Soul Of Man Research Articles

Sassi contro il cielo : menzogna individuale e verità di stato in Oscar Wilde

The late Victorian era saw Oscar Wilde’s rise to success and fall from grace. For many years the Irish author lived a double life. He was both a celebrated man of letters, and an irreducibly extraneous body. His essay The Decay of Lying , published in 1889, is a Socratic dialogue that, through its inherent duplicity, exhibits this binary condition. On one hand it is a brilliant work of criticism – pleasantly heterodox – that fully embodies Wilde’s rule of “bewildering the masses”, while on the other, even though backhandedly, it gives a recalcitrant account of the implacable social control of his time. In this eulogy of the art of lying – mainly understood as a way of “saying no” to the truths of power – Wilde reveals the theoretical foundations and originality of his political philosophy, which is the same as that displayed in his later essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891).

Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Rebels in the name of beauty’

‘Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche: “Rebels in the Name of Beauty” ’ reconsiders the intellectual confluence of Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is unlikely that Wilde and Nietzsche knew of each other. Yet, similarities between their conceptions of truth, aesthetic experience, individualism, and ethics, as well as their highly evocative, aphoristic styles, have drawn a large number of critics – from Thomas Mann to Patrick Bridgwater and Julia Prewitt Brown – to compare them. Such comparisons have, though, been brief and often focused on biographical parallels. This article provides, therefore, the first substantial discussion of the dynamics between the ideas of Wilde and Nietzsche. It argues that the parallels between Wilde and Nietzsche centre on their Romantic Individualism, and the shared belief that the individual ‘become[s] himself’ through aesthetic experience. The textual foci are four works written within three years of each other: Nietzsche's The Antichrist (1888) and Twilight of the Idols (1889), and Wilde's ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891) and ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891). These works, I argue, define Romantic Individualism through the strikingly similar, secular, appropriation of Jesus, whilst stylistically exemplifying the way in which the Romantic Individual may be brought into being through the experience of literary art.

Science, Intelligibility, Creation: How the Doctrine of Creation Unites, Delineates, and Ennobles Modern Science

Science, Intelligibility, Creation:How the Doctrine of Creation Unites, Delineates, and Ennobles Modern Science Scott G. Hefelfinger (bio) I. Introduction If the province of modern science seems today to be all encompassing, a quick survey of the situation will prove otherwise. Science can often seem to have no room for philosophy, no time for the immaterial, and no patience with God. Through all of these factors it seems we are left with no hope for reconciliation between science and philosophy, science and theology, and ultimately, science and ordinary life.1 If a "theological doctrine" were to come to the rescue and serve to make sense of the divide between ancient and modern science that would indeed be something.2 This is precisely what I would like to suggest. I hope to show that the doctrine of creation best accounts for and makes sense of the situation found today between departments of science and departments of philosophy and theology: a historically diverging but essentially complementary relationship between ancient and modern science. This assertion can either be viewed philosophically, or it can be assessed, to a certain extent, empirically. That is to say, for the scientist, I propose it as a hypothesis [End Page 131] that, as I hope to indicate, accounts for a number of things in a remarkably sensible and convincing way. In this article I will briefly trace the development of modern science in relation to ancient science, focusing on the evident rift that has formed between the two. But then I will show that such a division is in no way essential but rather an accidental occurrence. This is to say, it need not be so. Indeed, in cannot be so, which will become clear as I turn to creation and its accounting for the intelligibility of the objects of both philosophy and science. Finally, I hope to show that creation accounts for the possibility of any empirical inquiry in the first place, its hypothetical and seemingly unending quest for knowledge, and its dignity and nobility. I begin with the first part: a consideration of the growing rift. II. The Growing Rift The science of today is not the same as that of yesterday, and only by way of contrast can the novelty of modern scientific inquiry be brought to light. The ancient view of science finds representative expression in Aristotle, who describes science in the following terms: "We think ourselves to possess science simply, and not in the manner of the Sophists, i.e., accidentally, when we think we know the causes through which something is, that it is the cause of this [something], and further, that it is impossible that the thing be otherwise."3 Aristotle, the first to formulate it with precision, is not however the first to identify the mode of certainty that is characteristic of science. Rather it is Plato who is the first to express, albeit somewhat metaphorically, the constitutive element of true science. Through the words of Socrates, this specific character emerges in the dialogue Meno: True opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long and they escape from a man's soul, so that they are not worth much [End Page 132] until one ties them down by [giving] an account of the cause.. . . After they are tied down in the first place they become science, and then they remain in place. That is why knowledge is prized more highly than correct opinion, and knowledge differs from correct opinion in being tied down.4 Here, Plato describes the certainty of science metaphorically as "being tied down." This descriptive turn of phrase implies that a particular bit of knowledge, some conclusion, becomes science when rooted in or reduced to principles more certain and more known, which are of their nature more general than the knowledge tied down to them. Despite the figurative language, clear precursors to Aristotle's more precise formulation are found in the terms "cause" and "science," terms inherited verbatim by Plato's most famous pupil. Thus formulated by Plato and Aristotle, the ancient "scientia or episteme meant a very perfect knowledge, a...

