Search

James Bernauer’s Jesuit Kaddish about Jews and Jesuits in the shadow of the Holocaust is not a work of ordinary secular history. It is grounded in two distinctly Jesuit spiritual practices. This essay grapples with how to translate so avowedly Jesuit an account into a more universal one. It uses this work to think about how one might use its insights to think in more secular terms about the great wrong that haunts America: the legacy of racism. Finally, it understands Bernauer’s book as insisting that we reflect on broader questions: of complicity, of obligations to repair the wounds of the past, of responsibility. A book devoted to Jesuit versions of these sorts of issues invites a more general consideration. The contrast between a more secular and a Jesuit account of all these matters is refracted in part through the author’s personal relationship to the Holocaust.

Reflections on the special issue 'Divided by Death? Staging Mortality in the Early Modern Low Countries'.

Prostitution is the other great arena in which the battle against unsocialized sex and its dangers in a potentially fragmented culture was fought. “Whoring,” of course, had long been regarded as wicked and detrimental to the commonweal but so had drunkenness, blasphemy and other disturbances of the peace. The emphasis in “the solitary vice” should perhaps be less on “vice,” understood as the fulfillment of illegitimate desire, than on “solitary,” the channeling of perfectly healthy desire back into itself. The reasons given in late medieval and Renaissance literature for the barrenness of prostitutes are several: excess heat, as mentioned above; a womb too moist and slippery to retain the seed; and the mingling of various seeds—in short, reasons very much like those given by nineteenth-century doctors. The problem with masturbation and prostitution is essentially quantitative: doing it alone and doing it with lots of people rather than doing it in pairs.

espanolPrimo Levi en The Drowned and the Saved sugiere que el estar presente ante nosotros es lo que hace posible que sintamos lastima por un “co-humano” y actuemos de acuerdo con nuestros sentimientos. Nos preocupamos por los demas en relacion inversa a la distancia que nos separa de ellos. Por lo que respecta a los muertos, situados al otro lado de un abismo en apariencia insalvable, se encuentran inconmensurablemente mas lejos de nosotros que incluso el mas distante de los vivos. Es el arte —en su significado mas amplio— lo que nos ensena a sentir por ellos y lo que genera un relato en el que sus cuerpos y huesos importan. Es el arte lo que hace que los muertos vivan de nuevo de maneras importantes dentro de la cultura. Este articulo toma como caso de estudio el nuevo National Lynching Memorial en Montgomery Alabama. catalaPrimo Levi en The Drowned and the Saved suggereix que l'estar present davant nosaltres es el que fa possible que sentim llastima per un “co-huma” i actuem d'acord amb els nostres sentiments. Ens preocupem pels altres en relacio inversa a la distancia que ens separa d'ells. Pel que respecta als morts, situats a l'altre costat d'un abisme en aparenca insalvable, es troben incommensurablement mes lluny de nosaltres que fins i tot el mes distant dels vius. Es l'art —en el seu significat mes ampli— el que ens ensenya a sentir per ells i el que genera un relat en el qual els seus cossos i ossos importen. Es l'art el que fa que els morts visquen de nou de maneres importants dins de la cultura. Aquest article pren com a cas d'estudi el nou National Lynching Memorial a Montgomery Alabama. EnglishPrimo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved suggests that it is being present before us that makes it possible to feel pity for a “co-human” sufficient to make us act on our feelings. We care about others in inverse relation to their distance from us. I want to suggest that in the case of the dead who, on the other side of a seemingly unbridgeable chasm, are immeasurably further from us that even the most distant of the living. It is art –broadly understood– that teaches us to feel for them and that makes a narrative in which their bodies and bones matter. It is art that makes the dead live again in culturally important ways. This article takes as its case study the new National Lynching Memorial in Montgomery Alabama.

