The aim of the paper is a critical evaluation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival laughter’s theory, and along the analysis of Walter Benjamin’s notion of laughter, and its relation to modernity. While Bakhtin concentrates his attention on a few medieval festivities, this paper focuses on the “feast of fools” (festa stultorum) as a metaphor for carnival laughter. For Bakhtin, clown, joker, etc. represents Medieval and Renaissance carnival spirit, while an animated Mickey Mouse, alongside with Charlie Chaplin’s movie character, appears (...) in Benjamin’s texts as a figure of modernity. Carnival laughter can be cruel, and it was cruel indeed, participated in violence during the festivities. The same cruelty Benjamin had found in a few fairy tales collected by the Brother Grimm. How cruelty and laughter are connected? The lack of common experiences in modernity was the reason why Bakhtin wanted to find a counterbalance to modern atomistic bourgeois society, and laughter could have given it. According to Bakhtin, the spirit of carnival as a collective laughter gradually dried up and in the 16th century it has self-transformed into a novel and became a genre of grotesque realism. For Benjamin, only epic, architecture and cinematograph are able to create the collective experience. (shrink)

The following essay investigates the animating force of jester-humour and trickster-critique as necessary components of prophetic consciousness and social movement. Climate change devastation coupled with racialised socio-economic predation today faces social movement with a stark demand. The root-work necessary enjoins challenge of human presumption about the meaning of life at the most basic level. The locus from which such a depth-exploration will be elaborated here is postindustrial Detroit, on the part of a poet-activist-educator who will insist that ‘jesterism’ as ‘prophetic (...) animation’ cannot merely be ‘talked about’, but begs performance and embodiment – even in the process of writing and theorising. Indigenous wisdom and folk spirituality will supply historical perspective in asserting laughter as both antidote to trauma and tactic of critique – whether looking at traditional African practices of tricksterism reincarnate in everyday street life in Detroit, medieval Christian celebrations of the Feast of Fools subverting official Church orthodoxies in feudal Europe, or the postmodern insurgence of hip-hop beats and tags in challenging corporate gentrification and church capitulation at the emblematic heart of de-industrialisation. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Folly: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Language Games presents a dialogue between the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the author Françoise Davoine, and Davoine's patients with extreme lived experience. The book begins with Davoine's seminar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, which is attended by Wittgenstein. He then accompanies Davoine on visits to colleagues at the Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts, in California, on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota, and at Freud's house in Vienna. The dialogic form (...) of the book allows a performance centered on the psychotherapy of madness and trauma, in which Wittgenstein takes the floor. Davoine introduces us to a contemporary Feast of Fools and creates new language games with madness, enlarging the scope of psychoanalytic approaches to authors like Wittgenstein. The chapters of this book closely resemble short plays in which a conversation with living human beings or with characters from philosophy, literature, science, and the arts encounter one another and begin to open new ways of speaking that can render the "mad" more familiar and more manageable. Wittgenstein's Folly: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Language Games will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and to academics and students engaged in psychoanalytic studies, philosophy and trauma-related studies. (shrink)

Emmanuel Falque’s The Wedding Feast of the Lamb represents a turning point in his thought. Here, Falque links philosophy and theology in an original fashion that allows us to see the full effect of theology’s “backlash” against philosophy. By attending closely to the incarnation and the eucharist, Falque develops a new concept of the body and of love: By avoiding the common mistake of “angelism”—consciousness without body—Falque considers the depths to which our humanity reflects animality, or body without consciousness. (...) He shows the continued relevance of the question “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”, especially to philosophy. We need to question the meaning of “this is my body” in “a way that responds to the needs of our time”. Because of the ways that “Hoc est corpus meum” has shaped our culture and our modernity, this is a problem both for religious belief and for culture. (shrink)

