Browse

Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred

Peter C. Bouteneff, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Robert Saler (eds)

Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology, cultural and media studies, and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality. Arvo Pärt: Sounding ... More

Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology, cultural and media studies, and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality. Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred focuses on the representational dimensions of Pärt’s music (including the trope of silence), writing and listening past the fact that its storied effects and affects are carried first and foremost as vibrations through air, impressing themselves on the human body. In response, this ambitiously interdisciplinary volume asks: What of sound and materiality as embodiments of the sacred, as historically specific artifacts, and as elements of creation deeply linked to the human sensorium in Pärt studies? In taking up these questions, the book “de-Platonizes” Pärt studies by demystifying the notion of a single “Pärt sound.” It offers innovative, critical analyses of the historical contexts of Pärt’s experimentation, medievalism, and diverse creative work; it re-sounds the acoustic, theological, and representational grounds of silence in Pärt’s music; it listens with critical openness to the intersections of theology, sacred texts, and spirituality in Pärt’s music; and it positions sensing, performing bodies at the center of musical experience. Building on the conventional score-, biography-, and media-based approaches, this volume reframes Pärt studies around the materiality of sound, its sacredness, and its embodied resonances within secular spaces.Less

Channeling Moroccanness: Language and the Media of Sociality

Becky L. Schulthies

What does it mean to connect as Moroccans via mass media when there is widespread feeling of communicative failure? This book approaches the question by exploring situated talk about communicative ... More

What does it mean to connect as Moroccans via mass media when there is widespread feeling of communicative failure? This book approaches the question by exploring situated talk about communicative failure, which speaks to how Moroccans seek to shape social and political relations in urban Fez. Over the last decade, laments of language and media failure in Fez have focused on communicative channels and were not just about social relations that used to be and had been lost, but also what ought to be and had yet to be realized. These channels, or mediums that connected people, ranged from objects such as devotional prayer beads and remote controls; to interactional forms such as storytelling registers, dress styles, and non-standard Arabic writing; and to media platforms like television news, Moroccan religious stations, or WhatsApp group chats. This book describes these multimodal channels and analyzes how, why, and when they moved from facilitator (intermediating connecting mechanism) to meddler (mediating sociality actor). Laments about communicative channel failures precipitated relationality projects by the state and several Fassi calibrations of those efforts. These laments were ways of speaking that created Moroccanness, the feeling of participating in the ongoing formations of Moroccan public relationality. Rather than furthering the discourse about Morocco’s conflict between liberal secularists and religious conservatives, this ethnography shows the subtle range of ideologies and practices evoked in Fassi homes to calibrate appropriate Moroccan sociality and political consciousness.Less

Critique of Journalistic Reason: Philosophy and the Time of the Newspaper

Tom Vandeputte

This book examines an encounter recurring throughout the modern philosophical tradition: that between philosophy and journalism. It focuses on the images of reporters and newspaper readers, ... More

This book examines an encounter recurring throughout the modern philosophical tradition: that between philosophy and journalism. It focuses on the images of reporters and newspaper readers, messengers and town criers, and announcements and rumors punctuating the work of three thinkers who understood themselves to be writing at the limits of this tradition: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin. As this book argues, the preoccupation with journalism of these three thinkers cannot be separated from their philosophy “proper” but plays a pivotal role in their philosophical work, where it marks the nexus between their theories of history, time, and language. Journalism, for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin alike, figures before anything else as a cipher of the time in which they understood themselves to be writing. If the journalist and newspaper reader characterize what Kierkegaard calls “the present age,” it does so by marking it as a present marked by the crisis of the philosophy of history. But journalism does not simply mark the end of history as a philosophizable concept; for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, journalism takes on an exemplary role in the attempt to think time and history in the wake of this demise. As this book shows, the concepts around which these attempts crystallize—Kierkegaard’s “instant” (Øieblik), Nietzsche’s “untimeliness” (das Unzeitgemäße), Benjamin’s “actuality” (Aktualität)—all emerge from the philosophical confrontation with journalism and its characteristic temporalities.Less

Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, With a New Introduction

Jacques Derrida

John D. Caputo (ed.)

