Interior Life Research Articles

The politics of staying behind the frontline of coronavirus

Intended as a contribution to the Waiting in Pandemic Times project Collection in response to COVID-19, this short theoretical paper views the coronavirus crisis in terms of its unpredictable effects on the interior life of the National Health Service (NHS) workforce. Written immediately following the suspension (due to the pandemic) of an ethnographic investigation of waiting in a general practice in London, it tracks the first signs that working definitions of time would struggle to survive the onset of a temporality of acute crisis in the NHS. The paper considers what it might mean for healthcare practitioners at this particular moment in the NHS’s history to be living through an experience of ‘the ordinary’ breaking down. It also follows hints of new temporal modes of care appearing during this same period when one kind of crisis in the NHS has been put on hold, and another (the crisis of coronavirus) is just getting underway.

My Beloved Community

My Beloved Community

‘Rediscovering the Erotic as Ordinary’ in South African Women’s Short Fiction

In this article, I explore the possibilities of rediscovering the erotic as ordinary, as a strategy for writing queer, feminist erotica in a South African context that successfully negotiates heterosexist, patriarchal, racist and colonial discourses. I focus on two short stories from Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women Writers (2008), known as the first erotic anthology by women published in South Africa. South Africa does not have a large body of erotic writing, and the work that does exist is not widely written about. Both stories covered here, ‘Inside’ by Makhosazana Xaba and ‘Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus’ by Suzy Bell, depict erotic tension between women but do not contain graphic sex scenes. They emphasise the ordinary place of sexual desire in the lives of women by detailing the interior life of a female character whose everyday life is limned by the erotic. The focus in these stories is not on the sex act but on the build-up of sexual desire. Furthermore, the erotic is not limited to sexual desire but runs through other aspects of the characters’ lives, including spiritual, intellectual and embodied experiences. It is through these various elements that the two authors imagine the erotic as ordinary. Thus these two stories contest the spectacularisation and abjection of Black female lesbian sexuality and open up interesting possibilities for the representation of the erotic in literature.

Phenomenology of Interior Life and the Trinity

Michel Henry radicalises phenomenology by putting forward the idea of a double manifestation: the “Truth of Life” and “truth of the world.” For Henry, the world turns out to be empty of Life. To find its essence, the self must dive completely inward, away from the exterior movements of intentionality. Hence, Life, or God, for Henry, lies in non‑intentional, immanent self-experience, which is felt and yet remains invisible, in an absolutist sense, as an a priori condition of all conscious experience. In Christian theology, the doctrine of the Trinity illuminates the distinction between the immanent Trinity (God’s self‑relation) and the economic workings of the Trinity (God‑world relation). However, the mystery of God’s inmost being and the economy of salvation are here understood as inseparable. In light of this, the paper aims to: 1) elucidate the significance of Henry’s engagement with the phenomenological tradition and his proposal of a phenomenology of Life which advocates an immanent auto‑affection, radically separate from the ek‑static nature of intentionality, and 2) confront the division between Life and world in Henry’s Christian phenomenology and its discordancy with the doctrine of the Trinity, as the latter attests to the harmonious unity that subsists between inner life and the world.

The politics of staying behind the frontline of coronavirus

Intended as a contribution to the Waiting in Pandemic Times project Collection in response to COVID-19, this short theoretical paper views the coronavirus crisis in terms of its unpredictable effects on the interior life of the National Health Service (NHS) workforce. Written immediately following the suspension (due to the pandemic) of an ethnographic investigation of waiting in a general practice in London, it tracks the first signs that working definitions of time would struggle to survive the onset of a temporality of acute crisis in the NHS. The paper considers what it might mean for healthcare practitioners at this particular moment in the NHS’s history to be living through an experience of ‘the ordinary’ breaking down. It also follows hints of new temporal modes of care appearing during this same period when one kind of crisis in the NHS has been put on hold, and another (the crisis of coronavirus) is just getting underway.

The politics of staying behind the frontline of coronavirus

Intended as a contribution to the Waiting in Pandemic Timesproject Collection in response to COVID-19, this short theoretical paper views the coronavirus crisis in terms of its unpredictable effects on the interior life of the National Health Service (NHS) workforce. Written immediately following the suspension (due to the pandemic) of an ethnographic investigation of waiting in a general practice in London, it tracks the first signs that working definitions of time would struggle to survive the onset of a temporality of acute crisis in the NHS. The paper considers what it might mean for healthcare practitioners at this particular moment in the NHS's history to be living through an experience of 'the ordinary' breaking down. It also follows hints of new temporal modes of care appearing during this same period when one kind of crisis in the NHS has been put on hold, and another (the crisis of coronavirus) is just getting underway.