The world that never was: a true story of dreamers, schemers, anarchists and secret agents

last third of the nineteenth century saw the world in flux. Science vied with religion to represent the soul of man, and technological advances opened the possibility of new ways of living. Yet as the world sank into a long depression, untrammelled capitalism continued to stretch the gulf between rich and poor. From Russia to America, across Western Europe and beyond, governments already unsettled by major shifts in geopolitical power were threatened by growing social unrest and the rise of socialism. And looming over them was the spectre of the Anarchist and the shadow of international terrorism. A Tsar and an Empress, Presidents and plutocrats were all vulnerable to the assassin's bombs and bullets, but so too was bourgeois society in its cafes and opera houses. It was a new kind of Terror that could strike anywhere and that permeated deep into the imagination of the times. Its true weapon, though, was not dynamite but fear itself: a fact quickly grasped by those whose job it was to protect the powerful. Yet in a credulous age, when hoaxers and forgers thrived, the fictions spun by police chiefs and their agent provocateurs were often no less beguiling. And out of the short-term actions of these forgotten individuals grew the noxious delusions of worldwide conspiracy that would poison the century to come. A masterly exploration of the strange twists and turns of history, The World That Never Was follows the interweaving lives of several key anarchists, and of the secret police who tracked them. Framed by the Paris Commune of 1871 and the 1905 revolution in St Petersburg, and spread across five continents, their's is the story of a generation that saw the dream of Utopia crumble, to be replaced by a dangerous desperation. Here is a revelatory portrait of an era with uncanny echoes of our own.

The Grand Challenge for Psychoanalysis ? and Neuropsychoanalysis: Taking on the Game

As Ebbinghaus (1908) tells us in the opening words of his popular textbook of psychology, “psychology has a long past but only a short history.” In my opinion, there are three foundational moments in the history of psychology and, paradoxically, all three are moments of great advancement in biology. First, in the long past of psychology, psychology did not exist as such but was part of philosophy. It is extremely interesting to understand why it has been necessary, at one point of time in the sixteenth century, to invent this field and to create a signifier – namely “psychology” – separate from philosophy, which enabled the field to distinguish itself from philosophy (Mengal, 2000/2001). In this century of religious violence, bare corpses lay everywhere and progresses in anatomy are major. In 1540, the German religious reformer Philippe Melanchthon publishes a book which comments the De anima of Aristotle and he completes the Aristotelian text with a long treaty of anatomy (Mengal, 2000/2001). On the basis of this new knowledge, Melanchthon attributes functions to the body which were previously reserved for the soul. The brain becomes the principal organ of sensory functions and displaces the heart as the seat of emotional life and of thought. To the Aristotelian position that all living beings, whether plant, animal, or human, to varying degrees possess a soul which organizes the body, Melanchthon opposes a dualistic anthropology which divides the human in body and soul. The two-dimensional “anthropologia” is articulated in “anatomia,” science of body, and “psychologia,” science of the soul. It is this new anthropology that is diffused into the world of the Reformation (Mengal, 2000/2001). The Dutch reformer Snellius (1594), for example, defines the body and the soul by their respective essential property: “The rational soul of man is the thought that, coupled with the body, completes man. (…) The physical things closer to natural bodies that move naturally, have an extension and for that reason occupy a space. (…) The faculty of the rational soul is the mind or will. Thought is the faculty of the soul to discourse and think about things which are and which are not.”1 (Snellius, 1594, pp. 26–27). It is as a philosopher that Rene Descartes proposes his dualist vision much in line with the reformist opinions. Descartes dissects animals and human cadavers and is familiar with the research on the flow of blood (Fuchs, 2001). He comes to the conclusion that the body is a complex device that is capable of moving without the soul, thus contradicting the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul. The metaphysical order, which states that the body exists by the soul, is broken.