This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to ... More

This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to questions put to him at a roundtable held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, community, and the messianic. Derrida refutes the charges of relativism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics and sets forth the profoundly affirmative and ethico-political thrust of his work. The roundtable is marked by an unusual clarity that continues into the second part of the book, in which one of Derrida's most influential readers elaborates upon Derrida's comments and supplies material for further discussion. The new Introduction discusses the original context of the book and traces the development of deconstruction since Derrida's death in 2004, from the rise of new materialisms to return to religion. Long one of the most lucid and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language, and an ideal volume for students, the book will also prove illuminating for those already familiar with Derrida's work.Less

Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality

Genevieve Yue

For decades, feminist film analysis has been focused on issues of representation: images of women in film. But what are the feminist implications of the material object underlying that image, the ... More

For decades, feminist film analysis has been focused on issues of representation: images of women in film. But what are the feminist implications of the material object underlying that image, the filmstrip itself? What does feminist analysis have to offer in understanding the film image before it enters the realm of representation? In Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, Genevieve Yue explores how gender and sexual difference have been deeply embedded within film materiality. Though the industrial practices she examines are typically hidden from view, they are no less gendered than the images projected onscreen. In rich archival and technical detail, Yue examines three sites of technical film production: the film laboratory, editing practices, and the film archive. Within each site, she locates a common motif, the vanishing female body, which is transformed into material to be used in the making of a film. Yue develops a theory of gender and film materiality through readings of narrative film, early cinema, experimental film, and moving image art. In this original work of feminist media history, Girl Head shows how gender has had a surprising and persistent role in film production processes, well before the image ever appears onscreen.Less

Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State

Gareth Williams

This book clears a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. It considers globalization as a new, and increasingly unmoored, ... More

This book clears a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. It considers globalization as a new, and increasingly unmoored, ordering for which modern political theory, including its theories of political subjectivation, has proven largely obsolete. Globalization is the hollowing out and expiration of the political-theological imagination of the modern juridical system of states. In this regard Infrapolitical Passages provides (1) a theory of globalization as a crisis of symbolic organization and (2) a theory of global economic warfare as the positing itself of both directionlessness and facticity. In contrast, the work of clearing proposes “infrapolitics” as a distance from the biopolitical, which it understands as the contemporary forms of domination, that is, as the production of specific forms of subjectivity that pertain to the age of the ontology of the commodity. It is the relation of the subject to domination—and the subsequent obscuring of any question for being—that signals the need to circumvent the instrumentalization of life as a relation of subordination to the metaphysics of subjectivity, representation, and politics.Less

Passing Orders: Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare

S. Jonathon O'Donnell

Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis of evangelical “spiritual warfare” ... More

Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis of evangelical “spiritual warfare” demonologies in contemporary America, which envision the world as built on a clash of divine and demonic forces in which humanity is enmeshed. Situating spiritual warfare in the context of American exceptionalism, ethnonationalism, and empire-management, it exposes the theological foundations that justify the dehumanizing practices of the current US political order—queer- and transphobia, Islamophobia, antiblackness, and settler colonialism. The book argues that demonologies are not merely tools of dehumanization but ontological and biopolitical systems that create and maintain structures of sovereign power, or orthotaxies: models of the “right ordering” of reality that create uneven geographies of space and stratify humanity into hierarchies of being and nonbeing. Demonologies constitute and consolidate these geographies and stratifications by enabling the framing of other orders as passing orders—as counterfeit, transgressive, and transient. But these orders are unwilling to pass on, instead giving structure to deviant desires that resist sovereign power. Demonstrating these structures of resistance in demonologies of three figures—the Jezebel spirit, the Islamic Antichrist, and Leviathan—Passing Orders explores how demons exceed their designated role as self-consolidating others to embody alternative possibilities that unsettle orthotaxic claims over territory, time, and truth. Ultimately, it reimagines demons as a surprising source of political and social resistance, reflecting fragile and fractious communities bound by mutual passing and precarity into strategic coalitions of solidarity, subversion, and survival.Less

Preaching with Their Lives: Dominicans on Mission in the United States after 1850

Margaret M. McGuinness and Jeffrey M. Burns (eds)

This volume tells the little-known story of the Dominican Family—priests, sisters, brothers, contemplative nuns, and lay people—and integrates it into the history of the United States. Starting after ... More