Bouffon: The Roots of ‘Critical Clowning’ in Canada

In this article, Canadian theatre scholar Eury Colin Chang draws on his own training and performance experiences, as well as interviews conducted with two master bouffon teachers, to explore the bouffon’s critical capacities. Furthermore, he reflects on what these critical capacities might offer to the contemporary Canadian theatrical landscape. While Canada has been recognized internationally for our focus on physical theatre, circus arts, and even clowning, the specific clown tradition of bouffon is often given less attention and consideration. In contexts where bouffon is discussed, the emphasis is generally placed on the roots of this tradition in Europe, and the significant contemporary engagement with bouffon across Canadian is largely ignored. This article therefore fills a gap by exploring Canadian bouffon and considering what its potential might be for changing the professional theatre community here. This potential of bouffon, Chang suggests, resides in its ability to move beyond realism by offering new ways of being and seeing onstage, and in life. Furthermore, the bouffon is capable of revealing the complex interior life of the audience. This ability of bouffon to uncover, rediscover, and wrestle with the human psyche is at the core of its critical capacity.

“Whig Thomism” and the Making of the Catholic Neoconservative Movement

AbstractThe writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, although widely noted for their clarity, are also rich and capacious enough to merit differing interpretations among scholars of good will and good faith. However, despite the noble intentions and praiseworthy work of the late Michael Novak and other Catholic neoconservatives, their marketing of St. Thomas Aquinas as the “first Whig” appears to sever elements of the Angelic Doctor's philosophy from its essential principles. Although jealously guarding the nobility of conscience and the interior life, St. Thomas envisioned a political community that was decidedly hierarchical and in which the faith was to be shepherded by the state, which itself was charged with suppressing heresy and dissident thinking. These political ideas, moreover, are rooted in the very heart of St. Thomas Aquinas's deepest philosophical and theological principles.

Il racconto inclusive della disabilità e dell’autismo: i casi delle serie TV Speechless e Atypical

L’articolo muove da una panoramica sulle criticità che storicamente hanno segnato il racconto audiovisivo della disabilità. Come mostrano report sull’industria cinetelevisiva e come sottolineano i Disability Studies, accanto ad una rappresentazione insufficiente della disabilità, c’è, quando l’argomento è affrontato, il diffuso scadimento nello stereotipo. A partire da questo dato generale, l’articolo considera la recente categoria critica dell’«inspiration porn». Coniata dagli attivisti dei diritti alla pari dignità, denuncia quei prodotti culturali in cui la persona con disabilità è riduttivamente ritratta al solo fine di suscitare i buoni sentimenti, l’auto-stima, la gratificazione del pubblico che non ha disabilità. Tuttavia, nell’offerta televisiva internazionale segnali di un’inversione di tendenza sono riscontrabili. L’articolo analizza due serie, Speechless e Atypical, che hanno provato a migliorare lo storytelling improntandolo al valore dell’inclusione. L’analisi, che incrocia un approccio etico di fondo con la prospettiva più tecnica della sceneggiatura, si concentra su due aspetti: come la storia rende conto del punto di vista della persona con disabilità, così da rivelare la complessità della sua esperienza personale; come la storia presenta l’inclusione come un obiettivo socialmente conseguibile e motivante. In sede di conclusioni, sulla scorta della differente qualità riscontrata nelle due serie, l’articolo suggerisce tre criteri generali per l’eticità del racconto sulla disabilità: il realismo referenziale, per una rappresentazione fedele al dato medico-terapeutico-sociale; il realismo ottativo, cioè una declinazione proattiva del dramma; il realismo antropologico, cioè l’attribuzione ad azioni e relazioni del loro significato oggettivo entro un disegno esaustivo di completamento personale.

Wrestling with Angels

Wrestling with Angels

Writing Lifestories: A Methodology Introducing Students to Multicultural Education Utilizing Creative Writing and Genealogy

In this article, the author describes how she used a university course book assignment to produce a family history book to: (1) Raise consciousness and deepen understandings of other cultures, (2) assist students’ understanding of how intersecting cultures become part of the complex American cultural landscape, and (3) introduce students to research utilizing genealogical tools. The assignment aims to provide freshmen and preservice teacher education students an opportunity to recover personal memories and retell family stories, meld personal fragments into context by researching the historical and cultural backgrounds of their ancestors and produce a work that captures the interior life of a culture where each of us came. This calls for using “historical memory” to recover personal memories and retell family stories. Lastly, the knowledge gained from the Writing Lifestories: Exploring Cultural Heritages’ (2019) course will help students understand and heighten an awareness of multiculturalism/multicultural education through creative writing and immersion into research.

Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-visioning History, Memory, and IdentityHow to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of InterpretationBlack Aesthetics and the Interior Life

Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-visioning History, Memory, and IdentityHow to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of InterpretationBlack Aesthetics and the Interior Life

James Light: “The Parade of Masks” (c. 1928)

James Light: “The Parade of Masks” (<i>c</i>. 1928)

La vida escolar en el Colegio del Estado de Puebla durante el Segundo Imperio Mexicano

Este texto propone abordar la historia del Colegio del Estado de Puebla, durante el Segundo Imperio Mexicano, tomando como referencia documental las constituciones que normaban su vida interna y sus relaciones con el entorno social. Con este propósito, primero se presenta un panorama general de la vida en Puebla bajo el régimen imperial; después, la situación del ramo de escuelas en la ciudad de Puebla y, finalmente, una somera descripción del régimen de vida interior del Colegio Imperial del Espíritu Santo, como se le denominó durante el régimen de Maximiliano de Habsburgo.

Life Writing in Relational Modes: The Year in Estonia

Life Writing in Relational ModesThe Year in Estonia Leena Kurvet-Käosaar (bio) and Maarja Hollo (bio) A glance at some of the canonical works of life writing in Estonia, such as August Kitzberg's Ühe vana "tuuletallaja" noorpõlve mälestused (1924) or Jaan Kross's two-volume Kallid kaasteelised (2000, 2008), reveals the prominence of "a relational model of identity, developed collaboratively with others" (Eakin, How Our Lives 57).1 What makes relationality a worthwhile focus for our review of Estonian life writing of the last two years are its varied manifestations in texts that engage with different generic conventions and cut across different strata of (literary) culture, from award-winning authors to amateur biographers, and from leading publishing houses to scholarly presses and grassroots publishing initiatives. One of the most noteworthy trends in Estonian life writing of the twenty-first century is the emergence of biogeographical spaces that form the basis of the author's self-perception and memories. One of the prime examples of this trend is the autobiographical novel Paradiis (2009) by Tõnu Õnnepalu—currently one of the most well-known contemporary Estonian authors—that unfolds on Hiiumaa, one of Estonia's small islands, and interweaves detailed descriptions of concrete places, buildings, and landscapes with the author's emotions and memories. Õnnepalu himself has described Paradiis as a work that combines documentary features and fairy tale elements (Laurisaar). In his latest work, an autobiographical trilogy published in 2019, Õnnepalu again interweaves fictional and factual, returning to the question of how a specific place, its people, and its landscapes shape the author's subjectivity as a (look from) "ühest maailma kohast maailma ja iseendasse" [self-reflection from a particular place in the world] (Pariis, back cover) entails. The first volume of the trilogy, the diary novel Pariis, describes the author/narrator's life in Paris in the summer of 2018 with reminiscences of the summer of 1993 when he was finishing his debut novel Piiririik (1993). Although the narrator's motivation is the desire to remember and relive the beginning of his journey as a writer, his [End Page 55] self-observations, reflections, and memories are overshadowed by contemporary Parisian landscapes and descriptions of Parisians. The second, quite controversial volume of the trilogy, Aaker, does not focus on the author's interior life, his memories, and imagination, but on his experience of participating in an annual gathering of diaspora Estonians in the Muskoka region in the woods of northern Ontario. In his work, the author reflects on the meaning of North America (and North American identity), including the experience of being Canadian. He makes no effort to hide his criticism of the Canadian Estonian community, asserting that his bitterness stems from their sense of moral superiority over Estonians in Estonia (Aaker 273). The roots of the narrator's attitude lie in the Soviet era, when Estonians then living in the occupied homeland were regarded by refugees abroad as collaborators with the Soviet regime. Yet the work also stands out for its picturesque depictions of the local natural surroundings—the landscape, animals, and plants where the author utilizes his extensive knowledge of nature, as well as his reflections on the meaning of Europe, viewed from the opposite shore of the "Big Pond." The last volume of the trilogy, Lõpmatus, is dedicated to one of Estonia's small islands, Vilsandi, which has been given the poetic name Lõpmatus (endlessness), a pun by the author as a response to a question by a friend "Kuhu maailma lõppu sa siis nüüd jälle pugenud oled?" [Where in the end of the world have you been hiding yet again?] (12). Distinct from Pariis and Aaker, this text presents perception of place and the narrator's vision of himself as interconnected; self-examination takes place by feeling one's way into a place and situating oneself within it. The novel consists of a collage of essayistic portraits that sketch firmer outlines of certain residents on the island, plants, birds, or locations that the narrator finds particularly meaningful. In addition to autobiographical cartography, important elements of the novel elucidate the narrator's confessional thoughts about time, particularly...

