Power Of Death Research Articles

Risk prediction in patients with STEMI undergoing primary PCI: an observational study

Purpose: Acute Coronary Syndromes (ACS), and especially STEMI (ST segment elevation myocardial infarction), are one of the main causes of death in the western countries. Many scoring systems were developed to help physicians to correctly manage risk stratification of patients' invasive procedures, ranging from those based on clinical features like ACEF and EuroSCORE, to those derived from angiographic characteristics, like SYNTAX Score. The aim of this study was to evaluate the predictive role of ACEF, EuroSCORE and SYNTAX Score and to compare their accuracy for patients with STEMI undergoing primary angioplasty (PCI). Methods: All consecutive patients with diagnosis of STEMI undergoing primary PCI at our Institution between July 2002 and December 2005 were enrolled. ACEF and EuroSCORE have been calculated for all of them, and SYNTAX SCORE for consecutive 100 patients. The primary end-point was the predictive accuracy of the different scoring systems compared with AUC (Areas Under Curves) for MACE (defined as composite of death for cardiac and non-cardiac causes, non-fatal myocardial re-infarction, repeated angioplasty or bypass grafting, and global mortality), death and stent thrombosis. Results: 414 patients with diagnosis of STEMI were enrolled; after a median follow-up of 61±19,5 months 38% of MACE, 10,7% of death and 1,7% of stent thrombosis occurred. ACEF and EuroSCORE showed low accuracy for MACE (AUC 0.549, 95% CI 0,496-0,602 and 0.579, 95% CI 0,526-0,631), while both of them have a good predictive power for death (AUC 0.737, 95% CI 0,687-0,782 and 0.758, 95% CI 0,710-0,802) and stent thrombosis (AUC 0.766, 95% CI 0,711-0,814 and 0.601, 95% CI 0,541-0,659), without a significant difference; moreover EuroSCORE demonstrated to have a better ability than ACEF for stroke (AUC 0.848, 95% CI 0,805-0,885 and 0.588, 95% CI 0,533-0,641, p=0.015). In a subgroup analysis on 100 patients, SYNTAX Score results most accurate to predict MACE (AUC 0.891, 95% CI 0,531-0,728), while ACEF performed best for global mortality (AUC 0.802, 95% CI 0,710-0,875). Conclusions: ACEF and EuroSCORE demonstrate high accuracy to predict the risk of death in patients with STEMI undergoing primary PCI, while performed worse for MACE, for which SYNTAX SCORE showed a good performance; ACEF in particular resulted an easy and accurate tool.

Smuggling, Betrayal, and the Handle of a Gun: Death, Laughter, and the Narcocorrido

A comparison of two narcocorridos, Los Tigres del Norte's “Contrabando y traición” (1974) and Alfredo Ríos's “El Katch” (2009), highlights both continuity and change in core features of the genre. Whereas Los Tigres del Norte demonstrate a greater degree of restraint, a change of perspective enables Ríos to enthusiastically celebrate the illicit lifestyle of the narco-trafficker. The lighthearted musical setting of “El Katch” emphasizes personal autonomy by degrading the sense of the power of death, but a preoccupation with mortality remains, following Ríos beyond the song's boundaries into his off-stage reality.

Importance of Monocyte Deactivation in Determining Early Outcome after Ventricular Assist Device Implantation

Patients undergoing mechanical circulatory support using ventricular assist devices (VADs) experience a postoperative mixed antagonistic (proinflammatory and antiinflammatory) response syndrome. This response can result in immunoparalysis, exposing VAD recipients to infection and interfering with patient recovery despite adequate hemodynamic support. We undertook the present study to evaluate whether postoperative monocytic human leukocyte antigen-DR (mHLA-DR) expression is of prognostic value for mortality or infection of VAD recipients during their initial intensive care unit (ICU) stay after implantation. Since 2004, we have monitored postoperative mHLA-DR expression in 50 VAD recipients using flow cytometry. Thirty-seven patients (74%) developed infection, and 22 patients (44%) died during their initial ICU stay. mHLA-DR expression was lowest in the immediate postoperative period (postoperative days [PODs] 1-3) but increased progressively thereafter. Multiple regression analysis showed that preoperative aspartate aminotransferase level was the only significant and independent predictor of the percentage of HLA-DR-positive monocytes on PODs 1-3 (β = -0.726, p = 0.0001). ICU death and infection were associated with significantly lower percentages of HLA-DR-positive monocytes on PODs 1-3. ROC curve analysis revealed that the percentage of HLA-DR-positive monocytes on PODs 1-3 had significant discriminative power for ICU death (area under the curve = 0.73, 95% confidence interval, 0.545-0.912, p = 0.037), but not for infection. Postoperative mHLA-DR expression was closely related to preoperative hepatic cytolysis. It appeared to be the only early postoperative biological parameter that had some predictive power for death of VAD recipients in the ICU.

