Sacrificial Body Research Articles

Beyond the Sacrificial Fantasy: Body, Law, and Desire

Abstract From its origins, the Christian religious imaginary has been inhabited by the sacrificial fantasy, which finds its most radical symbol in the crucified body. According to the principle of imitatio Jesu, believers have always been called to consider pain as an experience to be lived and shared with Christ, to be offered to him as a gift of self to the Other. Already the masters of suspicion condemned this ascetic-religious cult of sacrifice and showed its dehumanizing and superegoic side, characterized by the violence of abuse, authoritarianism, submission, and above all the denial of life. However, this beneficial and liberating critique has removed the donative and not merely alienating aspect not of the sacrificial body, but of the symbolic sacrifice. Starting from a close dialogue between systematic theology and (Lacanian) psychoanalysis, this contribution aims to question both the sacrificial (religious) fantasy in its alienating character and the equally superegoic drive of the imperative of unlimited enjoyment as a reaction to any kind of symbolic limitation. Against this background, an attempt will be made to think of a form of sacrifice that follows the logic of the gift (of the body), without being subjected to a logic of alienating exchange.

Reclaiming the Abject: Witchcraft and the Sacrificial Femininity in Suspiria

Witchcraft has long been associated with expressions of femininity and womanhood. Suspiria, both 1977 and 2018 versions, provide vivid pictures of female bodies as sacrificial bodies bound and restrained by notions of monstrous femininity. The focus on the occult creates spaces wherein female characters find strength and healing through both displays of independence and interconnectedness to other women. These films, read through second- and third-wave feminisms, reveal the struggle to assert female empowerment in a male-dominated world.

The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom: Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation (review)

Reviewed by: The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom: Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation György E. Szönyi Urszula Szulakowska. The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom: Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation. Aries Book Series: Texts and Studies in Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill, 2006. xii + 180 pp. Ill. $155.00, €119.00 (ISBN-10: 90-04-15025-0, ISBN-13: 978-90-04-15025-6). Urszula Szulakowska established herself at the forefront of scholars dealing with early modern esotericism in 2000 when Brill published her monograph, The Alchemy of Light: Geometry and Optics in Late Renaissance Alchemical Illustration (Symbola Et Emblemata Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Symbolism 10). The peculiarity of this heavily illustrated book was that its author revisited the principles of iconology and semiotics and offered a study of intellectual history with a methodology that threw light on little-examined visual aspects of speculative alchemy in relation to developments of early modern science, primarily optics and geometry. In her new book, The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom, Szulakowska still complains that “recent research into the history of alchemical illustration in the Renaissance period is sparse” (p. 4). Although she could rely on some case studies by Barbara Obrist, Helena de Jong, and Hereward Tilton, she decided to carry on her own program and continue the study of alchemical illustrations in a new monograph. This time she has examined some of the same material—John Dee, Heinrich Khunrath, Robert Fludd, Jakob Böhme—although from a new angle: the relationship between alchemy and Protestant apocalyptic theology. Furthermore, the book introduces a storehouse of new and so far in English scholarship, hardly mentioned, German Protestant materials, especially Stefan Michelspacher’s cabalistic images from 1616, but one could also refer to her analyses of the works of Daniel Mylius, Michael Maier, Lambsprinck, Abraham von Franckenberg, and many anonymous alchemical works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although the monograph concentrates mostly on the ideology of the German Reformation, it is noteworthy that Szulakowska also uses some important Italian and English illustrated alchemical manuscripts to corroborate her argument. Although the title does not suggest it, this book has interest for historians of medicine. As alchemy in the Renaissance was inseparable from medicine, and as the discussed alchemists and theologians were often at the same time medical doctors, [End Page 394] the book chapters often touch on theologically tinted medical, or medically tinted theological, ideas. This tendency has its climax in the analysis of Robert Fludd’s Anatomiae Amphitheatrum (1623) and Medicina catholica (1629–31), and one must recognize that the author here offers a deep and contextualized reading of these works that has probably never been done before. The book consists of an introduction and eight chapters. The introduction has a literature review (referred above) and also sets out the basic argumentational logic of the book. First of all, Szulakowska claims that the emergence of Paracelsian alchemical illustration in the Protestant lands may be explained by the rejection of Catholic imagery where these illustrations could fulfill the role of spiritual substitutes, too. This assumption determines the direction of research and interpretation: “In the present study, Paracelsian alchemy as a phenomenon will be contextualized within the history of the German Reformation, specifically within the various disputes over the nature of the Eucharist and the accompanying terror of the Day of Judgement, believed to be imminent in the Last Times of the late sixteenth century” (p. 3). Chapter 4, “The Sacrificial Body,” is perhaps the most revelatory of the book. Here the author touches on the otherwise very fashionable topic of early modern anatomies and connects the themes of anatomical knowledge and anatomical imagery to contemporary theological ideas about Christ’s sacrificial body in a completely novel way. She compares the anatomical drawings of Vesalius, Fludd, and Michelspacher to demonstrate to what extent the new anatomy could be appropriated for theological and spiritual purposes and for the ideology of the Reformation. For historians of medicine, chapter 6—“Robert Fludd’s Sacramental Medicine”—is of utmost importance. Those who expect Fludd to be restored among medical innovators will of course be disappointed. The detailed...