The Fraternity of Metaphors

THE FRATERNITY OF METAPHORS: JEAN-LUC GODARD'S FILM SOCIALISME The moment an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or amusing craftsman, an honest or dishonest tradesman.Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism(1) JEAN LUC GODARD'S career in filmmaking began in the early 1950s when, as a young journalist (and lapsed anthropologist), he dabbled in some amateur and short documentary projects. His great breakthrough came with À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), and since then he has been directly involved in the production of over eighty films, many of which are major works of cinema. While there might seem to be discrete periods, or points of departure, in Godard's career (the heady days of the Nouvelle Vague, the Groupe Dziga Vertov phase, the mid-life 'autobiographical' turn, or, according...

Plato, Wilde, and Woolf: The Poetics of Homoerotic “Intercourse” in A Room of One's Own

This article places Woolf in the context of homoerotic literary ancestry. It suggests that the overall argument in A Room of One's Own owes a debt to Wilde's 1891 pamphlet The Soul of Man under Socialism. It also examines Woolf's controversial meditation on male–female collaboration and intercourse in A Room, and suggests a homoerotic reading of this meditation, drawing on images and ideas of literary transmission and creation from Plato's Symposium.

‘DEATH'S DREAM KINGDOM’: THE REPRESENTATION OF THE UNCONSCIOUS IN APOCALYPSE NOW

The film Apocalypse Now, first released in 1979, is now recognized as Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece. Inspired by Joseph Conrad's 19th century novella Heart of Darkness, the film tells the story of a journey upriver into a threatening interior where the protagonists face the challenge of attack from an unseen and savage enemy, disease, madness and death. The film can be ‘read’ from a number of different perspectives: as representing the USA's conflict with Vietnam, as a journey into man's soul or, from a psychoanalytic perspective, as representing the unconscious. Derived from this perspective, the author questions why Apocalypse Now continues to have such resonance. Working with Matte Blanco's theory of the mind which he saw as manifesting a form of logic, and which he called bi-logic, the author interrogates three significant scenes from the film and argues that they can be understood to represent increasingly deeper levels of the unconscious. It is this evocation which makes the film unforgettable.

Samuel Ibn Tibbo’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes: The Book of the Soul of ManRobinsonJames Samuel Ibn Tibbo’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes: The Book of the Soul of Man Mohr SiebeckTübingen, 2007, x, 660, €149.00ISBN 978-3-16-149067-5

Samuel Ibn Tibbo’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes: The Book of the Soul of ManRobinsonJames <i>Samuel Ibn Tibbo’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes: The Book of the Soul of Man</i> Mohr SiebeckTübingen, 2007, x, 660, €149.00ISBN 978-3-16-149067-5

Bettelheim: Living and Dying (review)