Eternal Life and Biopower

Eternal Life and Biopower Miguel Vatter (bio) Thanatopolitics, Biopower, and Contemplative Life Foucault introduced the concept of biopower to explain how something like "thanatopolitics," the mobilization of entire populations "for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity," became the norm in the twentieth century (1990, 137). Agamben and Esposito have since offered two paradigms that seek to explain the seemingly inevitable transition from a biopolitics to a thanatopolitics (Agamben 1998; Esposito 2008). And yet, Foucault showed hesitation about whether thanatopolitics could really be understood exclusively from the perspective of biopower. Indeed, he had recourse to the paradigm of sovereignty (the logic of "blood") to account for the constitution of modern racism and genocidal eugenics. Agamben closed the circle by hypothesizing that biopower in reality is a power over bare life that finds its origin not in life itself, but in the sovereignty of law. 1 Esposito, for his part, has argued that the distinctive operation of Nazi thanatopolitics [End Page 217] consisted in identifying a "lifeless existence," Dasein ohne Leben, a form of life (a bios) that was entirely lacking in "spirit" and consequently was reduced to mere "biological" life (zoë) and thus could be exterminated as a "life not worthy of being lived" (2008, 134). In both Agamben and Esposito, therefore, the power over life has its source outside of life. It is as if there is something irreducibly affirmative about the concept of the power of life, of "biopower," that never lets itself be placed at the service of the power over life, which is also a power of death ("thanatopolitics"). 2 In this essay I pursue the following hypothesis: if biopolitics can be transformed into thanatopolitics, this may derive from the fact that the life here produced, namely, a zoë entirely separate from a bios, is a life destined to die, a life that has death inscribed into it from the very beginning. Stated in a positive manner, my hypothesis is that an affirmative conception of the power of life requires conceiving of life as eternal, a zoë aionios that is not destined to die, that stands over mythical fate itself. Eternal life is a theme that traverses both Western philosophical and religious traditions. In this essay, I shall focus on the philosophical tradition. I am interested in pursuing Esposito's suggestion that a conception of the power of life that escapes thanatopolitics depends on interpreting "life's relationship with politics philosophically" (2008, 150). I understand this claim in the following sense: philosophy becomes truly political when it provides a conception of life (zoë) that is immediately theoretical or contemplative. Philosophy is political, or political philosophy exists, only where biology is philosophical. Philosophy here is to be understood in the traditional sense of contemplating what is most real or actual, what never perishes, what is eternal. Thus eternal life would be a conception of a contemplative zoë. But the notion of eternal life, even in philosophy, cannot be entirely separated from a theological subtext. The reason for this is that a life destined to die is a life that is originally guilty, indebted to its "maker." Benjamin speaks of "the guilt of mere natural life, which consigns the living, innocent and unhappy, to a retribution that 'expiates' the guilt of mere life" (1996, 250). In the essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities, Benjamin defines fate as "the nexus of guilt among the living" and clarifies this idea in relation to the life of the newborn: [End Page 218] it corresponds wholly to the order of fate that the child, who enters it as a newborn, does not expiate the ancient rift but, in inheriting its guilt, must pass away. It is a question here not of ethical guilt . . . but rather of the natural kind, which befalls human beings not by decision and action but by negligence and celebration. . . . With the disappearance of supernatural life in man, his natural life turns into guilt, even without committing an act contrary to ethics. For now it is in league with mere life, which manifests itself in man as guilt. (1996, 308) If life is guilty by nature, then it deserves to be punished, to expiate its...