This volume tells the little-known story of the Dominican Family—priests, sisters, brothers, contemplative nuns, and lay people—and integrates it into the history of the United States. Starting after the Civil War, the book takes a thematic approach through twelve essays examining Dominican contributions to the making of the modern United States by exploring parish ministry, preaching, health care, education, social and economic justice, liturgical renewal and the arts, missionary outreach and contemplative prayer, ongoing internal formation and renewal, and models of sanctity. It charts the effects of the United States on Dominican life as well as the Dominican contribution to the larger U.S. history. When the country was engulfed by wave after wave of immigrants and cities experienced unchecked growth, Dominicans provided educational institutions; community, social, and religious centers; and health care and social services. When epidemic disease hit various locales, Dominicans responded with nursing care and spiritual sustenance. As the United States became more complex and social inequities appeared, Dominicans cried out for social and economic justice. Amidst the ugliness and social dislocation of modern society, Dominicans offered beauty through the liturgical arts, the fine arts, music, drama, and film, all designed to enrich the culture. Through it all, the Dominicans cultivated their own identity as well, undergoing regular self-examination and renewal.Less

Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan

Marc Redfield

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European ... More

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement, monitoring and quarantining of populations within a global regime of technics, Paul Celan’s subtle yet fierce reorientation of shibboleth merits scrupulous reading. Building on Jacques Derrida’s Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, but following its own itinerary, this book interprets the episode in Judges together with texts by Celan, passages from William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!, and Doris Salcedo’s 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern, pursuing the track of a word to which no language can properly lay claim—a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and the ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent role in the Biblical story, offers Celan a locus of poetico-political affirmation.Less

Theory for Beginners: Children's Literature as Critical Thought

Kenneth B. Kidd

Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children’s literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. After ... More

Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children’s literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. After centuries of ignoring the child, some philosophy now considers the child an exemplary practitioner as well as subject. This attitude drives the Philosophy for Children or P4C movement, which got its start in the United States in the early 1970s and has since spread to other countries and continents. P4C has affirmed children’s literature as important philosophical work. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in some children’s classics and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children’s literature. After examining the P4C movement, the book turns its attention to theory for beginners and especially in the form of illustrated or graphic guides. These guides emerged from the anticolonial and Marxist work of Mexican activist and author-illustrator Eduardo del Rio, aka Rius. Rius’ Cuba Para Principiantes, or Cuba for Beginners (1970), kicked off the Beginners graphic series, emphasizing the self-teaching of political-critical awareness. The genre gradually went mainstream, losing the political edge. If philosophy is for children, and theory is for beginners, then children’s literature might also be described as a literature for minors. The third and final chapter pursues that idea, proposing more specifically that children’s and young adult literature can sometimes function as queer theory for kids.Less

Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning

Michael L. Raposa

This book is an attempt to adapt some of Peirce’s ideas, particularly his theory of semiotic, for the purpose of re-thinking certain issues in contemporary philosophical theology and the philosophy ... More

This book is an attempt to adapt some of Peirce’s ideas, particularly his theory of semiotic, for the purpose of re-thinking certain issues in contemporary philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. It begins with an historical sketch that links Peirce’s thought to that of earlier figures, certain contemporaries, and later thinkers and developments. Drawing on Peirce’s thought, the book then develops a semiotic conception of persons/selves and of community. It analyzes in some detail the role that acts of attention play in shaping human inferences and perception, while also exploring the relationship between attention, volition, and love. Its central Peircean presuppositions are that all human experience takes the form of semiosis and that the universe is “pefused” with signs. Theology is portrayed here in its manifestations as inquiry, therapy, and praxis. The book dramatically closes the gap between what would typically be recognized as the nature and purpose of a philosophical theology and a theology of the spiritual life. It draws on both Peirce’s logic of vagueness and his logic of relations to make sense out of how we talk about the nature and reality of God, and also about the relationship between different religious communities. Theosemiotic is portrayed here as a form of religious naturalism, broadly conceived. The book also argues that there is a natural affinity between a theosemiotic inspired by Peirce’s pragmatism and liberation theology.Less

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics

J. Daniel Elam

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead ... More

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead inexpertise, unknowing, unintelligibility, and collective unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success. This book shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, this book foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of four thinkers, Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way of rather to disavow mastery and expertise altogether. Reading was antiauthoritarian precisely because it urged readers to refuse authorship and, relatedly, authority. To become or remain a reader, and divest oneself of authorial claims, was to challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics.Less