To Love Without Memory: Seeds of a Christian Atheism in Deleuze and Kierkegaard

Children at elementary schools have been able to develop their logical thinking and the ability to understand symbols and fundamental principles, yet still in a concrete fashion. Religion, however, introduces the concept of God, which is quite an abstract concept. Therefore, a learning method that can help children to develop their understanding of God is required. This research aimed to identify the conception of God on children enrolled in Integrated Islamic schools (SIT). The study used qualitative method with the indigenous psychology approach. The study collected data from 200 students at Grade Six from Integrated Islamic elementary schools in Pekanbaru. The data was processed using thematic analysis based on the conception of God in Islamic tradition. The results showed that the majority of the respondents (97.73%) described their conception of God with their understanding of God as the Creator ( tawhid al-rububiyya) involving the perfection of God, the willfulness of God, and the existence of God. The implementation of the understanding of God in daily life ( tawhid al-uluhiyya) is then applied through prayers, compliance to religious rules, and submission toward God’s commands. These results suggest that respondents comprehend the concept of God and implement such understanding through their daily activities

This article aims to discuss the debate on the aspects of divinity in Islamic theology and its relation to the sentence of monotheism based on the madhhab Mu'tazilah, Asyariyah and Al-Maturidiyah. This study is a literature study with a qualitative approach that uses descriptive analysis. The data is taken from articles published on Google Scholar. Furthermore, a strict selection is carried out for these articles by evaluating the abstract, methodology, results, and relevance of each article. Conclusions were drawn from the findings, and the practical and theoretical implications of the study were identified. The results of the analysis show that Islamic theological schools such as Mu'tazilah, Ash'ariyah, and Maturidiyah debate various aspects of divinity in the context of monotheistic sentences. Mu'tazilah emphasizes the intellect and justice of Allah, while Ash'ariyah balances reason and revelation, rejects anthropomorphism in understanding God's attributes, and affirms God's decree and destiny. Maturidiyah, on the other hand, has a more moderate approach and emphasizes the importance of faith, and views the attributes of Allah as something that can be understood in a limited way by human reason. Despite their different approaches, these schools seek to understand and explain aspects of divinity within the framework of monotheism which is a fundamental principle in Islamic teachings

HyperCell: A Bio-inspired Design Framework for Real-time Interactive Architectures

In the article the basic principles of L. Tolstoy’s teaching are singled out, which according to his critics testify to its “non-Christian” character. Among these principles, there are emphasis on personal religious experience; emphasis on the importance of reason as the main ability of man in his relationship with God; the understanding of God as an impersonal absolute embracing all that exists. The main principle of Tolstoy’s teaching is the possibility of a person’s merging with God, this leads to the loss of the personality of man; on the other hand, after merging person with God evil, suffering and death become inessential: a religious person must come to an understanding of life as a blessing and realize his own eternity – uncreatedness and indestructibility. Jesus Christ is understood by Tolstoy as a great teacher, and not as a Savior: Christ brought the doctrine of how to make a life good and perfect. Tolstoy denies the idea of a personal bodily resurrection, considering it to be characteristic of Judaism; in the teaching of Tolstoy man is eternal, and death refers only to the empirical level of our existence. It is shown that Tolstoy’s teaching in all these principles coincides with the teaching of Gnostic Christianity. If the hypothesis that the Gnostic apocrypha express the most ancient layer of Christian ideas is true, Tolstoy’s teaching can be recognized as the exact expression of the true, original Christianity.

Gilles Deleuze once stated that ‘we ought to establish the basic sociotechnological principles of control mechanisms as their age dawns …’ (1995: 182). Is there a dawn today of new ‘sociotechnological’ principles of control? At the same time, is the movement towards control futile? It may seem so in the face of the increased complexity of the world created by the very same instruments meant to provide control.KeywordsTechnical ControlNetwork SocietyNetwork EconomyDigital EconomyNetwork CapitalThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze, this chapter explores how the ambient environment as an objectless, a-figurative continuum entails a basic aesthetic production of field effects, characterized by the sensation of material consistency, univocal dehierarchization, immanence and ubiquity. The chapter further identifies three basic morphological principles of ambient field effects: the spatial configurations of the sonic field either toward the ground or toward groundlessness, and the temporal a-figurative and a-teleologic production of ambient matter-flow as a form of continuous variation. Finally, I argue that ambient sound in all its variations—beyond established genre conventions, cultural preferences and historical periods—is distinguished by a single and general morpho-material principle expressed in the dynamic combination of repetition and continuity.