Contaminations: Irruptions of the Void

Contaminations:Irruptions of the Void Carlo Galli (bio) Translated by Margaret Adams Groesbeck and Adam Sitze Here we present, in broad terms, not a history of the Void, which Sergio Givone has covered with great authority, nor a history of nihilism, whose most important coordinates have already been mapped,1 but instead an essay on the irruptions of the void within the intellectual experience of the West. Our basic hypothesis is, first of all, that these irruptions presuppose that the void exerts a ceaseless labor—which is not, however, a "productivity"—that is capable of dismantling the forms and norms that are established from time to time to curb it or at least to hide it. And secondly, that whenever we frantically try to neutralize the void, the void seizes us from its abyss with even greater violence, twisting our forms and violating our boundaries (which are so much more fragile than they claim to be in the face of its impervious power). As such, he who fears and exorcises the void and its devastation is most exposed to them, and he who believes he gets the farthest away from them, is actually the nearest. Irruption is not, therefore, simply an "experience," a deliberate attempt to transgress the limits of the human, toward Good and toward Evil.2 It is rather an unforeseen and unwanted experience, a catastrophe we suffer. The sphere with which we are concerned is not theoretical but practical. Therefore the void is experienced as death, the absolute disorder, the annihilation of life—the very thing from which we wish to protect ourselves by creating the norm, law, and order to begin with. In this practical sphere, the categorical imperative absolutely must be security, which is to say, the deferral, or humanization, of death. There are many strategies that, in various guises, have the objective of securing life by means of a "productive" relation with death, of creating orders that incorporate disorder, strategies that make coexistence with death the origin of social cohesion, of coexistence among men. So many human laws find their own innermost force by incorporating the law of death. And if, as Emanuele Severino asserts, all Western thought that believes in the reality of death is nihilistic, and if this thought strives to defend itself from death with metaphysics and ontology, then there exist sophisticated forms of nihilism that define themselves by their proximity to death, to the annihilation of living beings. We learn this from René Girard and his theory of the sacrifice of the scapegoat; from Hegel, who in Phenomenology of Spirit demonstrates the power of death, that absolute [End Page 186] mistress, at work in history—and more precisely in the history of the slave who introjects death as anguish, as an agonized relation of labor with the Thing, the necessary passage toward the freedom of the Spirit; from the lesson of existentialism, which—from early Martin Heidegger to Karl Jaspers, from Luigi Pareyson to Jean-Paul Sartre—in the experience of death as the possibility exclusive to man that provides the occasion for the discovery of concrete contingency as the liberty and authority of the individual; from the negative thought (from Friedrich Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt to Ernst Jünger) that draws its own nihilistic disenchantment from the power of the void; from every form of "weak" thought, that from resignation—from Verwindung, the remission of the power of nihilism already outlined in late Heidegger—arrives at pietas toward the world, to let be whatever is (and, with this, the productivity of death extinguishes itself in non-productivity).3 These historical-political figures, so different from one another, interpret death less as a danger than as a destiny—one that can be transformed from the merely natural into the human, though never contained by the rhetoric of humanist discourse. And therefore, as we have said, even these historical-political figures believe they can render death productive for man: they believe they can turn death into a contradiction that is dialectically surmountable, into something manageable or governable.4 They believe in the existence of words and orders capable of incorporating or subduing death. This is a problematic faith, but it is...

