Possibility Of Redemption Research Articles

How to redeem a corrupted world: The aporia of negative theology in the thought of Theodor Adorno

In Minima Moralia, Adorno talks about a ‘messianic light’ which shines from beyond the corrupted world, offering the possibility of redemption from suffering. Theological statements like these have created significant controversy within the literature on Adorno, with interpreters like Hent de Vries and Peter Gordon arguing that the ‘messianic light’ depicts a transcendent negativity in line with negative theology. This is in opposition to the materialist interpretation, with interpreters like Jay Bernstein who oppose this reading, arguing that Adorno’s use of messianic language is only a metaphorical means to express a negative approach to finite, material experience. In this article, I argue that an ambiguity concerning the source of redemption in Adorno’s work prevents either interpretation from being conclusive. Adorno vacillates between locating hope in sensuous experience or in spiritual negativity. In response, I offer a reading of Adorno’s notion of the object’s preponderance that fulfils both the materialist concern with concrete mediation as well as the theological notion that the messianic light cannot arise from the existing world. The experience of the retreat of the object’s preponderance explains our consciousness of a negative notion of redemption that transcends our current cultural circumstance.

Comments on Macdonald, What Would Be Different

AbstractIain Macdonald suggests that, in spite of their differences, Adorno and Heidegger are alike in advancing what he calls critiques of actuality and “models of redemptive possibility.” I argue that that similarity is superficial in light of the difference between their conceptions of actuality and possibility. For Adorno, as for the metaphysical tradition since Aristotle, possibility and necessity are defined in terms of actuality. The privileging of actuality, Heidegger maintains, foregrounds entities and obscures the question of being.

Deconstructing Orientalist Representation of The East in Yasmina Khadra’s Sirens of Baghdad

Because of the blatant, direct persecution, and misrepresentation of all Iraqis, which comes from an Orientalist’s ignorant perception of the Orient (Iraqi), this study will be conducted to show the different misrepresentations of Arabs and Iraqis by the American tropes in a novel entitled The Sirens of Baghdad written by an Algerian novelist, Khadra Yasmina. The current study explores orientalists’ misrepresentation and the Western gaze towards the Middle East, especially the Iraqi character. Khadra portrays the complex life of Iraqis during the invasion of 2003, in the context of us versus them. Drawing on the critical framework of Orientalism theory by the theorist Edward Said, this paper examines how Sirens of Baghdad deconstructs Orientalist representations by giving voice to marginalized perspectives and resisting the erasure of local knowledge and agency. Khadra's narrative subverts simplistic depictions of “Islamic extremism”, highlighting the multifaceted social, political, and psychological factors that shape an individual's path towards violence and, ultimately, the possibility of redemption and nonviolent resistance. The study emphasizes the importance of embracing nonviolent resistance which represents a powerful alternative to the spiral of violence, gesturing towards the possibility of reconciliation and moral progress.

A Tale of Two Tweets: What Factors Predict Forgiveness of Past Transgressions on Social Media?

As more of our lives take place online, it is increasingly common for public figures to have their current image tarnished by their mistakes and transgressions in what is often the distant past. Three experiments (N = 2,296) found that judgments of a public figure who tweeted racist statements in the past were less harsh when more time had passed and when the public figure was younger at the time of the tweet. However, politics also played a powerful role. Independent of time and age, liberals allowed less possibility of redemption for anti-Black tweets, while conservatives were less forgiving for anti-White tweets. Such partisan differences extended not only to moral judgments of the individual, but also general moral principles and participants' subjective perceptions of the situation itself, including subjective temporal distance from the tweet, the subjective age of the public figure, and the current relevance of the past statements.

Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters: Reflections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID

Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters: Reflections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID

The Gift of Interruption: Saint John of the Cross and Covid-19

This article contends that St. John of the Cross provides a helpful perspective on envisioning the redemptive possibilities of COVID-19 through the paradigm of “interruption.” After reflecting on Old and New Testament stories of traumatic disruption, a biblical and theological foundation is established for redemptive outcomes of life-altering interruption. Next, John’s dark night of the soul theology is discussed in relation to persistent seasons of physical and emotional challenge. Three interruptive qualities of his night—discomfort, disillusionment, and discouragement—reveal his perspective on its redeeming potential for Christian faith. Then, through interrogating contemporary notions of (1) happiness, (2) success, and (3) self-worth, John shows how they often work against the transforming capacity of faith. In doing so, COVID-19 can be envisioned as a gift of redemptive interruption. The article concludes with a summary of key points.

