Abhorrent Bodies

2021 ◽  
pp. 78-105
Author(s):  
Paul R. Mullins

Chapter 4 illuminates the way the bodies of history’s most abhorrent characters fuel a broad range of contemporary politics. The corpse is the highest form of relic, a material thing that invokes the power of the dead person and is perceived as an active presence representing distinct values and memory. The bodies of reviled historical figures have often been effaced in an effort to defuse their capacity to foster, amplify, or reproduce unsettling or unacceptable politics, yet the burials of many people linked to abhorrent causes have become dynamic politicized landscapes.

Author(s):  
Don Herzog
Keyword(s):  
Tort Law ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Law ◽  

If you defame the dead, even someone who recently died, tort law does not think that’s an injury: not to the grieving survivors and not to the dead person. This book argues that defamation is an injury to the recently dead. It explores history, including the shaping of the common law, and offers an account of posthumous harm and wrong. Along the way, it offers a sustained exploration of how we and the law think about corpse desecration.


Author(s):  
Robert Wiśniewski

Christians always admired and venerated martyrs who died for their faith, but for a long time thought that the bodies of martyrs should remain undisturbed in their graves. Initially, the Christian attitude toward the bones of the dead, whether a saint’s or not, was that of respectful distance. This book tells how, in the mid-fourth century, this attitude started to change, swiftly and dramatically. The first chapters show the rise of new beliefs. They study how, when, and why Christians began to believe in the power of relics, first, over demons, then over physical diseases and enemies; how they sought to reveal hidden knowledge at the tombs of saints and why they buried the dead close to them. An essential element of this new belief was a strong conviction that the power of relics was transferred in a physical way and so subsequent chapters study relics as material objects. The book seeks to show what the contact with relics looked like and how close it was. Did people touch, kiss, or look at the very bones, or just at reliquaries which contained them? When did the custom of dividing relics appear? Finally, the book deals with discussions and polemics concerning relics and tries to find out how strong was the opposition which this new phenomenon had to face, both within and outside Christianity on the way to relics becoming an essential element of medieval religiosity.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison

AbstractNoting Heidegger’s critique of Kierkegaard’s way of relating time and eternity, the paper offers an alternative reading of Kierkegaard that suggests Heidegger has overlooked crucial elements in the Kierkegaardian account. Gabriel Marcel and Sharon Krishek are used to counter Heidegger’s minimizing of the deaths of others and to show how the deaths of others may become integral to our sense of self. This prepares the way for revisiting Kierkegaard’s discourse on the work of love in remembering the dead. Against the criticism that this reveals the absence of the other in Kierkegaardian love, the paper argues that, on the contrary, it shows how Kierkegaard conceives the self as inseparable from the core relationships of love that, despite of death, constitute it as the self that it is.


2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-134
Author(s):  
Angelika Moskal

Abstract: The shaman figure is most often associated with primitive communities, inhabiting, among others Siberia. The shaman plays one of the most important roles in them - he is an intermediary between the world of people and the world of spirits. Responds to, among others for the safe passage of souls to the other side and protects her from evil spirits. However, is there room for representatives of this institution in contemporary Polish popular literature? How would they find themselves in the 21st century? The article aims to show the interpretation of the shaman on the example of Ida Brzezińska, the heroine of the books of Martyna Raduchowska. I intend to introduce the role and functions of the „shaman from the dead”, juxtaposing the way Ida works (including reading sleepy margins from a rather unusual dream catcher, carrying out souls and the consequences that await in the event of failure or making contact with the dead) with the methods described by scholars shamans. The purpose of the work is to show how much Raduchowska tried to adapt shamanism in her work by modernizing it, and how many elements she added from herself to make the story more attractive.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 119-126
Author(s):  
Hadeel EJMAIL

Death is one of the most difficult topics a person can talk about. The human being is busy with how to continue his life and improve its conditions. This study aims is to explore the writing of Facebook pages of the dead. The research used the qualitative approach through a content analysis, where (50) publications were found on fifteen pages of a dead person with an intentional sample, and the results of the research showed that writing people in the pages of the dead included two directions, the first direction is a desire to immortalize the dead and a kind of preserving their roots Alive. As for the other direction, it was weeping over their ruins and showing the end of a person's death and his end life. Sometimes in the same post include both directions together, meaning "the use of the deceased’s account by his family by changing the profile picture of the dead, and at the same time inviting the deceased’s friends through his page to the memorial event. People write on the pages of the dead in order to weep over their ruins on the one hand, and to immortalize their memories on the other side. Facebook as a social platform and the interaction of people with the pages of the dead shows the great social interaction that takes place in this space, and research in this field is not consistent with one and only claim, as some posts are either temporary or permanent; Therefore, I have used screen capture technology to collect and retain information. The pages of the dead included referring to them, writing memorials and longing, etc. Facebook has become a social platform that allows those who lose a dear person to share their grief through it, and enables them to deal with death and relieve their pain