Reviewed by: Bettelheim: Living and Dying Kenneth Kidd David James Fisher. Bettelheim: Living and Dying. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 180 pp. $57.00 (pb). "Anyone who writes a biography," Freud insisted to Arnold Zweig in 1936, "is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it." David James Fisher opens his study of the controversial psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990) with this famous pronouncement, throwing down the gauntlet to the prevailing largely unflattering treatments of his subject. Bettelheim: Living and Dying isn't a biography per se but rather a volume with biographical tendencies, a collection of pieces written primarily about Bettelheim but also about his friend and fellow analyst Rudolf Ekstein (1912–2005). The book functions as eulogy and in fact includes memorial essays on Ekstein (Chapter 6) and Bettelheim (Chapter 9). The Ekstein-Bettelheim relationship is the subject of the longest chapter, Chapter 5, which includes reprints of twenty-two letters exchanged between them over several decades. Bettelheim: Living and Dying is also a memoir of sorts, detailing Fisher's relationship with Ekstein, his analyst for a decade, and also with Bettelheim, whom he befriended during the latter's final years. The book emerged from various essays and reviews, and all but Chapters 5 and 6 appeared previously in a 2003 German-language volume, Psychoanalytische Kulturkritik und die Seele des Menschen (Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul of Man). Perhaps thanks to its compositional history and its triangular energy, Bettelheim: Living and Dying is a curious book, engaging and often eloquent but not entirely persuasive as a rejoinder to Bettelheim's critics. At the time of his suicide in 1990, Bettelheim was one of the most respected psychologists in the world, praised for his work at the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School in Chicago and for his writings on the Holocaust, autism, child abuse, kibbutz life, and fairy tales. Since his death, a more troubling portrait of Bettelheim has emerged, culminating in Richard Pollak's The Creation of Dr. B (1997), the second and most critical of the three Bettelheim biographies that have appeared to date. Pollak follows Nina Sutton (1996) in exposing Bettelheim's [End Page 127] forged credentials, pretended acquaintance with Freud, plagiarized writings, and exaggerated claims of clinical success. For Sutton, such lies or distortions are merely unfortunate, evidence of the man's complexity; she maintains that, whatever his faults, Bettelheim was a gifted therapist. Pollak, on the other hand, presents Bettelheim as a liar and a tyrant, underscoring his sexist attitude and autocratic tendencies, even alleging the sexual abuse of girl patients. In the most recent biography (2002), Bettelheim's friend and literary agent Theron Raines defends Bettelheim as a humane practitioner of tough love. Fisher, an analyst and cultural historian, likewise mounts a defense of Bettelheim, through a series of essays both personal and scholarly. Fisher clearly wants to set the record straight about Bettelheim, which suggests at least a little faith in biographical truth. In the introduction, he outlines an alternative view of Bettelheim, describing him as a self-made analyst who functioned outside the psychoanalytic establishment by choice as well as by situation. Bettelheim, he asserts, was a maverick, even a "psychoanalytic gadfly, someone who cajoled others to examine their received opinions, who demystified pieties, and who punctured dogma and shibboleths" (5). At the Sonia Shankman School in Chicago, which Bettelheim ran for almost thirty years, he preferred to hire "amateurs who were emotionally responsive and intellectually curious" (4) rather than clinically trained professionals with less obvious levels of empathy and curiosity. Here and throughout the book, Fisher presents Bettelheim as a passionate lay analyst who championed and practiced cultural criticism, hence the wide array of topics on which he wrote. Fisher sees Bettelheim as Freud's heir in this regard. As for the charges that Bettelheim was tyrannical and even abusive toward others at the Shankman School, Fisher concedes Bettelheim's darker impulses but insists that the School's "hothouse atmosphere" makes impossible any easy understanding of such. "It will take more time," he writes, "to sort out the nature of...

Jamaica as America, America as Jamaica: Hauntings from the Past in Vincent Brown's The Reaper's Garden

The bleak moral vision in Vincent Brown's The Reaper's Garden offers to us a version of early America that is profoundly at odds with established, or at least popular, narratives of American historical development. It is also at odds with customary narratives of Caribbean history. These narratives deal as much about creativity as about destruction. They also see the merging of white and black in the crucible of slavery as producing not just death but also a viable Caribbean culture. Consequently, Brown's work is both a challenge to Caribbean orthodoxy and also a reiteration of long-standing jeremiads about how the settlement and exploitation of the Americas exemplified the darkness that is present in men's souls. Brown's vision of a Jamaica that looked like heaven but which was instead a hell on earth is compelling. I do wonder, however, whether in this hell there may have been some patches of sunlight that allow us to create a usable Jamaican past in which even planters might have some place.