The Assassination of Lieutenant Joe Petrosino: A Contested Symbol in the Mainstream and Italian-American Press in the Early 20th Century

Recently, scholars have looked at the ethnic press through a social constructionist lens, examining the process through which immigrants developed a sense of identity and the role of print culture in forming “imagined communities” (Anderson). Here, I analyze the coverage of the 1909 assassination of police Lieutenant Petrosino in both mainstream and Italian-American press and popular culture. This shocking event ignited a debate over the nature and origin of the Mafia and the dangerousness of the Italian community, a debate involving discourses of racial difference, immigration restriction, and the capability of Italians to assimilate. This debate became an important arena in which Italian immigrants defined themselves and their place in America. Italians were represented predominantly in the context of criminality, so immigrant writers constructed their own counter-representations in newspapers, re-coding stereotypes and negotiating a collective Italian-American identity. In the press, Petrosino became a contested symbol: on the one hand, of the rhetoric of the inclusiveness of the American melting pot and, on the other, of the possibility of redemption from the discredit that the actions of a small minority threw on the whole community.

전염병 서사에서 나타나는 혐오의 변증법: 그레그 베어(Greg Bear)의 다윈 시리즈(Darwin Series)를 중심으로

Greg Bear’s Darwin series consisting of Darwin’s Radio (1999) and its sequel Darwin’s Children (2003) portrays the eschatological crisis caused by an endogenous retrovirus named SHEVA which causes a great pandemonium and disgust among people. This retrovirus triggers speciation by rapidly evolving the next generation in utero but does so in a way that plunges the world into chaos. The rapid outbreak and activation of SHEVA triggers widespread panic and social turmoil, which in turn lead to large-scale acts of violence against the infected. The chaos and resultant cruelty shown in both narratives arouse questions as to the paradoxical principles of disgust. On the surface level, Darwin series depicts how social conflicts derive from disgust among people who project their fear and horror onto the minorities while it also grapples with disgust on an evolutionary dimension. Evoking the possibility of redemption of the human world, creating a counter-discourse to human conflict and disgust. The posthuman existence of Shevites, a new species of humanity, represents the blurred distinction between nature and culture, not to speak of that of human and nonhuman; this post-humanity breaks with Cartesian dualism and thereby demands a new epistemology which presupposes network of human and nonhuman and their interrelatedness, negating anthropocentrism.

Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community

Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community

The Philippine Craftsman: Empire, Education, and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition

Shortly after the Philippines was annexed by the United States in 1898, representations of Filipinos in the US popular imagination became inseparable from the sensationalist Philippine exhibition at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Of the more than 1,000 Filipinos and indigenous peoples who made up this “live exhibition,” the Bontoc Igorots, portrayed as savage “dog eaters,” became representative of the United States’ new colonial subjects. By the time of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, however, exhibitions of the Philippines centered on the handicraft of Filipinos under US tutelage to showcase the success of US industrial education in uplifting and civilizing Filipino savagery. This article examines the 1915 exposition’s Philippine exhibit organized by the Bureau of Education, which also published the magazine, The Philippine Craftsman, a publication devoted to the “advancement of industrial education in the public schools of the Philippines.” In analyzing the exhibition rationale of the Bureau of Education, this article demonstrates how the discourse of craft was central to the US imperial cultivation of a civilized “Philippine Craftsman” and embedded in the exhibition practices of empire, which, in turn, inculcated fairgoers in an imperial craft discourse that naturalized territorial expansion, reinforced racial hierarchies, and promoted faith in the redemptive possibilities of industrial capitalism and consumer culture.

Imagery, Irony, and Transcendence in Carl Jonas Love Almqvist's The Queen's Tiara

Imagery, Irony, and Transcendence in Carl Jonas Love Almqvist's <i>The Queen's Tiara</i>

The chosen and the unchosen: How eligibility for liver transplant influences the lived experiences of patients with advanced liver disease

Advanced liver disease is often uncurable and fatal. Liver transplant is the only curative option for patients with advanced, irreversible liver disease, but the need for new livers far exceeds the supply. Patients with the greatest need as well as the greatest likelihood of benefit, based on a complex array of biomedical and psychosocial considerations, are prioritized for transplant. The opportunity to receive a life-saving surgery no doubt has enormous consequences for patients and their healthcare providers, as does the absence of that opportunity. But these consequences are poorly characterized, especially for patients deemed poor candidates for liver transplant. Through in-depth interviews with patients living with advanced liver disease and the providers who care for them, we explore how eligibility status affects illness experiences, including patients’ interactions with clinicians, knowledge about their disease, expectations for the future, and efforts to come to terms with a life-limiting illness. We describe how the clinical and social requirements needed to secure eligibility for liver transplant lend themselves to a clinical and cultural logic that delineates “worthy” and “unworthy” patients. We describe how providers and candidates discuss the possibility of moral redemption for such patients through transplant surgeries, a discourse notably absent among patients not eligible for transplant.