Author(s):  
Nancy J. Hirschmann

The topic of feminism within the history of political philosophy and political theory might seem to be quite ambiguous. Feminists interested in the history of political philosophy did not urge the abandonment of the canon at all, but were instead protesting the way in which political philosophy was studied. They thus advocated “opening up” the canon, rather than its abolishment. There have been at least five ways in which this “opening” of the canon has been developed by feminists in the history of political philosophy. All of them do not only demonstrate that the history of political philosophy is important to feminism; they also demonstrate that feminism is important to the history of political philosophy. A two-tiered structure of freedom, with some conceptualizations of freedom designated for men and the wealthy, and other conceptualizations designated for laborers and women, shows that class and gender were important dimensions to be explored when examining the history of political philosophy. One way in which feminism has opened up the canon is its relevance to contemporary politics.


Author(s):  
Abigail Williams

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book offered a series of vignettes of reading lives and practices. It presented a cluster of historical figures and a range of historical books, and used them to try to reconstruct what literature has meant and what it has been used for. It showed that the way in which people used the books they read are closely bound up with other aspects of amateur, domestic culture. This book also showed that anxieties about forms of reading are not new. Eighteenth-century commentators worried about learning bought too easily and readers who could no longer engage with whole texts. Families encouraged reading together because they feared that young people were losing their sense of reality through their immersion in addictive imaginative fictions. The world of eighteenth-century reading was a very different land, but in some ways, perhaps not so far from our own as we like to think.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-783
Author(s):  
Dragana Frfulanović-Šomođi ◽  
Milena Savić

The design of socialist Yugoslavia received a particularly new look through the creation of Aleksandar Joksimović, which gave the new elements a traditional look, equally putting them in rank with world-famous designs of celebrated designers. This paper was created with the idea of emphasizing the importance of the creativity of Joksimović, which is within the framework of socialist norms, as an artist, remained insufficiently recognized, although his work was in the service of exclusive promotion of the cultural aspects of his country. His concept of design based on the medieval cultural tradition emerged from the framework of the then socialist clothes, and it is called grandiose exoticism. The names of the first collections given by the historical figures of medieval Serbian history are a clear indication that it is possible to draw inspiration from the past, if it is professionally approached and adequately, by contemporary trends, the audience and the market. Joksimovic's individualism, apart from design, was also reflected in the way the collection itself was modeled through models and choreographies, and clearly once again showed his step ahead of time, while the social and political circumstances forced him to stay one step behind.


1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Morris

Since the mid-1980s, debates between competing schools of archaeological interpretation have become more theoretical and abstruse, moving away from confrontations over specific methods of analyzing our data. This article reopens arguments over one of the more controversial propositions of the New Archaeology - Saxe's claim that the emergence of formal cemeteries corresponds to the appearance of agnatic lineages monopolizing vital resources through inheritance. The hypothesis is examined in three ways: through a generalized ethnological model; through specific ethnographic data from Taiwan and Kenya; and through a historical comparison of Athens from 500 to 100 BC and Rome from 200 BC to AD 200. It is argued that all three methods lead to a similar conclusion, that many societies do indeed talk about the dead in the way the Saxe/Goldstein hypothesis maintains, but that in any specific instance the cemetery/property message may well be subverted by other arguments which the buriers are making.


PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 1377-1385
Author(s):  
Michael North

The Single Most Influential Contemporary Statement on Authorship is Still the Obituary that Roland Barthes pronounced over thirty years ago (Burke, Death 19). Partly by the stark extremity of its title, Barthes's essay “The Death of the Author” transformed New Critical distaste for the biographical into an ontological conviction about the status of language (Burke, Death 16) and in so doing made the dead author far more influential than living authors had been for some time. If authorship is now a subject of contention in the academy rather than a vulgar embarrassment, it is largely because of the way that Barthes inflated the issue in the very act of dismissing it. Though the idea that “it is language which speaks, not the author,” seems to demote the human subject (“Death” 143), it may also promote the written word, and it has been objected from the beginning, by Michel Foucault first of all, that the notion of écriture “has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity” (Foucault 120). Many later critics have agreed, and thus there have been a series of arguments, from the theoretical (Burke, Death) to the empirical (Stillinger), to the effect that the whole post-Saussurean turn exemplified by Barthes has not so much killed off the concept of the author as raised it to a higher plane of abstraction. But it may be that, approached from another angle, Barthes's essay will turn out to have its own relation to certain social and technological developments, and that these, in their turn, will help to situate the death of the author as a historical phenomenon.


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