Weber e o advento do novo

Distinguishing between the old and the new and analyzing the transition from the former to the latter are challenges that acquired unparalleled centrality in Max Weber's sociology of religion. This article examines how Weber dealt with these challenges and the inherent difficulties in his approach. For Weber, the transition from the old to the new necessarily requires something like a transformation of man's soul - or a spectacular break with supposedly traditional mindsets. The argument is that this conceptualization led him to see nonexistent breaks (for example, between the Lutheran and Calvinist mentalities) and to fail to perceive important breaks (for example, between present-day tolerance and that of former ages). By way of conclusion, the article contends that there is an analogy between Weber's sociology of religion and Aristotelian physics, and that Weber's view that historically significant transitions require a transformation of man's soul can be better understood in light of this analogy.

The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? by Slavoj Žižek , John Milbank , Creston Davis (review)

[MWS 10.1 (2010) 121-137] ISSN 1470-8078 Book Reviews Slavoj liiek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Girist: Paradox or Dialectic? (ed. Creston Davis; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 312 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-01271-3. $27.95 and £19.95 (hbk). In The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? the Slovenian Marxist author Slavoj iiZek and the British Anglo-Catholic theologian John Milbank team up in an exchange on the meaning of Christian theological heritage for contemporary radical social and political causes. Èiiek kicks off with a chapter titled 'The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity', to which Milbank replies with "The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agree ing with Slavoj tiZek'. 2iZek gives a shorter concluding statement and the volume is helpfully introduced by a North American commentator, Creston Davis. Although the book has nothing to say about Max Weber, or even about sociology in any ordi nary sense (Weber is never mentioned in the volume, and neither is any other canon ical sociological figure, other than Comte), it deserves consideration in these pages, if only for how strikingly it testifies to Weber's ever recurring importance as a caution ary break on the free flights of fancy of contemporary 'neo-metaphysical' writing in current 'radical' religious social thought. Enfant terrible of the European left intelligentsia and doyen of an idiosyncratic blend of Marxist-Lacanian psychoanalytic cultural theory, 2iZek turns his hand here to an appraisal of the dialectically coded revolutionary message of Christian teaching—an interest also visible in some of iiiek's earlier books such as The Fragile Absolute (2000) or Tlw Ticklish Subject (1999). Close antecedents to 2izek's in some ways rather familiar line of argument in this text are perhaps Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope—theorizing the dialectical persistence of the Gospel in its a-theist sublation in revolutionary praxis—along with numerous other twentieth century heterodox Marxist sources, from the thought of figures such as Kautsky, Lukâcs, Horkheimer, Adorno and the young Kracauer to Latin American liberation theology of the 1970s. The difference in 2iZek's case is that at just the moment when one might have thought that all of this had been quietly laid to rest, dissipated by postmodern irony, cultural difference and the demise of Marxism as an integral worldview, it all seems to come back—with a twist. For 2iiek, the mendacity of contemporary liberal pluralist discourse in Western democracies and its refraction in contemporary bien-pensant academic postmodernism is reason enough for an adventure of return to the thought of a politico-metaphysical 'absolute' of some kind. Like the French left philosopher Alain Badiou, liiek is impatient with multiculturalist and value pluralist positions in contemporary commentary that invoke moral universals— such as human rights—while simultaneously abjuring any commitment to structural social transformation capable of realising such universals and instead retreating into various evasive epistemological disclaimers.© Max Weber Studies 2010, Global Policy Institute, London Metropolitan University, 31 Jewry Street, London, EC3N 2EY. 122 Max Weber Studies Pivotal for 2iZek's argument in his contribution to this book is Hegel's reference to the 'monstrosity' of God's appearance in the finite flesh of a human individual, Jesus Christ. "This is the monstrous [das Ungeheuere] whose necessity we have seen', wrote Hegel in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (quoted by iiiek, p. 74). Ziiek reasons here that the historical 'death of God' along with everything evoked by this dictum—Nietzsche, secularization, atheism and the natural sciences, de transcendentalization, Weber's 'disenchantment', modernity — itself occu rs in the Crucifixion, in the dying of God on the Cross. Combining Meister Eckhart's and other medieval mystic visions of God's absolute self-sacrifice and self-extinction in the soul of man with Hegel's dialectical elaboration of God's sublation into Christ and Christ into the Holy Ghost qua 'World-Spirit', Ziiek holds that the revolution ary self-education of the collective human subject of world history is itself the working out of the process of divine self-negation in historical material division and multiplicity—in the 'non-All'. 'In the...

Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity David Punter Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity. John Paul Riquelme, ed. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 236. $25.00 (paper). This is a surprising book. One might initially expect to find a run-through of modernist texts with Gothic elements, and wonder how this could fit alongside the admirably comprehensive Gothic Modernisms, edited by Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, and published in 2001. But in fact Gothic and Modernism is quite different: it does not attempt to live up to any fictional notion of coverage; it addresses a very unusual canon—or anti-canon—of texts; and it is centred around a specific idea, or set of ideas, about what the Gothic has become in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, when it comes to expressing exactly what this idea is, the difficulty becomes apparent. It is in fact extremely complex, not least because, of course, it is articulated, to a greater or lesser degree, by ten different writers; but it also hinges on the suggestion that Gothic, which began life as a mode of grotesquerie and exaggeration, has now become horrifyingly assimilated into the [End Page 252] actual processes of history. The Gothic is no longer a perturbation or troubling of an accepted mainstream of historical documentation: it now records, in one sense, the actual dreadfulness of events and, in another, the state of a consciousness whose perceptions are coloured—darkly—by a sense of the imminence, if not the actuality, of catastrophe. John Paul Riquelme, in his introductory essay, speaks of a "doubling characteristic of Gothic writing" which "evokes the mixed, ambiguous character of human experience, which holds the potential for both destructive and creative transformation" (9): here the emphasis is very much on the destructive side—this is, after all, a collection of essays on the "dark" aspects of modernity—beginning with two interesting pieces on Wilde and Stoker. Riquelme's essay on The Picture of Dorian Gray reflects very acutely on the aesthetic "debate" between Wilde and Pater in the context of a highly developed opposition between Echo and Narcissus; Joseph Valente is eloquent on Stoker as a figure for the "metrocolonial." We then move on to a challenging essay by Patrick R. O'Malley called "Jude the Obscure and the End of the Gothic," which concludes with the following words: If Austen's Northanger Abbey rejected the Gothic because it was too foreign to English experience, Jude destroys it because it has become too familiar. Jude the Obscure signals the end of a certain kind of Gothicising novel as it does the end of an era; the Gothic as a genre has collapsed into the contemporary novel, because the Gothic has, indeed, come home to England. (75) Behind this claim lie two arguments: the first is to do with the battle for historical primacy during the nineteenth century between the Protestant and Catholic churches in England, the second centres on Havelock Ellis's remarks on the way in which the child corpses in Jude disturb the otherwise "realist" carapace of the novel. Each of these apparently wildly different trajectories converge on the question of what is Gothic and what is realist, and thus also on the question of what society does with the residues of its past, with the movements towards and away from, for example, "medievalising," with the depiction of the depths to which a man's soul might sink—all questions which obviously could be taken to summarise Matthew Lewis's The Monk, but which here spring into a different light—or, one might say, bearing in mind the notion of the "obscure," a different chiaroscuro. The next three essays move us across the atlantic, to consider Dorothy Scarborough's anti-Western The Wind, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. Susan Kollin's essay on Scarborough focuses on how American Gothic seeks historical correlatives in the absence of the stock European Gothic repertoire of castles, convents and related scenarios; Charles J. Rzepka's essay on Chandler is fascinating on the traces of medieval, chivalric ("white Gothic") legendry which ripple...