A Study of the Aesthetic Stylization of Polanski's Films

Polanski's personal experiences during his childhood are directly reflected in his expression of visual narratives, which in most of his films are full of rebellion and violence, against power, against class, against religion. In his conception, the underdog is never the object of sympathy, and with the help of a single sharp instrument that simultaneously cuts through the surface skin, he leaves his protagonists without the possibility of redemption.

Suffering with Style

Suffering with Style

A Foucauldian Reading of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good in a Socio-Political Context

One of the pioneering women dramatists of British literature, Timberlake Wertenbaker provides both a criticism of post-war Britain and propaganda of the ameliorating function of theatre in her play Our Country’s Good (1988). As a play based on the novel The Playmaker (1987) by Thomas Keneally, Our Country’s Good builds upon the issue of redemptive effects of theatre by portraying a group of convicts on a ship that takes them to Australia in the eighteenth century. Our Country’s Good portrays different authority figures consisting of those who believe in traditional means of punishment and who suggest the possibility of redemption through theatre as an alternative to severe punishment. It is possible to analyse the conflicting views of officers concerning the appropriate punishment methods of the convicts from a Foucauldian perspective. This reading draws on Foucault’s proposal of a penal reform that requires the use of carceral transformation through work and exercise resulting in the correction of delinquents’ behaviour. This paper focuses on the social function of punishment and analyses the representation of the conflation between theatre and punishment in Wertenbaker’s play in light of the dominant ideology concerning these issues in Britain in the Thatcher years.

Early Modern Spectatorship: Interpreting English Culture 1500–1780. Ed. Ronald Huebert and David McNeil.

<i>Early Modern Spectatorship: Interpreting English Culture 1500–1780</i>. Ed. Ronald Huebert and David McNeil.

Rewriting Universes: Post-Brexit Futures in Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe Quartet

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a new strand of British fiction that grapples with the causes and consequences of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union. Building on Kristian Shaw’s pioneering work in this new literary field, this article shifts the focus from literary fiction to science fiction. It analyzes Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe quartet—comprised of Europe in Autumn (pub. 2014), Europe at Midnight (pub. 2015), Europe in Winter (pub. 2016) and Europe at Dawn (pub. 2018)—as a case study in British science fiction’s response to the recent nationalistic turn in the UK. This article draws on a bespoke interview with Hutchinson and frames its discussion within a range of theories and studies, especially the European hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. It argues that the Fractured Europe quartet deploys science fiction topoi to interrogate and criticize the recent rise of English nationalism. It further contends that the Fractured Europe books respond to this nationalistic turn by setting forth an estranged vision of Europe and offering alternative modalities of European identity through the mediation of photography and the redemptive possibilities of cooking.

Black Lives Matter and the politics of redemption

This article explores the role of practical political theory in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. I argue that BLM represents a multifaceted engagement with the complicated politics of redemption that lies at the heart of American democracy. In one sense, BLM stands for the integration of black life into the framework of political value, and thus for a redemption of the promise of ‘justice for all’. In another, it is a challenge to the principles themselves, viewing justice as a threat to be managed, rather than as a principle to be redeemed. Exploring the praxis of this movement, organized both against and within the possibility of redemption, will enable us to more effectively characterize the limitations of a politics grounded in the theorization of justice and generate a richer understanding of the possibility for practical political theory to simultaneously employ and critique the politics of redemption.

Islam and the Possibility of World Redemption

Abstract Rosenzweig’s account of Islamic universalism might lead us to question the extent of that universalism itself. In the context of Islam, it is widely understood that the possibility of redemption is available to “righteous” believers. But what about the world as a whole, the world beyond the realm of righteous believers? These questions have not elicited straightforward responses, as Muslim theologians have long debated the question of who exactly can be saved and admitted into paradise and God’s mercy. In the present essay, I consider certain influential Muslim theological approaches to the topic of world redemption, or universal salvation, with a focus on Sunni thought.

Rosenzweig on Human Redemption: Neither Nothing nor Everything, but Only Something

Abstract Despite Franz Rosenzweig’s unequivocal condemnation of Gershom Scholem, his own view of the world and the possibility of human redemption therein is in some respect very close to the nihilistic sensibility and its gnostic underpinning. Although Rosenzweig obviously did not consider himself either a nihilist or a gnostic, the latter term can well be applied even to Rosenzweig’s mature speculation in The Star of Redemption and other writings from the 1920s. In spite of his initial rejection of negative theology in the Star, the swerve of Rosenzweig’s path winds its way to an apophasis of the apophasis, a turn that is encapsulated in the astounding statement, “That God is nothing becomes just as much a figurative sentence as the other one, that he is truth.”