Myth Of Paradise Research Articles

Paradise Lost in Derrida and Agamben: onto-theology of animal life

ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore the philosophical resonance of the theological notion of Paradise in the works of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida through the question of the Paradisiacal belonging of animal life. What is the significance of Paradise for these authors? This essay undertakes the search for the meaning of Paradise by way of these thinkers’ assessment of animal or creaturely life. I argue that their differing attitudes towards the life of the animal or creature expose a fundamental discord concerning exactly this issue: the significance of theology, and the myth of Paradise and the Fall. To be precise, it is argued that Derrida means to preclude the narrative of the Fall. Agamben, on the other hand, takes the animal as creature, and thus as a proper theological subject – which in this context means an Edenic exile – and accordingly as a proper subject of redemption. So, where Derrida intervenes in an encounter between human and animal prior to Paradise, Agamben joins the story after man was driven from it. In turn, this essay covers the issue of Derrida and Agamben’s messianic terminologies, the ontology of the animal as being-after, and ultimately, the conceptual understanding of Paradise.

Women (Re)Writing Milton

Women (Re)Writing Milton

Expulsados Del Paraíso. Motivos genesíacos en tres filmes de iniciación: The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955), Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955) y El espíritu de la colmena (Víctor Erice, 1973)

This essay proposes a new approach to three fi lms, The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955), Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955) and El espíritu de la colmena (Víctor Erice, 1973), by comparing and analysing structural and audiovisual elements that refer to the Fall of Man and Expulsion from Paradise Myth as a coming-of-age tale.

Refashioning Paradise in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus

This paper explores how Helena Maria Viramontes deconstructs the myth of paradise in her novel, Under the Feet of Jesus. California, the setting of the novel, has been portrayed as “a Second Eden,” or “paradise” on earth, through American mass media and culture. What is problematic is that it effaces exploited Mexican migrant workers. This study demonstrates that Viramontes deconstructs the myth by offering the reality of Mexican migrant workers’ hardship. Furthermore, it demonstrates that through Estrella, Viramontes shows the potential of building a new paradise. In the refashioned paradise, Viramontes presents Estrella as a Christ-like figure. And it is a cosmopolitan paradise in which the citizenship is extended to Mexican and other non-white migrant workers without suffering exploitation and racial discrimination.

The design philosophy of Edenic gardens: tracing ‘Paradise Myth’ in landscape architecture

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the Eden mythology in both western and eastern cultures, and its reflection on people’s perception and use of nature. It aims to examine how cultural ideologies and systems of beliefs in relation to Eden have affected landscape making and how landscape icons influenced other cultures subsequently. This study describes how narratives of Eden evolved and influenced landscape design by explaining the narratives of Paradise and Arcadia in eastern and western cultures as two distinct landscape narratives, with a brief history of their emergence and evolution. It discusses the ways in which landscape architecture reflects the prevailing attitudes towards nature in a society by studying the ancient world’s philosophies and ideologies as a starting-point for this investigation. The paper then focuses on the Persian paradise garden and explains the notion of iconography, as a visual explanation of an idea in landscape design. It projects the transformation of Persian paradise gardens’ icons and patterns in landscape architecture through historical and spatial explorations.

Holiday destinations: The myth of the lost paradise?

• Similarities are identified in the promotional elements of tourism destinations. • We raise the question of the existence of cultural elements evoking similarities. • Common elements are identified in the mythologies from different civilizations. • We link mythology with some tourism promotional elements through a general model. • Lost Paradise is proposed as cultural element of evocation in the promotion. • Main elements of the Lost Paradise myth: Paradise-Garden, Island, the Good Savage . • We provide some examples of tourism destinations adjustments to this myth.

The Myth of the State of Nature: Extract From Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes

The Myth of the State of NatureExtract From Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes Louis Althusser Translated by G. M. Goshgarian [End Page 16] The State of Nature is a mythic state in which idealist philosophers imagine that people lived before entering the state of society: Robinson Crusoe’s solitude, for example, or a community without the “disadvantages” of society as we know it. In many religions, this State of Nature is called paradise. To take the example of Christianity, paradise was the condition of a human couple whom God created without sin and entrusted to the goodness of nature. Nature was generous then: it provided humanity with nourishment and, what is more—this is important—it was transparent for them. Not only was it enough, to satisfy one’s hunger and thirst, to stretch out one’s hand to pick fruit that was always ripe; it was also enough for Adam to see something with his eyes or take it in hand in order to obtain full knowledge of it. Contrary to what is all too often supposed, people had the right to know all things: this knowledge was provided by the senses, was identical to intelligence in man, was identical to the words designating it, and was perfectly immediate and transparent. Adam did not have to work, produce, or seek in order to know. He knew, as the “Christian philosopher” Malebranche puts it, “by simple sight.”1 The truth of things was in things, in their empirical existence, and it was enough to extract it from them by simply looking in order to possess it. The abstract was identical to the concrete. This image typifies, better than any other, the theory of knowledge known as empiricism—which, as we shall see, has not disappeared along with the religious myth of paradise. There is, however, something else in this myth: the idea that nature was generous and that it was enough to reach out and pick fruit that was always in easy reach. In a word, people did not have to work to eat any more than they had to work to know. There is, as will readily be seen, an unmistakable relationship between the empiricist notion of knowledge and the fact that people did not have to work to produce their means of subsistence. In one case as in the other, Nature, or objects, or the object, suffices for everything. There is no need to transform nature to satisfy human needs; the answer is inscribed in the object in advance. It is enough to extract it; this extraction is, in its simplicity and immediacy, the empiricist form of abstraction. Hence it is obvious that idealist philosophy can represent such abstractions, in which all people live, as the simple effect of contact between human beings and nature, that is, between human beings and objects. At the same time, it is obvious that this distorted conception of abstraction bears on both the practice of knowledge, reduced to “simple sight,” and the practice of production, reduced to the mere picking of fruit that is always ripe and always in easy reach (“handgreiflich,” Hegel).2 There was something else again in this myth, of course: the idea that human relations are as transparent as the relations between people and natural objects. Since all the problems of the relations between people and nature have been settled in advance by the generosity of nature, it is understandable that relations between people should display this transparency. Thus believers or philosophers endow man in this state of paradise or nature with a body that is itself transparent to his soul or intelligence. The body is, consequently, no longer Plato’s “tomb” or “shroud”:3 a barrier to knowledge of nature or the self that comes between human intelligence or the human soul and the nature of bodies [End Page 17] or of things, this opaque thing that desires and feels hunger, pleasure, and pain. The body is simply a tool that obeys man without resisting, has neither passions nor desires nor an unconscious and, since it is nothing other than practical transparency, is, by the same token, theoretical transparency. Under these conditions, in which...

