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The Transcendence of Desire

Author: Tom James

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-11-28

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 3031462270

The “secular age” is not a smooth, untroubled process of accumulation and advance but an uneven and unpredictable series of clashes of interest. Charles Taylor’s “immanent frame” cannot be construed merely as a phenomenon within religion and culture but urgently needs to be understood in political and economic terms–i.e., as a class project. The failure of the secular, vividly displayed in the crumbling legitimacy of global institutions and in the spectacle of police violence, both calls for and makes possible a renewal of political agency. Tom James and David True argue that a theology of the cross has a distinctive potential today: it can pierce the sacred aura of normalcy around the consensual anti-politics of the neoliberal order so that a vision of a world beyond today’s racialized capitalism can emerge. But they contend that we don’t need to forsake the emancipatory aims of modernity nor retreat to local communities. As an alternative to these weak strategies, they offer a constructive and cruciform account of political agency that includes both prophetic resistance and practical wisdom, each embedded in contemporary struggles for freedom that, they argue, embody divine desire for a common world.

Divining Desire

Author: James W. Hood

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-14

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780367888220

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This study examines Tennyson's portrayals of the erotic and creative impulses, reading the poet's ubiquitous lover-artists as tropes that figure the desire for transcending the state of being human, a condition of personal fragmentation and limited knowledge. Ostensibly seeking to fulfill erotic wishes, construct utopias, or create grand artistic works, Tennyson's characters engage in a fundamentally spiritual quest, yearning to divine desire: to eternalize the fulfilment of their deepest wishes. Freud revealed how Victorians sublimated sexual desire into religious impulse. This book demonstrates, however, the remarkable way in which Tennyson's poems transact the opposing projection, transfiguring spiritual desire into erotic art. Brilliantly negotiating a middle ground between scientific skepticism and reactionary religiosity, his vastly popular poems suggest that fulfilment of "the wish too strong for words to name" lies in a sacramentality: only as means do art and eros allow transport beyond fragmentation. At a deep level, the poems conclude that language itself brokers transcendence through its very brokenness.

Love, Desire and Transcendence in French Literature

Author: Paul Gifford

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1351921258

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European literature and theory of the twentieth century have been intensely preoccupied with questions of 'Desire', whereas 'love' has increasingly represented a fractured and strange, if not actually suspect, proposal: this is a prime symptom of an age of deep cultural mutation and uncertainty. Paul Gifford's book allows this considerable contemporary phenomenon to be observed steadily and whole, with strategic understanding of its origins, nature and meaning. Gifford paints a clear and coherent picture of the evolution of erotic ideas and their imaginary and formal expressions in modern French writing. He first retraces the formative matrix of French tradition by engaging with five classic sources: Plato's Symposium, the Song of Songs, the myth of Genesis, the tension between Greek Eros and Christian Agape and the repercussions of Nietzsche's declaration of the 'death of God'. Modern variations on these perennial problematics are then pursued in ten chapters devoted to Proust, Valéry, Claudel, Breton, Bataille, Duras, Barthes, Irigarary, Emmanuel, Kristeva. Literary and theoretical perspectives are perfectly blended in his study of these attempts at 'deciphering Eros'. The book will appeal not only to students of French literature, but to all those interested in the cultural upheavals of the twentieth century.

The Feeling of Transcendence, an Experience of God?

Author: Louis Roy

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2021-04-15

Total Pages: 126

ISBN-13: 1725272741

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In this book, Louis Roy takes account of the fact that, in the last fifty years, numerous people in the secularized West have responded yes to surveys that asked, “Are you aware of having had an experience during which you felt in the presence of a dimension or a reality very different from ordinary human life?” Are such experiences mere illusions? Some thinkers, like Feuerbach and Freud, believed so. Are such experiences encounters with God? Karl Barth, a great Protestant theologian, did not think much of their worth. On this issue, psychologists and theologians are divided. Roy argues that those experiences are valid, that they possess a real potential, and that they can open their recipients to a genuine wisdom. He reports on eight narratives, spells out their constitutive elements, classifies them into four categories—aesthetic, ontological, ethical, and interpersonal—and suggests criteria to assess their concrete authenticity. Thus, this book will appeal to educated readers interested in spirituality, philosophy of religion, psychology, literature, theology, and pastoral ministry.

The Nature of Desire

Author: Julien A. Deonna

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0199370966

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Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise of the good even right to assume? Should we adopt an alternative picture that emphasizes desire's deontic nature? What do neuroscientific studies suggest? Essays in the first section of the volume are devoted to these questions, and to the puzzle of desire's essence. In the second part of the volume, essays investigate some implications that the various conceptions of desire have on a number of fundamental issues. For example, why are inconsistent desires problematic? What is desire's role in practical deliberation? How do we know what we want? This volume will contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on a neglected, albeit crucial, dimension of the mind.

