but whose weight all must carry. In a semi-secular-theological turn, the essay contends that credit/debt relationships make and unmake worlds. Threading together insights from a patchwork assemblage of sources, including M. T. Anderson’s YA novel Feed, current advancements in “wearable” technologies, St. Francis, Parrika, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari (to name but a few), the essay explores the ethological and ecological web of debt and ultimately proffers an aesthetics of debt, whereby debt becomes not merely a garment worn, but both a gesture of promise for, and a threat to, other worlds.

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Franco ◽  
Beth Mulvaney
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Édouard Glissant

Introduces some key concepts: hybridity, ‘Relation’, the relation between oral and written language, creolization, the chaos-world, multilingualism and ‘opacity’ (i.e., we do not need to understand the other in order to relate to him/her.) From now on, we can all hear the cry of the world, i.e. we are conscious of struggles in faraway places, and we live in ‘common places’ that we are learning to share. Glissant contrasts the ‘system’ with its positive alternative, the ‘trace’. Identity is recast as a relational ‘rhizome’ (cf Deleuze and Guattari), rather than a single self-sufficient ‘root’. (p.11). He stresses the importance of defending languages that are in danger of disappearing, but also discusses the virtues of translation. He describes the founding of the International Writers Parliament in Strasbourg.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-46
Author(s):  
Martin Koci

Abstract We have no other experience of God but the human experience, claims Emmanuel Falque. We – human beings – are in the world. Whatever we do, whatever we think and whatever we experience happens in the world and is mediated by the manner of the world. This also includes religious experience. Reflection on the possibility of religious experience – the experience of God – suggests that the world is interrupted by someone or something that is not of the world. The Christian worldview makes the tension explicit, which is perhaps why theology neglects the concept and fails in any proper sense to address the world. Through following the phenomenologist Jan Patočka, critiquing the theologian Johann B. Metz and exploring the theological turn in phenomenology, I will face the challenge and argue for a genuine engagement with the world as a theological problem.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-137
Author(s):  
Theresa Giorza

A public park adjacent to an inner-city preschool invites children and their teacher into new encounters with the world, literacy and themselves. The park and preschool are situated in the inner-city of Johannesburg, South Africa. In this article, the researcher performs as mutated-modest-witness of events that unfold in lively materialdiscursive encounters between children, grass, friendship, a pen, cement table, sand, sticks, the alphabet and daylight. The agential realism of Karen Barad and the nomadic thinking of Deleuze and Guattari offer ways of re-imagining ‘the child in the park’. Diffracting with repeated viewings of video clips the researcher finds that forward and reverse movement and stops in different moments throughout repeated viewings of the same video footage produces different and new ‘stories’ about the events and the children involved. Conceptions of ‘child’ as literacy learner and of researcher-as-writer mutate through this diffraction which instantiates a non-representational videography practice.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-153
Author(s):  
Stephen N. Williams

RésuméL’encyclique papale Laudato Si’ traite de questions environnementales en proposant une synthèse de la foi et de la raison. Prenant en compte la variété des réactions à cette encyclique, l’auteur vise à adopter une approche indépendante de celle-ci. Après un exposé de sa synthèse, il avance qu’elle n’est pas pleinement convaincante parce qu’elle ne prend pas suffisamment en compte les objections rationnelles qui sont opposées à la vision chrétienne de la création et de l’eschatologie. Ce défaut affaiblit l’argumentation de l’encyclique. L’auteur met aussi en question l’usage insistant, dans l’encyclique, de la personnification pour décrire le monde, et sa tendance panenthéiste. On peut estimer et vouloir prendre soin du monde naturel sans décrire la relation de Dieu au monde dans les termes de Laudate Si’. Ces critiques viennent cependant dans un contexte de chaude appréciation du contenu de l’encyclique et d’une exhortation à prendre au sérieux l’exemple personnel de François d’Assise.SummaryThe Papal Encyclical Laudato Si’ approaches environmental questions by offering a synthesis of faith and reason. Acknowledging the range of responses which Laudato Si’ has received, this article tries to adopt an independent approach to the encyclical. After describing the synthesis, it argues that it is not entirely persuasive because the encyclical does not show enough awareness of rational objections that are brought against the Christian understanding of creation and of eschatology. This weakens the argument of the encyclical on its own terms. The article also raises questions about both Laudato Si’s emphasis on personified language to describe the world and its panentheism. We can value and care for the natural world without describing the relationship of God to the world in the terms of Laudato Si’. However, these criticisms are placed in a context of warm appreciation for the encyclical and an exhortation for us to take the personal example of Francis of Assisi seriously.ZusammenfassungDie päpstliche Enzyklika Laudato Si’ befasst sich mit Umweltfragen und bietet dabei eine Synthese von Glaube und Vernunft. Der vorliegende Artikel nimmt das weite Spektrum von Antworten wahr, welche Laudato Si’ hervorgerufen hat, doch er versucht, einen unabhängigen Ansatz im Blick auf die Enzyklika zu vertreten. Nach einer Beschreibung der obigen Synthese argumentiert er, dass diese nicht gänzlich überzeugt, weil die Enzyklika die rationalen Erwiderungen nicht ausreichend wahrnimmt, die dem christlichen Verständnis von Schöpfung und Eschatologie entgegengesetzt werden. Dadurch entkräftet die Enzyklika ihre eigene Argumentation. Der Artikel wirft des weiteren Fragen auf sowohl zum Schwerpunkt, den Laudato Si‘ auf eine personifizierte Sprache legt, mit der sie die Welt beschreibt, als auch zu ihrem Panentheismus. Wir können die natürliche Welt wertschätzen und Sorge für sie tragen, ohne dass wir die Beziehung Gottes zu dieser Welt mit den Worten von Laudato Si‘ beschreiben müssen. Gleichwohl ist diese Kritik eingebettet in eine wohlwollende Wertschätzung der Enzyklika und die gleichzeitige Ermahnung an uns, das persönliche Vorbild von Franz von Assisi ernst zu nehmen.