Human Rights and Genocide: The Work of Lauterpacht and Lemkin in Modern International Law

2008 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the adoption of the Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN General Assembly. These two instruments adopted and proclaimed by the then newly formed world body on successive days, 9 and 10 December 1948 respectively, represent two sides of one coin. Born of the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s, the United Nations Charter speaks of human rights and to the importance of the rule of law. The Genocide Convention and UDHR are integral to the pursuit of these aims. The work of two international lawyers, Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, whose personal and familial histories traverse the tragedies of 20th century Europe, was instrumental in the realization of these twin efforts. This article examines their respective contributions to contemporary international law by concentrating on their European experience from their youth in Central Europe and the early days of the League of Nations to their mature work up to and including the Nuremberg Judgment. Important events � whether serious, happy or unfortunate � do not change a man's soul, they merely bring it into relief, just as a strong gust of wind reveals the true shape of a tree when it blows off all its leaves. Such events highlight what is hidden in the shadows; they nudge the spirit towards a place where it can flourish.

Women's letters, literature and conscience in sixteenth‐century England

Early modern letters have long been utilized for the light they shed on the religious consciences of women. In his seminal work, Patrick Collinson outlined the ‘confessional’ nature of women's correspondence with reformation preachers such as John Knox, Edward Dering, Thomas Cartwright and Thomas Wilcox. Traditional studies have approached letters as historical documents, reliable depositories of facts there to be picked clean by the assiduous scholar. Approached as ‘literary’ texts, however, reading letters from the perspectives of genre, rhetoric and epistolary conventions, erodes (but does not entirely erase) simple notions of individual subjectivity, and letters as ‘windows on men's souls’: religious self‐representation instead appears as conscious, strategic, fluctuating and contested. Perhaps surprisingly given the religious turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women's everyday correspondence, by its very nature pragmatic, registers little concerning religion. The epistolary representation of religious conscience it will, therefore, be argued in this essay most clearly emerges through situations of conflict or social negotiation. The essay will seek to explore the ways in which women constructed religious selves in correspondence by examining letters produced in a range of situations and performing a variety of functions. These include letters from women writing to extricate themselves or husbands and family from accusations of recusancy; letters of maternal rebuke chiding sons for lack of piety or irreligious behaviour; letters of religious nonconformists which were ‘scribally’ published or printed for posterity; and women's correspondence with male confessors.

The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment

The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment . Joanna Moncrieff. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 278 pp., $95.00. In the gloomiest of days during the American Revolution when George Washington's soldiers were enduring a cold, poorly clothed, and hungry winter at Valley Forge in December 1776, Tom Paine wrote, "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country." There is something of a gloom hanging over the revolution against involuntary, biological psychiatry. Like the British Empire at the time of American's War of Independence, organized psychiatry and the drug companies have all the money, all the power, and most of the big victories. What does the opposition to modern psychiatry have on its side? What armaments are in the hands of those few who stand up for independence from oppressive and irrational biological psychiatry? We have the scientific truth and right principles, at this point spoken by a few undaunted, courageous truth speakers. Joanna Moncrieff is one of these few truth speakers. I should begin with a disclosure of conflict of interest. Joanna Moncrieff and I get together on occasion at professional meetings, we've shared a couple of speech platforms in London, and I like her and respect her very much. We correspond occasionally. She is a board member of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, the organization I founded decades ago. If she didn't live on that island (England) so far away, I'm sure we'd know each other better. So I was prepared to like her book and maybe, unconsciously, to be generous toward her. Why generous? Because long ago I learned to mute my disappointment with my colleagues in psychiatry-even the ones I like. No disappointment here! Dr. Moncrieff's book impressed me with its scientific precision, its incisiveness, its honesty, and its courage. She masterfully weaves together science and philosophy. Although written from a scientific perspective, the prose is incisive. She writes with a rare determination to make herself clear and accomplishes her aim with easily readable prose. She does not waffle about her conclusions as one might expect by a psychiatrist with academic credentials and appointments. The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatments delivers what is says it will. Dr. Moncrieff sets her observations within two alternative models of explanations. One is biological model, which she calls the disease-centered model. Its first two premises are "Drugs help an abnormal brain state" and "Therapeutic effects of the drugs derived from their effects on presumed disease pathology." The paradigm, of course, is insulin for diabetes. Dr. Moncrieff proposes and ultimately defends a second paradigm, the drug-centered model. This drug-centered model begins by understanding how drugs really work. Its first two premises are "Drugs create an abnormal brain state" and "Therapeutic effects derived from the impact of the drug-induced state on behavioral and emotional problems." The model is alcohol for anxiety. She debunks the notion that psychiatric drugs are specific for diseases and cites scientific literature calling into question claims for effectiveness. …