Immanent Transcendence

Author: Patrice Haynes

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-08-23

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1441121528

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Overthe last twenty years materialist thinkers in the continental tradition haveincreasingly emphasized the category of immanence. Yet the turn toimmanence has not meant the wholesale rejection of the concept oftranscendence, but rather its reconfiguration in immanent or materialist terms:an immanent transcendence. Through an engagement with the work ofDeleuze, Irigaray and Adorno, Patrice Haynes examines how the notion ofimmanent transcendence can help articulate a non-reductive materialism by whichto rethink politics, ethics and theology in exciting new ways. However,she argues that contrary to what some might expect, immanent accounts of matterand transcendence are ultimately unable to do justice to materialfinitude. Indeed, Haynes concludes by suggesting that a theisticunderstanding of divine transcendence offers ways to affirm fully materialimmanence, thus pointing towards the idea of a theological materialism.

The Government of Desire

Author: Miguel de Beistegui

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-05-04

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 022654740X

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Liberalism, Miguel de Beistegui argues in The Government of Desire, is best described as a technique of government directed towards the self, with desire as its central mechanism. Whether as economic interest, sexual drive, or the basic longing for recognition, desire is accepted as a core component of our modern self-identities, and something we ought to cultivate. But this has not been true in all times and all places. For centuries, as far back as late antiquity and early Christianity, philosophers believed that desire was an impulse that needed to be suppressed in order for the good life, whether personal or collective, ethical or political, to flourish. Though we now take it for granted, desire as a constitutive dimension of human nature and a positive force required a radical transformation, which coincided with the emergence of liberalism. By critically exploring Foucault’s claim that Western civilization is a civilization of desire, de Beistegui crafts a provocative and original genealogy of this shift in thinking. He shows how the relationship between identity, desire, and government has been harnessed and transformed in the modern world, shaping our relations with others and ourselves, and establishing desire as an essential driving force for the constitution of a new and better social order. But is it? The Government of Desire argues that this is precisely what a contemporary politics of resistance must seek to overcome. By questioning the supposed universality of a politics based on recognition and the economic satisfaction of desire, de Beistegui raises the crucial question of how we can manage to be less governed today, and explores contemporary forms of counter-conduct. ?Drawing on a host of thinkers from philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis, and concluding with a call for a sovereign and anarchic form of desire, The Government of Desire is a groundbreaking account of our freedom and unfreedom, of what makes us both governed and ungovernable.

Transcend

Author: Scott Barry Kaufman

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1524704989

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A bold reimagining of Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs--and new insights for realizing your full potential and living your most creative, fulfilled, and connected life. When psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman first discovered Maslow's unfinished theory of transcendence, sprinkled throughout a cache of unpublished journals, lectures, and essays, he felt a deep resonance with his own work and life. In this groundbreaking book, Kaufman picks up where Maslow left off, unraveling the mysteries of his unfinished theory, and integrating these ideas with the latest research on attachment, connection, creativity, love, purpose and other building blocks of a life well lived. Kaufman's new hierarchy of needs provides a roadmap for finding purpose and fulfillment--not by striving for money, success, or "happiness," but by becoming the best version of ourselves, or what Maslow called self-actualization. While self-actualization is often thought of as a purely individual pursuit, Maslow believed that the full realization of potential requires a merging between self and the world. We don't have to choose either self-development or self-sacrifice, but at the highest level of human potential we show a deep integration of both. Transcend reveals this level of human potential that connects us not only to our highest creative potential, but also to one another. With never-before-published insights and new research findings, along with exercises and opportunities to gain insight into your own unique personality, this empowering book is a manual for self-analysis and nurturing a deeper connection not only with our highest potential but also with the rest of humanity.

The Oxford Handbook of Levinas

Author: Michael L. Morgan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-04-10

Total Pages: 800

ISBN-13: 0190910682

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Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes--the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others--speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. And there are essays on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized him and found him wanting. The volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas's philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying why his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers.

Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

Author: Alan P. Lightman

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1101871865

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In this meditation on religion and science, Lightman explores the tension between our yearning for permanence and certainty, and the modern scientific discoveries that demonstrate the impermanent and uncertain nature of the world. As a physicist, he has always held a scientific view of the world. But one summer evening, while looking at the stars from a small boat at sea he was overcome by the sensation that he was merging with a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute and immaterial. This is his exploration of these seemingly contradictory impulses, and the journey along the different paths of religion and science that become part of his quest. -- adapted from publisher info.