Scenarios of the “Descent into Hell” in Two Processional Antiphons

Despite importance of other events of Holy Week and Easter, biblical account gives only scant reference to what transpired during three-day interim between Crucifixion and Resurrection. are mainly ambiguous affirmations of Christ's descensus in 1 Peter 3:19-20, Matthew 27:52, and Hebrews 2:14-15, latter verses referring to his participating in death through death might destroy him that had power of death, that is, devil; and deliver them through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. (1) However, early belief in historicity of event by Church developed by third century and eventually was to be incorporated into Apostles' Creed, which includes he into clause. (2) The account is only given full treatment in a fourth-century addition to apocryphal Acts of Pilate. The expanded work, generally known as Gospel of Nicodemus, was attributed to devoted follower of Christ, though not one of twelve disciples, assisted Joseph of Arimathea in Burial (see John 19:39-40). Thereafter, a late fourth-century or early fifth-century sermon formerly attributed to St. Augustine, now identified only as Pseudo-Augustine, likewise chose to use as a biblical authority words of Psalm 23 (Vulgate numbering). (3) This Sermo CLX, vividly recounting happenings of descensus in infernum, gained wide exposure through liturgy and music in early medieval churches. Despite its considerable potential, it was only to be incorporated into liturgical drama in late Elevatio, as in instance of innovations of Katherine of Sutton at Barking in late fourteenth century. (4) In earlier centuries, there was good reason to believe that it could develop and serve as a separate ceremony for Holy Saturday. However, in spite of its failure to so develop, processional antiphons that I shall discuss here deserve to be of considerable interest to students of medieval music drama. I. The Narrative and Its Reception in West The Gospel of Nicodemus and Sermo CLX present a vivid descensus narrative by means of incorporating an Old Testament authority, Psalm 23 (Vulgate numbering; Psalm 24 AV). The psalmist's text became substance of Christ's thundering challenge--Atollite portas principes vestras et elevamini portas eterale et introibit rex glorie--to powers of darkness, reinforce iron bars holding shut brass gates of underworld. As Gospel of Nicodemus describes event, Christ calls out: Remove, O princes, your gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and King of shall come in. (5) At third repetition of shout by one in narrative is distinguished by carrying a cross over his shoulder, infernal powers inquire Who is King of glory? (Quis est iste rex gloriae?). David, from Limbo, identifies voice as that of the Lord strong and mighty, Lord mighty in battle, is King of glory The hitherto indestructible bonds of hell are smashed, and Christappeared in form of a man and lightened eternal darkness. The devils, in their confusion, question further, at last wondering if is Jesus, of whom Satan our prince said that by thy death on cross thou shouldest receive dominion of whole world. Thereupon did King of in his majesty trample upon death, and laid hold on Satan prince and delivered him unto power of Hell, and drew Adam to him unto his own brightness. (6) The prolix, even rhapsodic prayers of Gallican rite affirm theological contextuality of descensus in which same humanitatis genitor, Adam, is named as one extractedfrom depths of infernal dirt by Christ, one who descended as agent of this blessed release. The following quotation presents Holy Week prayer and collect from Gallican Missale Gothicum (c.700): ITEM ORATIONES IN BIDUANA DIE SABBATI DIE SABBATI AD SE[XTAM] Deum omnipotentem, patrem et filium et spiritum sanctum, uniuersitatis unum creatorem, in hac magna magni matutina sabbati, dominici scilicet corporis requiei, fratres karissimi, suppliciter dipraecamur, ut qui Adam de profundis infernalis limi misericorditer eripuit, nos eius filius de luto faecis huius cui inhaesimus sola misericordia tantum clamantes eruat. …

Being-in-Christ and Putting Death in Its Place: An Anthropologist’s Account of Christian Performance in Spanish America and the American South