From Christ to the Bourgeoisie

In this early article (one of his first, written when he was twenty-one), Deleuze responds to the Romantic fear of losing “interiority” — the fear that the technological world will gut a person like a chicken and deprive them of any interior life. Many of the political examples, metaphysical concepts and affective descriptions that are cited and mostly criticized by Deleuze are traceable to the central figure in French philosophy at that time, Jean-Paul Sartre, and to Jacques Maritain as the chief proponents of dividing human life into the exterior and interior. The article criticizes the claims of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy to atheistic, materialist and humanist selfsufficiency and reconstructs the genealogy of the division between the exterior and interior. It should properly be traced back to the Gospel — to the Christian revelation of the exterior world and our interior connection with it. Deleuze finds examples of the secularization of this division in politics and science, in public and private life, in jaywalking and in the willingness to fight for the fatherland, in the bourgeois love of interpreting everything and of wearing a bowler hat. It has been suggested that bourgeois nature is a naturalized spiritual life, and the State is a naturalized Spirit. A person can no longer merely be an atheist — even in becoming an atheist they will nevertheless remain Christian by maintaining the opposition between the private individual and the State. To recreate one lost unity or another, mankind will require the figure of Christ, the Leader who offers friendship.

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self by Yuri Corrigan

Reviewed by: Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self by Yuri Corrigan Octavian Gabor (bio) Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self Yuri Corrigan Northwestern University Press, 2017. 248 pp. $120.00 cloth. $39.95 paperback. There is a unifying thought that brings together the various chapters of Yuri Corrigan's Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self: Dostoevsky's concern in his writings is to portray humans' unwillingness to look deeper inside themselves. [End Page 154] This unwillingness stems from various wounds that determine the characters of Dostoevsky's stories to run from their memories, which results in further pain. The interior life of the person is feared because one finds inside not only beauty, but also darkness. Dancing between the notions of interiority and collective self, Corrigan writes a book in which he contemplates how Dostoevsky's characters find themselves in communication with others, but also lose themselves in their attempts to feast on other people's flesh. His argument is compelling, and his writing is smooth and attractive. Corrigan travels through the majority of Dostoevsky's works, finding a constant tension between interiority and intersubjectivity, which, in his view, defines the problem of selfhood in Dostoevsky (25). In order to find themselves, broken characters lean on others, needing them desperately for survival. As Corrigan says, there is an "insatiable hunger for the other of a disturbed psyche" (28). The need for others is indeed recurrent in all of Dostoevsky's writings, and Corrigan emphasizes well this aspect. He shows how such dependence on another person represents also an attempt to run from the deep and feared interior. After all, this dichotomy between the interior and the exterior remains Dostoevsky's problem in all of his novels. For him, the others seem to be people who produce fear, but also people without whom someone cannot live unless this person falls into the despair given by the encounter with one's interior darkness. The notion of hunger is, I believe, very telling for Dostoevsky's world, and Corrigan shows this masterfully. The notion of confession also has an interesting development in Corrigan's book. He shows how confession is connected with self-transparency, the act of revealing oneself fully to others. We can see the difficulty of this notion precisely in this aspect of it, that the revelation is of something that is not clearly known. Since confession is of the self, then it is intrinsically connected with self-knowledge. For what is the one who is revealed? We can indeed see in Dostoevsky's writings that self-revelation has various levels of authenticity, and thus it can have positive or negative aspects. Corrigan begins by showing how revelation works in an early work, The Insulted and the Injured, in which we have two contrasting attitudes: a confession that is "sadistic self-exposure" (54), and a "tormented, self-sacrificial recollection of the buried past" (54). These two confessions prepare the path for the requested self-revelations that remain central in Crime and Punishment: the different attempts of Sonia and Porfiry to make Raskolnikov confess the same deed. The requests come from different perspectives and demand a different sort of revelation because each of them looks at the person of Raskolnikov in a different way. While Porfiry wants to reveal the murderer, Sonia wants to bring to the surface the real person who, through confession, [End Page 155] can redeem his life. The dichotomy between revelation and hindrance that is at play in various souls of Dostoevsky's world is connected with the notion of nourishment or thirst for other people. In its most negative aspect, thirst for others is manifested in both demoniacs and demons. As Corrigan says, "the notion of interior emptiness characterizes both the possessed and the possessors" (95), as we see especially in The Demons. Corrigan shows how many characters thirst for the presence of others, and they nourish themselves with these presences. Many of the characters of Dostoevsky's stories are indeed devouring others or allowing themselves to be devoured by others; some of them, on the contrary, offer themselves as nourishment for their brethren. Two such characters come to mind, Sonia from Crime and...

Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play by Julie Paulson

Reviewed by: Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play by Julie Paulson Matthew Sergi Julie Paulson. Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. x, 229. $100.00 cloth; $45.00 paper. While morality plays "are regularly described as didactic or instructional dramas that dispatch easily discerned moral truths using 'flat' abstract types and predictable stories of temptation," Julie Paulson's excellent Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play argues, convincingly, that "the opposite is true" (2). The engine of that argument is Paulson's application to the morality plays of Wittgenstein's work on language and consciousness: "there appears to be little exploration in the morality play of the interior life or mental processes of its characters" (33), not because the playmakers failed to understand the inner workings of human consciousness, but rather because "[h]uman subjects have no a priori identity that exists outside human exchange" in the first place (123). The medieval morality plays, Paulson writes, "imagine a self that is first and foremost performed: constructed, articulated, and known through communal performances" (6, emphasis hers), which are central to and instrumental to the very "formation of Christian subjects" (7, 86). For Paulson, the definitive communal performance, a ritual through which the self takes form (rather than only being revealed or discovered), is penance: "the plays illustrate how penance provides penitents with a particular kind of training that shapes their understanding of the meanings of moral and ethical words central to a conception of a Christian self" (33). Starting from a user-friendly primer on Wittgenstein, interwoven with premodern writing about the soul and being (20–33), Theater of the Word demonstrates that morality play characters emerge gradually, through "sensible and communal processes of generating meaning" (66) in which "words are redefined through human interactions" (139), into the fullness of what they allegorize. Paulson's Wittgensteinian interpretation not only fuels the book's major theses, but also produces some gorgeous close readings along the way, notably of Caro in The Castle of Perseverance (48–49), Anima in Wisdom (which "stages the processes through which its protagonist learns the meaning of her own name" [65–66, 79–85]), Mercy in Mankind (throughout Chapter 3, articulated especially well at 111–12), Goods and Good Deeds in Everyman (126–29, 132–35), and Adulation in Respublica (138–39). [End Page 434] Chapter 1 finds in Castle "a case for the essential role of penance … in defining what it means to be 'humankind' … a version of human selfhood produced by, and utterly dependent upon, the institutions and social performances in which it participates" (40). For Paulson, Castle's version of penance deflects Lollard heterodoxy, both by asserting the necessity of the sacrament and by "decentraliz[ing] the priest's role" (47) in its communal ritual: "repentance is both an interior and a social process" (52, emphasis hers). She points out that Shrift's priestly absolution of Humankind, as pivotal as it is in Castle, still fails—"Shrift's warning does not hold" (60)—without social and experiential learning. Andrea Louise Young's Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of "The Castle of Perseverance" (2015) might be read productively alongside this chapter, particularly where Paulson discusses physical space and audience interactions. Similarly, Chapter 2's interpretation of Wisdom, which touches often on medieval contemplation and participation, might be read as a complement to Eleanor Johnson's Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama (2018). In this chapter, Paulson establishes a strong foundation for her broader thesis that moralities demonstrate "the role of penitential ritual in shaping [the] interior" of the medieval self "and the impossibility of splitting the interior from the exterior practices that define it" (71). In Wisdom, "in the same moment penance reforms the soul to God's image, the soul learns what a soul is" (86): the play is thus "less an attempt to demonstrate that the soul is defiled through sin and purified through penitential ritual than an attempt to reveal how the formation of the Christian soul takes place through … visible ritual practices...

Duch miłości w nauczaniu Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego

Cardinal Wyszyński continues teaching about the Holy Spirit as love and as a gift, which comes from the Bible and patristic tradition (eg St. Augustine). The basic text of his reflections on the God of Love are the words from the First Letter of St. John: “God is love” (1 Jn 4: 8, 16). He reads these words, or the shortest definition of God, from the perspective of the Christian and his life experience. In the Holy Spirit, God communicates as love. To be gifted and loved by God means for man to elevate him to the supernatural order. The Holy Spirit, who in the interior life of God is the Love of the Father and the Son, in his self-giving to the world (ad extra), pours God’s love into human hearts (Rom 5: 5), enlivens and dynamises human life. Love as a proprium of the Holy Spirit is also the criterion of Christian identity and of the Church. Important threads of the discussed issue are also the spiritual motherhood of Mary and the establishment of her as the Temple and Bride of the Holy Spirit.

Hughie

Hughie