From Searching for Cultural Integrity to Symbolism of Temple Building and the Organic Picture of Reality

The article is focused mainly on aesthetic-philosophical constants of the work of art of Julius Zeyer. The author of the article tries to point out that Zeyer´s conception of art is tightly connected with artistic conceptions of the rising literary symbolistic generation: His aesthetic-philosophical system contains strong protest against rationalism, realism and naturalism in contemporary literature and underlines the way to subconscious roots of human existence; it turns away from rational understanding of the world and the mystical intuition of inner and organic life in modern literature. In the article the motifs of temple building and motifs of creating the organic picture of the world in Zeyer´s work of art are analysed. The article also contains main references to Zeyer´s work of art published by reputable names of the Czech and European literary criticism.

The Biography of the Earth

The way the planet has changed through geologic time, and life on it, the account of the Earth, is the topic of this and the next three chapters, starting in this chapter with the Precambrian Supereon. The overarching principles of geologic time, plate tectonics, and evolution worked dynamically to create the biography of the planet. This chapter traces back to the recesses of the geologic record and early Earth, from its birth and the formation of the Moon through seven-eighths of its existence, a huge span of time. Early life forms emerged during this supereon in the Archean Eon and had a profound influence on other Earth systems. Life interacted and changed the chemistry of the atmosphere through photosynthesis, so much so that the changes are thought to have sent planetary systems over an edge into multiple “Snowball Earth” episodes when most of the planet froze over. In addition to the beginning of organic life and climate, the emergence and configuration of the continents during the Precambrian are covered. Events of this supereon set the stage for the burgeoning of life forms in the next eon, the Phanerozoic.

The Life Strike

This article examines the forms of disobedience practiced by migrants at the European border to circumvent biotechnological modes of surveillance and identification, which are rooted in involuntary movements that can be used as evidence against migrants. What actually happens when bodily growth, heart rate, respiration, and body heat are integrated into technologies for the detection of life with a view to their measurement (biometrics) and the constitution of a database needed for border surveillance? What happens when life is turned against itself? How to disobey when the involuntary dimensions of the body—not only one's appearance but the body's very organicity and biochemistry—become the sites of a surveillance from which one can only escape by holding one's breath or burning one's fingerprints? This essay asks how the emerging tactics of migrants seek to escape their interior, organic lives, and identifies the “life strike” as a form of thanato-mimesis that consists in playing dead and limiting what in organic life is recognizable as such in order to go unnoticed and to interrupt racial interpellations.

Nature, Freedom, History

Post-Kantian philosophers historicize the world soul, reconceiving it as an implicitly rational, progressive, yet impersonal agency, at work throughout nature as a formative principle, more especially, however, in the progressive liberation and self-determination of spirit in human history. This chapter outlines the concept’s career in the thought of Kant, Maimon, Schelling, and Hegel, focusing especially on the overlapping functions they accord to the world soul. On the one side, it serves to mediate within nature between the opposing spheres of mechanism and organic life; on the other, between those of unconscious currents of historical development and self-consciously free human action. In thus tasking the world soul with mediating between nature and the history of human freedom, German idealists are faithful to their Platonic source of inspiration, even as they refashion the concept in a distinctively modern, post-Enlightenment spirit.

The Origin and Evolution of life

This article is intended to provide definitions of the organic life form in absolute-geometric terms

Self and Dignity: The Spirituality of Survival

This paper examines the nature of spirit and spirituality as organic response to threat in the context of a global pandemic. Drawing from the fields of neuroscience, philosophy and theology, the author defines spirit as the biological capacity of a living organism to maintain homeostasis in response to changes in its environment. The capacity of individual human organisms to respond to changes that are perceived as threats to homeostasis with passive and active power is posited as a spirituality that is crucial for the survival of the human species. The paper represents a form of secular spirituality that is synonymous with the natural power of organic life.

Ameen F. Rihani's 'Biophilic Masculinity' in The Heart of Lebanon and The Rihani Essays

Now that we have reached the third millennium, an era associated with the onslaught of modernity, technology, industrialization and urbanization, it is time for our relationship with nature to undergo an ecological evolution through which a conservationist masculinity can develop. In this respect, it is particularly essential that literature provide a genuine modernized perspective, a biocentric understanding oriented towards a biophilic attachment to nature that centers on the affirmation of universal kinship based on the connection to all organic life. The cornerstone of the biophilia notion is a balanced man-nature relationship which is still undervalued in the realm of green literature. In this perspective, it is worth highlighting Ameen Fares Rihani’s edifying contribution to the realm of deep ecology. The works of this Lebanese-American writer and thinker have not been given sufficient attention when his prosaic oeuvre effectively reflects man’s regrettable alienation from the natural environment. In a sense, Rihani’s prose with its biophilic inclination is a crucial addition to the body of works concerned with restoring the gap between nature and mankind. This paper, therefore, attempts to study Rihani's approach to living nature from the perspective of evolutionary biology by shedding light on an unexplored aspect, namely his essentially biophilic conviction evident in his landmark book Qualb Lubnan (The Heart of Lebanon) and in Ar-Rihaniyyaat (The Rihani Essays). These works will be analyzed from a literary ecocritical perspective and against ecological masculinity which is the most recent interpretive paradigm of ecocriticism. This reading will also profess that Rihani's intention is to ecologize modern masculinity, Eastern and/or Western masculine thought, through re-designing an alternative future, a deep green future founded upon the biophilia hypothesis.

BECOMING THE POSTHUMAN: THE DESTABILISATION OF THE SUBJECT IN THOMAS GLAVINIC’S NIGHT WORK

The paper provides an insight into the destabilisation of the subject and the emergence of the posthuman condition in the novel Night Work (Die Arbeit der Nacht, 2006) by Austrian writer Thomas Glavinic. The first part briefly discusses previous analyses of the novel and the definitions of posthumanism as an umbrella term for a heterogeneous theory dedicated to the questions of what follows after the re-consideration of the humanist ideals and after decentring the human. The posthuman is interpreted as non-fixed, in the state of constant reconstruction as opposed to the humanist subject’s fixedness and integrity. The analysis examines the ‘uncanny’ setting of the novel and the power of survival in the face of death, which becomes the protagonist’s point of demise and divergence from consciousness and rationality. The urban environment devoid of all organic life replaces the Other applied traditionally to other humans. The Sleeper as the nightly doppelgänger and the filming of the environment further add to the transgression of the boundaries between material and immaterial, the living and the non-living, the real and the dreamlike/artificial, and ultimately determine the protagonist’s posthuman existence in the state of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’.