It took me many months to finish reading Miles Richardson’s comparison of Latin American Catholicism and Anglo-American Protestantism. The publicists at Louisiana State University (where Richardson is a chaired professor in Latin American Studies, with “no plans to retire”) call it “bracingly original” and “rooted in the author’s personal story of why he became an anthropologist.” I found the early chapters (the first third of the tome) undisciplined and self-absorbed. Topics careened from the author’s youth to the dawn of human awareness, from the brain sizes of hominids, to their feet, their hands, their tools, and their Neanderthal fellows, to Jacques Derrida, Ernest Becker, and Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, and then to participant-observation in anthropology. Such a wobbly trajectory made me wonder if the man in the cowboy hat on the dust jacket (“Whiskey Bent & Hell Bound,” the sign says in his office) has both hands on the reins.At the beginning of chapter 4, he addresses his companion, the mysterious “You” with whom he converses throughout the work: “You, having traveled with me down the twists and turns of the Christian story in the New World, rightly grow impatient. I have promised, you remind me, I have promised that we will find how they find Christ” (p. 134). My patience exhausted, I had to remind myself that three very prominent scholars whose work I admire have written enthusiastic blurbs for this work. Yi-Fu Tuan states that it is “a superb example of what humanist scholarship can offer both specialists and the general reader in our time.” James L. Peacock calls it “fabulous, . . . lucid, poignant, moving, and compelling.” James W. Fernandez remarks that Richardson, “raised a Southern Baptist but now an anthropologist, has been a long-term participant observer of Spanish American Catholicism” and has undertaken “a remarkable journey of Christian comparison and religious revelation.” With these three evaluations encouraging me, I persevered. And I am glad I did.At its core, Being-in-Christ and Putting Death in Its Place compares the religious practices at the Catholic church in Nueva Esperanza de San Pablo, Costa Rica, and the First Baptist Church in Mt. Hope, Texas. The book contrasts their architectural forms (ornate temple vs. foursquare auditorium), their liturgical emphases (Eucharist vs. sermon), their sensory channels (eyes and hands and their palpable icons vs. ears and their dramatic words), their biblical interpretations (sacramentalist vs. literalist), their devotional outpourings (pilgrimages to shrines vs. revivalist homecomings), and their eschatological orientations (suffering with Christ crucified vs. triumphant with Christ ascended). For all their differences, however, both share the aspiration of “being-in-Christ” (Albert Schweitzer’s phrase), which means to live by virtue of his suffering, death, and resurrection. As one Latin American man told Richardson, “‘Christ died so that we too could learn how to suffer and how to die. To live is to die. It is part of the human tragedy. Through his actions, Christ teaches us this tragedy and how we must face death’” (p. 263).For all his discomfort with both Catholic and Protestant practice—expressed repeatedly throughout the text—the author finds the Christian project uplifting. “My contention,” he writes, “is that a Christ nailed to a cross with blood flowing down his face and a Christ strolling through the streets of gold in a heavenly city are, in fact, affirmations of our humanity” (p. 281). “When we are in-Christ,” Richardson continues, “the weak, the tortured, the despised, the crucified, and the dead, normally objects of scorn, become icons of solidarity. This symbolic reversal, so compelling in all religions, is Christianity’s strong suit” (p. 291). The author concludes that “the gift of Christ is the gift of death. . . . The vision of death brings awareness of self, and the self, once awake, knows death. . . . The power of death that is released is the power of our presence. We affirm our solidarity in the face of absence. We, together, repeat with Paul, ‘O, death where is thy sting? O, grave where is thy victory?’ ” (pp. 330-1).

Improvement of SOFA's predictive power for death when associated with central venous oxygen saturation intermittently obtained in the first 24 hours of cardiac surgery postoperation

Improvement of SOFA's predictive power for death when associated with central venous oxygen saturation intermittently obtained in the first 24 hours of cardiac surgery postoperation

The Decentering Cultural Topography of English Poetry (3) Yeats: The Cultural Politics of Tragedy and Authority [1] － The Antinomies and Oppositions between the Absolute Power of Death and the Individuality

The Decentering Cultural Topography of English Poetry (3) Yeats: The Cultural Politics of Tragedy and Authority [1] － The Antinomies and Oppositions between the Absolute Power of Death and the Individuality

"A clown in a grave": complexities and tensions in the works of Gregory Corso

Using a number of critical approaches, Michael Skau examines Gregory Corso's complex imagination, his humor, and his poetic techniques in dealing with America, the Beat generation, and death. Skau covers the complete works of Corso, one of the four major Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs) who attempted to provide an alternative to what they saw as the academic forms of literature dominating American writing through the 1940s and 1950s. The Beat option focused on ordinary people, spurning the cultural pretensions of the intelligentsia and using common language as well as the rhythms of actual speech. Corso, abandoned as a child by his mother, subjected to a variety of foster homes, and imprisoned as an adolescent, became an authentic voice of America's neglected streetwise youth. He embodies much of the tension, confusion, and rebellion that emerged in America after World War II and eventually crested in the 1960s. Corso emphasizes social issues, yet risks undermining this significance by using wit, wordplay, and humor. While conceding mortality, he is adamant in refusing to acknowledge death's power. Even as he rebels against conventional literature, he still is enchanted by classicism and romanticism, often borrowing their techniques and idioms. Skau examines these complexities and seeming contradictions throughout Corso's career, showing that Corso finds value in inconsistency and vacillation. For him, as illustrated in the poems Hair and Marriage, contradiction and ambivalence suggest the foundations of freedom of imagination. In spite of Corso's significance as an American poet, Skau's is the first extensive study of his work, including his fiction. Skau also provides the first complete bibliography of Corso's published work in more than thirty years.