The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (review)

Hutson, Lorna. 2007. The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. $99.00 he. 383 pp.Anthony DiMatteoNew York Institute of TechnologyWe usually speak of casting suspicion or having it raised, but in these times when terrorism and counter-terrorism can be hard to distinguish, we have had to relearn what it means to invent suspicion. That there is a long history of individuals and governments inventing such a thing - of generating suspicion about those persons walke in the night, or sleep in the day, as William Lambarde prescribed for Elizabethan constables (Hutson 331) should at least give us pause to suspect our own suspicions. Indeed, the use of suspicion, whether there is something to be suspicious about or not, has comprised a master political art in modernity, and perhaps the very hallmark of modernity, with techniques and goals first identified by Machiavelli.No wonder the arts of suspicion are powerfully displayed in English Renaissance drama, which from one perspective can be seen as responding to monopolistic, centrist pressures from above - despite royal proclamations by Queen Elizabeth I not to make windows men's souls, or by James I that commoners had their own Solomon-like conscience when acting as jurors. Hutson convincingly develops another view of the prevalence of suspicion in the drama of George Gascoigne,Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, a view from below, as it were, turning the Foucauldian approach on its head. The English common man and woman were more and more participating in forensic inquiry, as evidenced by the great amount of litigious activities going on in the final decades of the sixteenth century. The playwrights hold a mirror not up to nature but to the motives and consequences of a society in a chronic state of suspicion, as they were trained to do not only by their own experiences but by their Roman forerunners in drama - Plautus and especially Terence - whose works were often cited in Roman law books. The forensic rhetoric of Roman New Comedy, with its ability to summon up realities that may or may not exist, had a pervasive effect across all the genres of English Renaissance drama as Hutson demonstrates, provocatively showing how this development in Tudor and Jacobean drama links to major reformations in the understanding and practice of law and justice.The connections that Hutson identifies have roots in the classical ideal that acknowledges poets as legislators, giving rules for wedded life, building towns, and engraving laws on tablets, in Horace's impressive formulation of the Orphic archetype. In Hutson's reading, when we weigh evidence for and against, raising as well as reflecting upon causes for why people act, we are like poets weaving stories, entertaining conjectural answers to questions of who, what, when, where, how and why. We see into evidence so that, at least in our minds, we can judge for ourselves and sound plausible to others, our accounts taken as socially and legally valid. From the perspective of forensic rhetoric Hutson writes a complex history of the relations of law and literature in Tudor and Jacobean England, showing the importance of poets who were trained in law such as Thomas Norton, Thomas Sackville, Christopher Yelverton, and John Foxe. From Cicero and Quintilian, they learned a forensic conception of narrative that aimed to weave together circumstances and testimonies a seamless account, the intelligible spring from the accidental in Paul Ricoeur's phrase, which Hutson finds especially useful in understanding how emplotment (muthos) functions as both matter and arrangement in Aristode's conception of mimesis. Hutson charts how this forensic training - in making one's account of some action sound true by mounting artificial and inartificial proofs - filtered throughout early modern England as processes of justice involved more and more people. …

Abode of the soul of humans, animals and objects in Mongolian folk belief

The soul of man resides in different parts of the body on each day of the month. The concerned body part should be handled with care, as if it is hurt, it causes extreme harm. The yurt, just like animals, also has a soul. The paper presents five small hand-books — from the collection of the Oriental Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, from the St. Petersburg Oriental Collection of the Russian Academy and from private possession — indicating the abode of the soul in humans, the yurt and animals.

Get Thee Right: Lessons from Romeo's Apothecary

Get Thee Right: Lessons from Romeo's Apothecary