Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219

Browse

Filters

Settings

Subject: search.filters.subject.messianism

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    The Crime of Indistinction?
    (英語學系, 2012-03-??) Han-yu Huang
    The undead is a crime against the religious and the sacred; it always troubles our received topologies and distinctions between body and soul, life and death, culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman, animate and inanimate,organic and inorganic, etc. It has always been preoccupying, or haunting, writers and thinkers in the fields of philosophy, ethics, theology, and literature. Especially in contemporary biopolitical discourse, where the conditions andessence of life are fervently debated, problematized, and rethought, the undeadcomes to the fore and calls for our critical attention. This paper begins with abrief critical review of Hannah Arendt’s contribution to biopolitical discourse.By way of some psychoanalytic perspectives, I explicate how the “strangelogic of the undead” works in such signature Agambenian categories as the“threshold” and “zone of indistinction,” and in the context of the saturation oflife in the political field. Then, I turn to the homo sacer and the Muselmannwho, as figures of the undead, inhabit the threshold of political life and barelife, and embody the zero degree of humanity as beings that have beendeprived of human communitarian and identitarian registers, while opening asite where new ethical material might appear. The last part of this papercarries the logic of the undead a step further in order to address Agamben’sintervention in contemporary theological theories, and his contribution to thepolitics of emancipation and redemption through his revitalization of Paul andmessianic thinking.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Form-of-Life between the Messianic As Not and the Hypothetical As If
    (英語學系, 2015-03-??) Chien-heng Wu
    This paper takes Agamben’s conceptualization of form-of-life as its point of departure and situates this idea within the larger context of Agamben’s philosophy. Agamben diagnoses our contemporary political crisis and searches for a mode of existence where life would remain inseparable from its form: in this way he offers both a compelling analysis of sovereign power and a redemptive hope. However, it is not clear to what extent his notion of messianic redemption corresponds to that of political emancipation, for the register of change in Agamben’s political philosophy is framed exclusively in ontological terms, leaving the coming politics in a suspended sphere of pure mediality which subordinates questions concerning political contestation and material transformation. My contention is that an ontological politics modeled on potentiality proves a necessary yet insufficient ground for thinking political emancipation. It therefore behooves us to explore ways in which we can build on Agamben’s insight, but take it in a different direction and place it on a different level of analysis. The argument of this paper is that, rather than seeing the condition of possibility of change as being equivalent to change itself, we need to think the ethical exigency (in the form of the messianic as not) and the political dissensus (in the form of the hypothetical as if) together as forming a dialectic—such that ethics and politics are made in service of each other, not in place of each other.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    The Crime of Indistinction?
    (英語學系, 2012-03-??) Han-yu Huang
    The undead is a crime against the religious and the sacred; it always troubles our received topologies and distinctions between body and soul, life and death, culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman, animate and inanimate,organic and inorganic, etc. It has always been preoccupying, or haunting, writers and thinkers in the fields of philosophy, ethics, theology, and literature. Especially in contemporary biopolitical discourse, where the conditions andessence of life are fervently debated, problematized, and rethought, the undeadcomes to the fore and calls for our critical attention. This paper begins with abrief critical review of Hannah Arendt’s contribution to biopolitical discourse.By way of some psychoanalytic perspectives, I explicate how the “strangelogic of the undead” works in such signature Agambenian categories as the“threshold” and “zone of indistinction,” and in the context of the saturation oflife in the political field. Then, I turn to the homo sacer and the Muselmannwho, as figures of the undead, inhabit the threshold of political life and barelife, and embody the zero degree of humanity as beings that have beendeprived of human communitarian and identitarian registers, while opening asite where new ethical material might appear. The last part of this papercarries the logic of the undead a step further in order to address Agamben’sintervention in contemporary theological theories, and his contribution to thepolitics of emancipation and redemption through his revitalization of Paul andmessianic thinking.