Jonathan Singer's witty, erudite book is a celebration of rationality and an urgent call to make use of intelligence and reason to better cope with human problems. Emphasizing the importance of rationality's greatest achievement, modern science, Singer—one of the foremost biologists of our era—argues that for the first time in several million years humanity has at its disposal the tools for an objective understanding of the external world. Singer demonstrates that, today more than ever, the fullest exercise of rationality is (...) essential if humanity is to rein in a runaway technology and control an explosion of the human population that together threaten to devastate life on this planet within only a few more generations. The intrusion of reason and rationality into our largely irrational world has been painfully slow, uneven, and often unwelcome. Singer explains that for rationalists the founding of modern science—which took place only a few hundred years ago—has overthrown many of the myths of conventional wisdom and dogmas of traditional religions. Yet these beliefs still hold sway over the irrational world, obstructing efforts to deal sensibly with the problematic future of mankind. The core of _The Splendid Feast of Reason _is an engaging and accessible account of the knowledge that modern science provides. Singer offers an absorbing discussion of how life works, of the nature of reproduction, aging, and death, and of the necessary fragility of the individual life compared to the resilience of life itself. He emphasizes the primary role of the genes in determining the structural organization and the behaviors of living things, including humans. He also stresses the nature and mechanisms of biological evolution, mechanisms that have now been placed in jeopardy because of human ignorance and irrational appetites. Finally, Singer delves into the enigma of the real world with its irrational and chaotic operations and offers suggestions of how a rationalist can not only survive, but thrive in it. (shrink)

Using the guise of a simple supper of commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of a charismatic Protestant pastor, who had gathered around him a community of devoted disciples in a small village in Norway, Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen shows us a banquet in which, through the food prepared with the eye of an artist, the senses are awakened for the first time to a kind of experience where what is corporal and what is spiritual cease (...) to be at odds with each other. Thus, a reconciliation of a lost unity between the body and the soul, matter and spirit, is celebrated and achieved. From this first step, with which the fundamental internal fragmentation is overcome, the other levels of unity (unity with others, with the cosmos, and with God) occur in a chain sequence, so to speak. As in all religious situations, there occurs here the coming together of two orders that seem unreconciliable: the temporal and the eternal, the limited and the infinite, the profane and the sacred. The mediator between both orders is Babette, who takes on a genuine sacerdotal function. However, there is an unexpected inversion, and paradoxically what is profane and mundane comes to the rescue of what is spiritual and sacred. (shrink)

This qualitative study was positioned within an emerging scientific field concerned with the interaction between biblical text and the psychological profile of the preacher. The theoretical framework was provided by the sensing, intuition, feeling and thinking (SIFT) approach to biblical hermeneutics, an approach rooted in reader-perspective hermeneutical theory and in Jungian psychological type theory that explores the distinctive readings of sensing perception and intuitive perception, and the distinctive readings of thinking evaluation and feeling evaluation. The empirical methodology was provided by (...) developing a research tradition concerned with applying the SIFT approach to biblical text. In the present study, a group of 17 Anglican clergy were invited to work in psychological type-alike groups to explore two of the biblical passages identified by Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary for the Feast of Christ the King. Dividing into three workshops, according to their preferences for sensing and intuition, the clergy explored Psalm 93. Dividing into three workshops, according to their preferences for thinking and feeling, the clergy explored John 18:33–37. The rich data gathered from these workshops supported the hypothesis that biblical interpretation and preaching may be shaped by the reader’s psychological type preference and suggested that the passages of scripture proposed for the Feast of Christ the King may be a joy for intuitive thinking types, but a nightmare for sensing feeling types. Contribution: Situated within the reader perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, the SIFT method is concerned with identifying the influence of the psychological type of the reader in shaping the interpretation of text. Employing this method, the present study contributes to the fields of homiletics and hermeneutics by demonstrating how some readers (sensing types) may struggle more than others (intuitive types) to interpret the scripture readings proposed by the lectionary for the Feast of Christ the King. (shrink)