Scriptorium ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Dhemersson Warly Santos Costa ◽  
Maria Dos Remédios De Brito

A máquina de guerra é um conceito criado pelos filósofos Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, que não tem relação com o poder bélico de um Estado, mas, sobretudo, é uma potência inventiva, imbricada em um nomadismo, capaz de fissurar as organizações da máquina estatal (sedentária), abalando suas estruturas, escapando dos sistemas dominantes, inventado linhas de fugas. O nômade, inventor da máquina de guerra, cria para si outros modos de habitar no mundo, inventa seu próprio território, vagando por trajetos indefinidos. Nesta perspectiva, a intenção desta proposta é tencionar ressonâncias entre o conceito filosófico de máquina de guerra e a literatura de Caio Fernando Abreu. Parte-se do pressuposto de que a máquina de guerra compõe o elemento (des) arranjador de toda a obra do autor, uma verdadeira máquina literária que explode em linhas de fuga por todos os lados, declarando a guerra dos sexos, dos desejos, das sexualidades, das identidades. *** The Literature of Caio Fernando Abreu as a war machine ***The war machine is a concept created by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who has nothing to do with the military power of a State, but above all, it is an inventive power, imbricated in a nomadism, capable of fissuring the organizations of the machine state (sedentary), shaking its structures, escaping from the dominant systems, invented escape lines. The nomad, inventor of the war machine, creates for himself other ways of inhabiting the world, fashions his own territory, wandering on indefinite paths. The intention of this proposal is to consider resonances between the philosophical concept of war machine and the literature of Caio Fernando Abreu. It is assumed that the war machine composes the element (dis) arranger of all the author’s work, a true literary machine that explodes in lines of escape on all sides, declaring the war of the sexes, the desires, the sexualities, identities.Keywords: war machine; Caio Fernando de Abreu; Deleuze and Guattari; literatura.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Raffety ◽  
Wesley W. Ellis

This article explores the problem of youth from the multidisciplinary viewpoints of Youth Ministry and Childhood Studies, arguing that while Youth Ministry has been limited by paradigms of developmentalism and hampered by theological essentialism, theories of childhood as a social construct and children as social actors in Childhood Studies have yet to penetrate Youth Ministry or influence society. Anticipating the potential for Youth Ministry to serve as a field for new concepts of youth, the authors posit that an ‘ethnographic turn,’ or an ethical re-orientation toward the ‘Other-ness’ of youth might allow adults to be powerfully ‘disrupted’ by God’s action in youth in the world. As such, an ‘ethnographic turn’ in Youth Ministry serves both to complement the ‘theological turn’ by providing a practical method for accessing youth experience in relationship and to critically refine Childhood Studies’ theory of child agency and failure to effect contemporary society.


2019 ◽  
pp. 182-201
Author(s):  
Alejandro de la Torre Hernández ◽  
Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre

This chapter outlines a geography of historical anarchism (between 1871 and 1918) from three main ideas in which the authors bring together interdisciplinary contributions from geography and history, with a number of theoretical postulates from Deleuze and Guattari. The first examines the symbolic geography and imaginaries regarding anarchism; the second the militant migration and the connexions between groups around the world, analysed through anarchist newspaper records; and the third covers the prior two issues by contrasting capitalism expansion with anarchism expansion.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 487-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Ivanoska-Dacikj ◽  
Urszula Stachewicz

AbstractRecent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world dramatically, posing profound challenges to our healthcare infrastructure, economic systems, social and cultural life but also to our freedom. What this pandemic made us realize so far, is that, despite the tremendous advances in medicine and pharmacy, in the initial moments, which are crucial in the containment of spreading of any pandemic, the key role is played by the non-pharmaceutical measures. These measures are the ones that bridge the time between pandemic outbreaks and the development of drugs or vaccines and are crucial for the number of human lives spared. Smart textiles and novel materials as part of the personal protective equipment (PPE) and telemedicine are crucial factors in the healthcare system. Here, we present an overview on the use of textiles in the fight against pandemics, in the past and current COVID-19, we analyze the morphology of the commonly used face masks, made of cotton and typically used polypropylene (PP). We also present the perspective that smart textiles, wearable technologies and novel materials are offering in the fight against future pandemics, mainly as part of the personal protective equipment and telemedicine.


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