Urszula Szulakowska, The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom. Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation

Urszula Szulakowska, The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom. Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation

Sacrificial Bodies: Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, Torture

In this paper, I illuminate the underlying demonology of religious terrorism. I argue that counter-terrorist practices mirror the demonology that they are designed to resist. This argument focuses on our system of detention and torture. I suggest that the terrorism–counter-terrorism discourse relies on sacrificial bodies: the bombed body, and the tortured body. To find a creative response to terrorism, and to restore human rights, we need an alternate narrative for global violence. I suggest that this alternate narrative exists. I trace it through citizen resistance and a case study.

The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom: Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation

The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom: Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation

Sacrificial Bodies and the Body of the Text in Aristophanes' Lysistrata

‘Why is inert Matter female and the animating Nous male, please?’‘Because earth is the Mother, because all beautiful things spring from her, trees and flowers and creatures.’A.S. Byatt Angels and InsectsByart's characters, the Victorian gentlewoman who asks the question and the poet who answers, articulate an enduring notion of Western popular and intellectual culture. The association of women with matter and the body, men with form and the soul, is the legacy of ancient Greek thought which gendered the physical universe according to social convention: women were considered to be passive and therefore acted upon by the formative male principle. Examples of this bilateral symmetry include preformation theories of conception which suggest that a mother only provides the fetus with its raw material, while the father's seed organises that undeveloped material into its human form. This is a value-laden distinction, as we see from ancient philosophy which privileges the masculine soul over the feminine body and aligns men with the intellect but women with the baser corporeal passions.

Theorizing the flagbody: Symbolic dimensions of the flag desecration debate, or, why the bill of rights does not fly in the ballpark

This paper analyzes American flag symbolism in public debate about the Supreme Court's flagburning decisions in 1989 and 1990, and in related flag events. The connotated flag is systematically represented by champions of flag protection laws as a sacrificial body contrasted both to the bodiless text and the profane body of flagburning. What is at stake in the flagburning debate is a cultural fight between the body and the text, and a notion of the sanctifying drama of the American holy family.

Fraternization and rationality in global perspective

Etymologically, the term "community" derives from the Christian idea of a communion, a sacrament in which bread and wine are partaken of as a commemoration of the death of Christ. Under the Pauline Church this idea was extended into a covenant of faith in a universal Christian community under one God.1 This church was to be a unified body of individuals, a brotherhood bound in loyalty to God through the sacrificial body of his son. Max Weber, among others, pointed to the radical nature of this idea of a religious sodal? ity, for it required believers to invest their primary loyalty to it. Other social and economic bonds, including those of family, kin, clan and civic associations, are reduced to secondary status in this overarch? ing universal community of brotherhood and sisterhood. Even the most secularized sociological conceptions of community bear the mark of this religiously derived conception of the communion. American English is replete with cognates derived from the origi? nal sacramental communion: i.e., commune, communal, communi? cable, communicate, communism, communitarian, and such usages of "community" as in community chest, community college, and community-wide. In addition, we speak of a community of share? holders, a corporate community, a rural or urban community, the European community, or even, in a phrase that stretches its original meaning beyond recognition, a "community of interests."