In 1475, the Florentine humanist Piero Cennini sent a friend a letter in Latin, in which he described in detail both the Florentine baptistery and the yearly celebration of the feast of St John in late June. This article presents a full text and English translation of the document, with an introduction and notes. Cennini, a scribe and scholar, belonged to a distinguished family of Florentine goldsmiths, with whose members he collaborated on an edition of the commentaries of Servius (...) on Virgil. His description of the baptistery was informed by his knowledge of and pride in his family’s craft, as well as by the teachings of Leon Battista Alberti, which he had mastered. Cennini’s hybrid of craft and humanism enables him to fill his account of the celebration of St John with vivid detail, but his choice of Latin also makes it too artificial to convey the enchantment that the plays and processions, like the baptistery itself, inspired in other observers—a feature that helps to explain the author’s frustration with his remarkably vivid text. Drawing on contemporary texts and paintings, this article finally places Cennini’s vision on the spectrum between the magic of Florentine religion and its disenchantment. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe role of the image in the third part of Practice in Christianity suggests that Kierkegaard was inspired by Meister Eckhart’s and Johann Tauler’s account of detachment. I argue that Kierkegaard was not only indirectly influenced by Tauler through the works of the Pietistic writers, but also directly inspired by Tauler’s sermons. Particularly striking are similarities to a sermon that was included in the Tauler edition owned by Kierkegaard: the second sermon on the Feast of the Exaltation of the (...) Cross. A comparison of the texts shows how both Tauler and Kierkegaard criticize the mental images their contemporaries hold of Jesus Christ. Both stress the importance of existential kenosis, which they describe as Entbildung of the intellect and the will, and which is an essential part of following Christ in his abasement. Furthermore, they analyze inadequate attempts to imitate Christ in a similar manner. Even though Kierkegaard and Tauler differ with regard to the ontological implications of Entbildung, the ethical implications are the same: one should not retreat from the world, but rather turn to it with a selfless attitude. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Message to Buddhists for the Feast of Vesakh 2007:Christians and Buddhists: Educating Communities to Live in Harmony and PeacePaul Cardinal Poupard, President and Archbishop Pier Luigi Celata, SecretaryDear Buddhist Friends,1. On the occasion of the festival of Vesakh, I am writing to Buddhist communities in different parts of the world to convey my own good wishes, as well as those of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.2. We, (...) Catholics and Buddhists, enjoy a good relationship and our contacts, collaboration and implementation of diverse programmes have helped to deepen our understanding of each other. Dialogue is the sure path to fruitful interreligious relations. It deepens respect and nurtures the desire to live in harmony with others.3. The Second Vatican Council teaches that the entire human race shares a common origin and a common destiny: God, our Creator and the goal of our earthly pilgrimage. Similarly, Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2007 Message for the World Day of Peace, observed: "As one created in the image of God, each individual human being has the dignity of a person; he or she is not just something, but someone, capable of self-knowledge, self-possession, free self-giving and entering into communion with others" (n. 2).4. Building a community requires concrete gestures which reflect the respect for the dignity of others. Furthermore, as religious people, we are convinced that "there is a moral logic which is built into human life and which makes possible dialogue between individuals and peoples" (ibid, n. 3). Yet, there are people today who still need to learn about others and other people's beliefs in order to overcome prejudices and misunderstandings. This sad reality, if it is to be overcome, demands much effort [End Page 131] on the part of both civic and religious leaders. Even in places where people experience daily the ravages of war, fueled by sentiments of hatred and vengeance, trust can be restored. Together we can help to create the space and the opportunities for people to talk, listen, share regrets and offer forgiveness for each other's past mistakes.5. Education for peace is a responsibility which must be borne by all sectors of society. Of course, this starts in ordinary homes where the family, the fundamental pillar of society, strives to transmit traditional and sound values to children by a deliberate effort to inform their consciences. The younger generations deserve and indeed thrive upon value-based education which reinforces respect, acceptance, compassion and equality. It is important therefore that schools, both government and faith-based, do all possible to support parents in the delicate but satisfying task of raising children to appreciate all that is good and true.6. The media's power to shape minds, especially of the young, cannot be underestimated. While the irresponsible elements within it are increasingly being recognized for what they are, it is also the case that much good can be effected through quality productions and educational programmes. When people working within the media exercise their moral conscience, it is possible to dispel ignorance and impart knowledge, preserve social values, and portray the transcendental dimension of life which arises from the spiritual nature of all people. Religious believers serve society admirably by collaborating in such projects for the common good.7. Ultimately, the aim of true education is to bring the individual to encounter the ultimate purpose of life. This motivates the person to serve broken humanity. Together may we continue to contribute toward peace and harmony in our society and the world. We Catholics join you with our heartfelt greetings as you celebrate this feast and I wish you once again a happy Vesakh. [End Page 132]Paul Cardinal Poupard, President and Archbishop Pier Luigi Celata, SecretaryPontifical Council for Interreligious DialogueCopyright © 2007 The University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

