Giorgio Agamben. What is Real? Trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. 88 pages. ISBN: 978-1-5036-0737-8 Every mysterious disappearance assumes mythical tones, the subsequent fate of the missing person remaining indefinitely suspended when concrete and sufficient information is lacking: perhaps a second life somewhere far away, under an identity as new as false, as […]
Author: Assistant Editor
Review – When God Was A Bird (Scott McDaniel)
Mark I. Wallace. When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. 240 pages. ISBN-10: 0823281310. A simple two-bedroom house sits along a busy street in a suburban neighborhood in the Midwest during the warmer months. Across the street there is a line of non-descript utility […]
Review – Genealogies Of Mahayana Buddhism (Ananda Abeysekara)
Joseph Walser, Genealogies of Mahāyāna Buddhism: Emptiness, Power, and the Question of Origin. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018. 288 pages. IBSN: 978-1-13-895556-1. . Since Talal Asad’s landmark work Genealogies of Religion, some scholars in the humanities have slowly begun to consider the relation between power and religion. But the same cannot be said about […]
Thinking With One’s Feet – Lacanian Theories Of Textual Engagement, Part 3 (William J. Urban)
The following is the third part in a three-part installment. The first part can be found here and the second here. The Real Lacan: Sublime Object of Texts We have hinted that many of the paradoxes and contradictions involved in the topological constitution of the subject which eventually lead Lacan to shift his emphasis onto […]
Thinking With One’s Feet – Lacanian Theories Of Textual Engagement, Part 2 (William J. Urban)
The following is the second part in a three-part installment. The first part can be found here. The Symbolic Lacan: Signifiance of Texts There are certain key écrits [1] from the 1950s that in effect fully announce Lacan’s entry into his so-called “structuralist phase.” Academically speaking, this Lacan is the most well-known of our three Lacans […]
Thinking With One’s Feet – Lacanian Theories Of Textual Engagement, Part 1 (William J. Urban)
The following is the first part in a three-part installment. Introduction In 1975, Jacques Lacan travelled to the United States to deliver a series of lectures and made a memorable stop in Boston to speak to a distinguished audience of mathematicians, linguists and philosophers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was there he first […]
The Silent Space Of The Vacuum (Jonathan P. Morgan)
Many kinds of structures seem ubiquitous and essential for the kind of meaning humanity concerns itself with. Lévi-Strauss’ early work on myth and kinship are two significant examples with the influence of each visible in much of our daily existence. Still, we must ask, can structures of this sort be universal? How do we avoid […]
Embodiment And The Experience Of The Divine (James Mensch)
At the outset of Genesis, we are presented with two different pictures of God. The first depicts God as the creator of the world and, thus, as transcendent to it. This implies that we cannot understand his creative action in worldly terms. If, for example, we say that “in the beginning” God caused the world […]
If You Have To Explain It, It Isn’t Funny – Laughing Immediately With Merleau-Ponty, Part 2 (Adam Blair)
This the second part of a two-part series. The first part can be found here. Merleau-Ponty wants to avoid the division of latent and manifest content, instead pointing to the inability to speak as a simple, unified condition. Both the shock of the earthquake and the maternal prohibition caused a refusal of coexistence on the part of […]
If You Have To Explain It, It Isn’t Funny – Laughing Immediately With Merleau-Ponty, Part 1 (Adam Blair)
This is the first section in a two-part series. The three predominant theories of humor within the Western canon — relief, incongruity, and superiority— reveal something about why we laugh when we do. There is a central insight to each of the three theories, regarding the psychological, conceptual, and social forces at play in our experience of […]