Miracles, Temporality, and Unfulfillment in A Diagram for Fire Bruno Reinhardt Jon Bialecki, Vineyard Movement, charismatic, Pentecostalism, Gilles Deleuze, Holy Spirit, necromancy, exorcism, Bruno Reinhardt Miracles are one of the most widely acknowledged indexes of "religion" in secular scholarship and common sense. Yet, their theoretical role remains paradoxically residual, as if miracles were good to recognize but not to account for religious lifeworlds. The fundamental pressures imposed by the miraculous upon secular knowledges justify such opaqueness. By following empathetically miraculous veridiction, scholars can be led astray from basic epistemological principles such as neutrality and critical reflexivity, becoming theologians. A possible solution has been to circumvent miracles by sticking to their human co-participants, proposing theories of recognition that bracket their existence while focusing on their institutional, sociocultural, historical, ethical, or cognitive conditions of receptivity or construction. From this angle, the ultimate object of study of disciplines like the anthropology of religion or religious studies would not be miracles, but the media whereby miraculous truth is relayed, from social structures, symbolic systems, and semiotic ideologies to culturally embodied schema and the nervous system. Scholars might also import miracles into social theory through analogy and substitution. A classic example is Max Weber's secularized notion of charisma, borrowed from Pauline Christianity through theologian Rudolf Sohm and converted into a type of legitimate authority. What Weber calls pure charisma is explicitly residual, existing "only in the process of originating."1 Pure charisma nevertheless introduces a strategic dose of freedom and unexpectedness into Weber's otherwise bleak theory of modern rationalization, becoming a deterrent for determinism. Carl Schmitt's political theology performs similar work through the analogy between miracles and sovereignty: it selects a particular property of miracles—their extra-normative givenness— [End Page 456] and imports it to political philosophy as a critique of liberal democracy. 2 A more recent example of such procedure is Hent de Vries's argument about the "structural resemblances" between miracles and special effects, which—like the arguments of Weber and Schmitt—establishes parallels between religious and secular phenomena (leadership, sovereignty, mediation) and oscillates between analogy and substitution.3 Miracles for these authors operate primarily as tools for reading secular modernity otherwise, often against its self-image. Is it possible to propose a theoretical approach to religion that does not dilute the originary force of the miraculous through either constructivism or analogical thinking? Moreover, can we do that while still recognizing the otherness of social theory vis-à-vis theology or religious experience? Jon Bialecki's A Diagram for Fire faces bravely these major ethical and theoretical challenges through a rich ethnographic engagement with the evangelical Charismatic Vineyard Church. Bialecki's initial research problem was how to account for the dazzling plurality as well as the inchoate family resemblances he encountered in the field under the umbrella "Vineyard Church." How to recognize such inner difference without reifying the Vineyard in terms of stable doctrines, identities, or centralized organization, which ultimately do not empirically exist? This initial problematic expands in the book two ways: it scales up to wider objects that share similar qualities, such as "actually existing Christianity" and "religion" itself, and it scales down ethnographically from the Vineyard movement (they avoid denomination) to particular churches at different locations, small meetings, practices, and experiences. The resulting argument has a fractal design, which oscillates recursively between what we conventionally understand as "micro" and "macro" levels of analysis while showing these terms' inappropriateness. Such design reflects Bialecki's attempt to avoid both nominalism and essentialism. If there is a religious atom or lowest common denominator in the book, it is not substantial, but an iterable pattern of differentiation traceable across various scales, a "type of recurrent event" (xviii), which is best accessed through what Vineyard members call miracles. This spreadable but aggregating, elusive but affective force is diagrammatic: "a diagram for fire." According to Bialecki, diagrams are "abstract maps of how forces play out that point as much toward [End Page 457] the different potentials in outcomes as they do toward a similarity in relations or constitution" (69). Such focus on a set of fundamental relations reminded me of classic structural analysis, with the exception that the stuff of diagrams is...

This article examines the problem of using Gilles Deleuze’s methodology to political and social processes. Based on the basic principles of research and categories that can be excluded from Deleuze’s work, the author proposes a specific research program that the French philosopher presumably used. The author concentrates on the analysis of such concepts as production, body without organs, assembly, deterritorialization, becoming and expression. Particular attention is paid to such research principles as the relationship between the actual and the virtual, rhizomaticity and singularity. The author’s conclusions, derived from the research, are as follows: 1) Deleuzian methodology has an original and powerful methodological apparatus, but cannot become the basis for the implementation of a predictive function, since the foundation of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy is classical metaphysics - Spinoza and Leibniz; 2) Gilles Deleuze’s research program presupposes the principle of pluralism in relation to the selected methods, categories and concepts, which, in turn, allows the researcher to liberate himself from the effect of corporatism in the modern scientific community.