A very special kind of feast belongs to the Christian Orthodox tradition: there is a specific liturgical celebration of the Images in the so-called Sunday of Orthodoxy. While in many cultures images are employed in order to celebrate an historic event, this is the only feast in which, on the contrary, images are celebrated for themselves. Nonetheless, the role of images in Orthodoxy is not univocally and positively accepted. In fact, the title’s expression.the wolf as a shepherd. belongs (...) to a Desert Father and refers to the role of images in our mental life. This is not reported by a heretical iconoclastic document, but by the well-known Philokalia, a kind of handbook of Orthodox Aesthetics. This paper aims to present these two aspects in their paradoxical partnership. First, I will present some historical, symbolic and liturgical aspects of this feast. Thus, we should be able to understand better why many contemporary authors claimed that the origins of our visual culture can be traced in this Feast. However, if we comprehend the philosophical value of Byzantine icons, we realise that they have little to do with our contemporary images, no matter whether we mean artistic, religious or media images. We often talk about the.power of images., but just to blame them -as if they were autonomous entities- or to praise them, in a generalized aestheticization of contemporary life. Iconophobia and iconodoulia, I claim, are emerging as ontologically impoverished versions of the former Byzantine theoretical models. What falls into oblivion is the paradoxical status of the image as.appearance of the essence of Being. that demands as a condition of its own existence its self-sublation. These dialectics, conceptually inspired by the Hegelian logic, are fully present in Byzantine Aesthetics, where the feast is considered as a precarious image, held in memory of a future image-loss event known as eschaton. (shrink)

Scholars have recently noted the interest of Guibert of Tournai’s sermons on Francis of Assisi. Nicole Bériou partially edited Guibert’s sermon Surrexit Helyas, focusing on the theme of prophecy, in 1994,1 and Sean Field edited two more, Inflammatum est cor meum and Veni columba mea, highlighting the theme of Francis as a perfected soul through annihilation, in 1999.2 The two yet unexamined works in Guibert’s corpus of sermons discussing Francis hold their own interest, as they discuss an important topos in (...) Franciscan literature of the mid-thirteenth century. The present article edits and analyzes these two previously unedited sermons for the first time.3 This topos is the Biblical quotation Vidi .. (shrink)

A number of feminist critics of Latin American women writers in exile have suggested that women in exile may flourish as they are freed from the traditional gender restrictions imposed on them in their home countries. In this article I reexamine the association of exile with liberation through analysing Cristina Peri Rossi’s 1984 novel La nave de los locos (The Ship of Fools) in the light of the tension between Rosi Braidotti’s Deleuzian affirmation of feminism as a ‘joyful nomadic (...) force’ (1994: 8) and Sara Ahmed’s critique of compulsory happiness (2010). Peri Rossi juxtaposes the prescriptive worldview of the captivating medieval ‘Tapestry of the Creation’ in the Cathedral of Girona in Catalonia, which depicts the Biblical story of Genesis, and the diasporic and unpredictable wanderings of the protagonist Ecks on his journey to feminist enlightenment. I argue that while the novel seems to champion nomadic subjectivity, it also highlights the deceptive charm of imperative positive affect that may function as a disciplinary force, compelling subjects to follow a conventional path in life, and invalidating those who ‘stray’ from it. My reading of the novel calls for a nuanced approach to exile and diaspora that takes into account wider questions of the privilege and ease of movement – or, indeed, settling – enjoyed by or denied to various subjects. (shrink)

The feast introduces an interruption in the flow of everyday life. Within the limits marked by such an interruption, a form of experience different from the ordinary takes place. The time of feast evokes and makes present the sacred time in which events that founded human society took place. In festivals, on one hand, one can grasp and represent the meaning that grounds human experience; on the other hand, a form of full life takes place. In the modern (...) era, festivals lose their connection with the religious dimension, and such features fade away. Yet they do not disappear entirely. They are grasped in a fragmentary way, and this is enough to turn them into marks of resistance against the reduction of human experience to a purely utilitarian dimension. (shrink)