Shadowing the Ground

The character of a person, and the worth of a poet, may be judged by how he or she comes to terms with death. David Ignatow, not in his late 70s, faces the prospect of death squarely and speaks with quiet authority of his puzzlement, anger, grief, and ultimate acceptance. In 66 short poems, that together form one monumental work, Ignatow describes what is to grow old--the isolation, loss of loved ones, idle hours, long walks --and ponders the elemental conundrum of ceasing to exist: Why was born if have to die, / buzzed the fly, and buzzed and buzzed. He demonstrates his greatness as a poet when he moves beyond somberness to turn the awe of death into a heightened awareness of life and a force that clarifies how we should spend our brief time on this earth. Divided into three sections, Ignatow's conversational meditations are at first ironic and humorous as he addresses you fool of a cosmos. He then becomes more personal, considering what his dead parents would think of him as a white-haired old man, recalling the silent company of the last years with his aging wife, realizing that it is death to be alone. Ultimately, he finds solace in the natural world--the sound of rain, smell of grass, warmth of sunshine. Without becoming sentimental or mystical, he sees that death is much the glory and handiwork of god (if there be one) as are the mountains and the flowers, which will also die. The poet turns from self-absorption, sadness and regret to see death's power as a reflection of life's wonder: I look/ out upon the dark, knowing/ death as one form/ of transcendence, but/ so is life.

Suffering and Hope: The Story Behind the Book

“For in their own bodies, Christians live exist entially the tension of their present uncompleted existence in solidarity with an unredeemed creation, and they must therefore yearn for the consummation of the resurrection, which is nothing but God's triumph over the power of death that poisons his creation.”

Criticism Worldly and Otherworldly: Edward W. Said and the Cult of Theory

The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence. It also warns us why and how these events then have to be reintegrated in a historical and aesthetic system of recuperation that repeats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy.'

Tolstoj's Vision of the Power of Death and "How Much Land Does a Man Need?"

Tolstoj's Vision of the Power of Death and "How Much Land Does a Man Need?"

Two Forgotten Creeds

For the modern theologian there is an all-encompassing bond of perfectness in the New Testament in the doctrine of the Logos, found in the Johannine gospel and epistles. It links together the christology of the Synoptic writings, Mark, Matthew, Luke-Acts, and that of the epistles. It combines the primitive doctrine of Jesus the faithful “Servant” of God, glorified and exalted to God's right hand—a doctrine of “apotheosis,” as Baur called it—with the Pauline doctrine of “incarnation,”—Christ a pre-existent being, agent of creation, in the form and likeness of God, but self-emptied and abased, made for a little while lower than the angels, that for the suffering of death he might be made eternally higher than they, heir and lord of the creation. In the one—the Petrine christology, as we may call it because it is mainly represented in the speeches of Peter in Acts 2–5—the residence in heaven is an episode. God has taken up his faithful Servant for a short interval to his own right hand, delivering him out of the power of death, that, when his people have repented of their wicked rejection of him, he may send him again as the Christ, to restore the kingdom to Israel and reign forever on the throne of David in the renewed and glorified Jerusalem. In the other christology—the Pauline—the residence on earth is the episode. The drama's beginning and ending is in heaven. Viewed thus “under the aspect of the eternal” the brief period of abasement, poverty, and suffering, undertaken for the “reconciliation” of the animate world, is scarcely a moment of time. For our sakes the eternal Son of God “became poor,” he emptied himself and took upon him the form of a slave, and became obedient unto death, yea, even the (slave's) death of the cross; but therefore also “God highly exalted him and gave him the Name which is above every name, that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”