This dissertation intends to unfold the aesthetic, ethical and political significance of Virginia Woolf’s streetwalking with Judith Butler’s theoretical framework of precarious life and bodily vulnerability. By conceptualizing precarious streetwalking in Woolf, this dissertation argues that a body’s unwilled susceptibility and openness to street milieus and chance encounters have called into question the masculinist and anthropocentric definition of subjectivity. In exposing a subject’s limit in the midst of walking, Woolf not only embraces a new mode of vulnerable subjectivity but also reimagines the possibilities of a precarious community that is oriented toward a political critique of the unequal distribution of precarity and gender assignment induced by the patriarchal society. While Woolf shares similar concerns with Butler in her political critique of patriarchal society, this dissertation contends that Woolf’s aesthetics of streetwalking, unlike the conceptual consistency in Butler’s politics of street protesting, is more uncertain, open, and vulnerable. Apart from dwelling upon the literal sense of streetwalking, this dissertation also treats it as a metonymy of Woolf’s aesthetics, which is characterized by its vulner-ability to write its own passivity and to deviate from the im/proper place. This dissertation is structured into four chapters. In chapter one “‘We Are No Longer Quite Ourselves’: Dispossession and Ethical Responsiveness in ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure,’” I will discuss the question of subjectivity through Judith Butler’s dual explication of “dispossession.” In the midst of streetwalking in London, the narrator becomes “an enormous eye” in the face of alterity and street shocks. By problematizing the perceiving eye, this chapter argues that the enormous eye does not reiterate the primacy of vision; rather, it reveals the tension between agency and passivity in bodily vulnerability and the possibilities of ethical responsiveness regarding the suffering in the streets. In chapter two “‘Odd Affinities’: Toward an Ethics of Precarious Community in Mrs. Dalloway,” I will demonstrate Woolf’s ironic treatment of the capacity of the street milieus to affect the characters’ sensory receptivity (especially auditory) and to mobilize patriotic sentiments and communal spirits. In light of Butler’s thoughts on mourning and grievable life, I attempt to unravel the novel’s embrace of an alternative idea of community, which is based upon the ecstatic relationality rather than the exclusionary matrix of patriotic community, gender assignment or class. In chapter three “‘This Dog Is the Road’: Affectivity and Vulnerability as Radical Equality in Flush,” I attempt to investigate the relation between human and animal, their mutual enfolding/unfolding with the external environment, and the contrasts between London and Italian city milieus through the lens of both Deleuzian becoming and Butlerian vulnerability. This chapter argues that the equality of human and animal lies in their respective affectivity and vulnerability in the world. In the final chapter “‘Infinitely Obscure Lives’ in the Streets: Rethinking Androgyny in A Room of One’s Own,” I will examine Woolf’s ethical concern with the infinitely obscure lives in the streets and the gradual shift of her concern from women to the thing in itself during walking. As Woolf urgently points out, there are “infinitely obscure lives” in the streets of London, which remain unrecorded in human history. To give life to the lives that are denied life, or simply to make them appear in her writing thus turns out to be Woolf’s burden. That is also the reason why Woolf suggests that the best mind for writing is the androgynous mind. Overall, this dissertation reconsiders the connections between Woolf’s aesthetic practice, ethical concern, and political critique through the discussion of precarious streetwalking. By interrogating the power deployment behind the frames of recognition regarding whose lives are more valuable, this dissertation demonstrates Woolf’s non-anthropocentric tendency to apprehend life as equally precarious. In this sense, our shared precariousness also establishes a basic principle of equality, which in turn may awaken our ethical responsiveness to alterity—which is not absolutely different from but cohabits with and co-constitutes our lives—and induce certain responsibility for the preservation of lives. Departing from certain criticisms’ construction of Woolf as a mentally-ill invalid, this dissertation not only challenges this dualist divide between strength and weakness but also hopes to affirm Woolf’s embrace of radical equality in vulnerability.

Venus in Czernowitz: Sacher-Masoch, Ehrlich and the Fin de Siecle Crisis of Legal Reason

French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has enigmatically declared that “Montage is the art of producing this form that thinks.” What does it mean for an image to think? The fundamental principles of montage, such as juxtaposition and shock are well known. Perhaps, however, there is another way to speak of montage, when it is deployed as a mode of knowledge. By claiming that images are capable of thinking, this essay argues that Didi-Huberman is taking up Gilles Deleuze’s proposal that cinema does not merely imitate or reflect philosophy, but produces its own philosophical project. For Deleuze, the challenge facing philosophy was to overcome the assumptions concerning what thinking is, a return to a ground zero of what representation can possibly be. Didi-Huberman’s arguments signal an alternative way of treating images beyond what Deleuze calls “representation,” or thought based on resemblance, recognition and identity. To do this, Didi-Huberman retrieves montage from the historical avant-garde and explores its epistemological potential. By emphasising montage’s capacity to create new meaning and generate new lines of thought, images become theoretical objects, things that “think.”

Anti-Oedipus: Metaphysics and method

Drawing upon the thought of Timothy Leary, the purpose of this article is to examine the uncomfortable relationship between his conceptualisation of ‘counterculture’ as the perpetual generation of the new, and the processes of accumulation that drive post-industrial capitalism - the very system that this account of counterculture seeks to undermine. The argument, in short, is that the countercultural, as defined by Leary, plays an essential role in the accumulation of capital that drives our economic system, and accordingly, it cannot be plausibly understood as external to the structural conditions that it opposes. This is not to suggest that counterculture does not produce new possibilities, new opportunities, and new ways of living, but instead to illustrate the contradictions that might emerge when the notion of counterculture as resistance to capitalist hegemony is coupled with the identification of counterculture as an authentic repetition of the new.