Here I review Robert Trivers' 2011 book _The Folly of Fools_, in which he advocates the evolutionary theory of deceit and self-deception that he pioneered in his famous preface to Richard Dawkins' _Selfish Gene_. Although the book contains a wealth of interesting discussion on topics ranging from warfare to immunology, I find it lacking on two major fronts. First, it fails to give a proper argument for its central thesis--namely, that self-deception evolved to facilitate deception of others. Second, the book (...) lacks conceptual clarity with respect to the focal term "self-deception.". (shrink)

In the years following the death of Bernardino of Siena Giovanni of Capestrano was intensely involved with the tasks of his role as the main supporter of the cause of canonization. This project, which finally came to be realized in the Jubilee year of 1450, was close to his heart for both personal reasons and for the legitimating power that a Bernardino who had been proclaimed a saint would have for advancing the interests of the Observant movement. Along with a (...) feverish diplomatic activity carried out by Giovanni in the triangle of Siena-Aquila-Rome, he developed a role in the construction of the written memory of his Franciscan brother.1 He promoted the registration of miracles both before and after the... (shrink)

"Of Children, Fools, and Madmen: Spinoza's Scientific Method and the Constraints of Fact" Spinoza has been largely ignored in the history of the scientific method in the seventeenth century. Such neglect is unjustified insofar as Spinoza deliberately circumscribed with scientific method both Biblical hermeneutics (TTP), a field which he deserves credit for founding, and political theory (TP). Although he wrote no discrete discourse on method, he wove his scientific methodological principles into the fabric of his philosophical treatises.

_ Source: _Volume 28, Issue 2, pp 132 - 148 A striking feature of Thomas Hobbes’s account of political obligation is his discussion of the Fool, who thinks it reasonable to adopt a policy of selective, self-interested covenant breaking. Surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the potential of a psychological defense of Hobbes’s controversial claim that the Fool behaves irrationally. In this paper, I first describe Hobbes’s account of the Fool and argue that the kind of Fool most worth (...) considering is the covert, long-term Fool. Then I advance and critically assess two psychological arguments according to which the Fool’s policy of self-interested covenant breaking is prudentially irrational. The first argument holds that, taken together, the deep guilt from early-stage covenant breaking, the cumulative guilt from continued covenant breaking, and the high statistical risk of detection during high-volume covenant breaking render the Fool’s policy irrational. The second argument holds that the Fool’s policy is irrational because it puts him at risk of adopting a psychologically intolerable view of his fellow covenanters and, specifically, the extent to which they can be trusted. (shrink)

The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York). Theodore Levin With. 74 minute music CD. 1996. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. $35.00 (cloth).

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the debate about the strawman fallacy. It is the received view that strawmen are employed to fool not the arguer whose argument they distort, but instead a third party, an audience. I argue that strawmen that fool their victims exist and are an important variation of the strawman fallacy because of their special perniciousness. I show that those who are subject to hermeneutical lacunae or who have since forgotten parts of justifications they have provided earlier (...) are especially vulnerable to falling for strawmen aimed at their own positions or arguments. Adversarial argumentation provides especially fertile ground for strawmen that fool their own victims, but cooperative argumentation is no fail-safe protection from them either. (shrink)

The paper presents fragments of a Byzantine icon discovered in 2015 during regular archaeological excavations carried out in Chełm, eastern Poland. Iconographic analyses allow the nine surviving fragments to be interpreted as belonging to a diptych wing with the Great Feasts cycle. The icon represents archaic iconography of the subject, with the scene of Transfiguration placed after Entry into Jerusalem and before the Crucifixion. The artefact was created in the second half or at the close of the 12th century, and (...) it was made from steatite, which has been confirmed by petrographic analyses. The icon was discovered in the remains of a palace complex of King Daniel Romanovich, the greatest ruler of the Galicia-Volhynia Lands. The results of the archaeological research allow the terminus ante quem for the icon’s arrival in Chełm to be determined as before the middle of the 13th century. Various possible explanations as to how the icon found its way to Chełm are also explored in the paper. (shrink)