Deconstructing Paradise and the Lessons from Samoa's 1992–2001 Tourism Master Plan

Tourism master planning for small island developing states (SIDS) has been framed and dominated by donor aid agencies and their executive institutions including the World Bank, various United Nations agencies, and regional development banks as well as the European Union. The paper argues that for the South Pacific, this framing has been a western construct based, in part, on the myth of paradise and notions of Saidian “Other”. The Samoa Plan for 1992–2001 is a typical example of this problem, which has wider implications for other SIDS. The paper undertakes, from a historical perspective, a detailed critical analysis of the plan (undertaken by the then EU Tourism Council of the South Pacific) concluding that a) the flaws and contradictions in tourism master planning could have been avoided by a more careful reading of classic planning texts from as early as the 1960s, and b) the plans are too complicated, take little account of local sensibilities, and fail to recognise the balance that needs to be struck between national plans and the regional context in geographic locations where individual island states are, in effect, too small to ignore intra-regional cooperation.

Prehistoric California: archaeology and the myth of paradise

In this anthology, Mark Raab and Terry Jones present a series of research articles that dispel lingering mythologies about California s They begin with the most enduring notion that of an essentially stable, benign climate presenting evidence that prehistoric climate flux played a significant role in culture change. From there, Raab and Jones seek to dispel the myth of California as a natural cornucopia. They show that prehistoric foragers themselves had the capacity to negatively affect their animal food supplies, and that what is often considered the premier vegetal food, the acorn, appeared much later than many suppose in the diets of native peoples. This collection effectively summarizes the major debates surrounding California archaeology and provides a solid basis for a new, more nuanced view of the state s prehistory.

Garden of the Empire: Catherine's Appropriation of the Crimea

This paper investigates the ramifications of the garden trope, as Catherine the Great and Grigorii Potemkin applied it to the Crimea after Russia's annexation in 1783. Schönle argues that Catherine conceived of the province as a kind of garden and that she did so in order to bolster the identification of the Crimea with the garden of Eden and thus appeal to the paradise myth that became an intrinsic part of Russia's ideology of imperial power. The Crimean garden was meant to exemplify the benefits of her loving and protective rule, one that enables multicultural coexistence, eschews the risks of assimilationist imperial policies, and yet brings about a moral transformation of the subjugated population. In both its physical and ethnic geography, the Crimean garden claims universality in that it foregrounds an eclectic diversity of species and peoples. Catherine ascribed religious overtones to the garden trope, and she did so in opposition to a western Enlightenment definition of empire and civility.

The paradise myth in eighteenth-century Russia: utopian patterns in early secular Russian literature and culture

The paradise myth in eighteenth-century Russia: utopian patterns in early secular Russian literature and culture

L'arbre interdit du paradis aztèque

The Forbidden Tree of the Aztec Paradise The Aztec myth of paradise lost, according to which all the misfortunes of the world resulted from a creature having plucked the fruit of a forbidden tree and having been exiled to earth with its fellow-creatures, is generally attributed to Spanish missionary influence. The Pre-Columbian authenticity of this myth is demonstrated by numerous and highly significant variants and by ancient rituals which reenacted them. However the similarities with the Bible are still extant, the more so while the first trangression appears to have conditioned by what might be called the salvational structure of Aztec religion.

Myths of Paradise Lost in Pre-Hispanic Central Mexico [and Comments and Reply

Reconstruction and comparative analysis of the Central Mexican myths that deal with the first phase of the creation of the world demonstrate that they all tell the same story. They attempt to explain how the world came to be what it is, the result of a mediation between two poles-the one eternal life in perfect harmony with the creators, the other life in darkness, alienation from the creators, and death. The passage from the first to the second is brought about by defilement-creation or illicit procreation-and has as its compensations the earth, separated from heaven by fire and/or by trees and bearers of heaven; Venus's first glimmer; cooking fire; cultivated plants; and the succession of generations. The mediation between these two poles is effected by the sacrifice which, by introducing the sun and the moon, causes day and night to alternate and restores life in the hereafter. Through systematic comparison it is possible to establish equivalences and to clarify the symbolic meaning of several elements. This comparison also shows that the Tamoanchan myth of paradise, often said to be influenced by the Bible, owes nothing to the West. Finally, one can detec connections between the myths of Central Mexico and the myths of the Mayas and the Mixtecs and, in one case, with modern Totonac, Tepechua, Popoloca, and Chontal miths, connections that argue for the unity of Mesoamerican thought.

REVIEWS

REVIEWS The Paradise Myth. BY JOHN ARMSTRONG. Pp. xii+154. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. 50s. net. J. B. BEER J. B. BEER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXI, Issue 84, 1970, Pages 524–526, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXI.84.524 Published: 01 October 1970