This article rehearses the claim that, as a consequence of political, cultural, and epistemological changes, the sexes came in the eighteenth century to be ordered as two opposite sexes rather hierarchically ordered versions of one. It connects this change to the advent of masturbation as a great moral problem by arguing that both reflect a still more major shift: sexual pleasure and the whole gigantic apparatus of desires, institutions, and restraints that had for so long been linked almost entirely to reproduction began to become unmoored. This is the problem that so unsettled Thomas Malthus, among many others. The triple revolutions of the eighteenth century—French, industrial, and commercial—are critical. By focusing on them rather than on governmentality and the creation of subjectivities, as Michel Foucault did, the the chronology of change is shifted from the late nineteenth century to an earlier period. One can, however, give up Foucault’s chronology without giving up the larger project of...

In the USA today, the election of gay bishops threatens to bring about a schism in the Episcopalian Church. This article asks questions about the extraordinary importance attached to matters sexual, both historically and in the present. Laqueur's anthropological answer to this broad question is that it is connected with a long and divergent tradition of thinking about the origins of culture. Sex and death, he says, organize the work of making culture. The thematic occasion for the history presented here is the notion of 'orgasm', and Laqueur offers four or five dates which can be regarded as turning points in the long history of 'allegories of orgasm'.

This essay explains the advent of modern cremation by how it came to stand in a variety of isomorphic relationships with other cultural practices or political positions. The meanings of this form of disposing of the dead—of rendering corpses quickly into their component parts through combustion in technologically advanced furnaces—are a consequence of the ways this relationship was articulated.

It seems a very long way from a dog howling in pain on François Magendie’s laboratory table in 1816 to Gilbert-Louis Duprez’s more-or-less novel accomplishment at the Paris Opéra two decades later: the tenor’s high C from the chest; the darkened voice; the sound of the future first heard in a performance of Guillaume Tell. Most obviously, the sounds of the dog were horrible and horrifying. When Magendie’s teacher, the great Xavier Bichat, tried the experiment some years earlier, his cleaning lady asked to move her chambers from near the scene because she could not bear the dog’s cries. Duprez’s sound was, arguably, beautiful; at least some people thought so, even if two doctors, driven to study the physiology of singing by the occasion, claimed that most people thought the voice was forced and false. Whether it was ‘pathological’ or not – I’d prefer, at worse, ‘pathogenic’ in the sense that so many unnatural new activities of the nineteenth century, like sitting long hours at a desk or riding on a train, were thought to make one ill – the tenor’s high C did, even its detractors admitted, ‘transport and dominate with its power’. It was musical and in the minds of many opened up radically new interpretative possibilities.

“Occult,” a 1902 international encyclopedia of religion tells us, is derived “from Latin occultus—Hidden,” and is applied to the assumption that insight into and control over nature is to be obtained by mysterious or magical procedures and by long apprenticeship in secret lore. The physical science of the middle ages, alchemy and astrology, and in modern times spiritualism, theosophy, and palmistry contain various factors of occult lore. Such doctrines, known as occultism, fall outside the realm of modern science. See MAGIC.

The reluctance of medicine to shift from treatment to palliation has existed since at least the 1700s and remains stubborn today.

This response to Michael Stolberg argues that the occasional piece of evidence for sexual dimorphism in Renaissance anatomy does no damage to what I had earlier called the “one‐sex model.” There are three reasons for this: a considerable amount of such evidence had long been available; stray observations do not discredit worldviews; and new supporting evidence for the one‐sex model was also available. Moreover, illustrations in the purportedly paradigm‐altering texts in fact support the old model. Since there was no radical change during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the reasons offered by Stolberg for why it happened then are moot. The view that biology grounded two sexes (the two‐sex model) replaced the view that it reflected imperfectly an underlying metaphysical truth (the one‐sex model) as part of the epistemological revolution of the Enlightenment.

The 37th (i.e. the 1998) edition of Tierney, Mcphee and Papadakis’ Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment has a chapter, written by two physicians, on “Care at End of Life.”1 There it is—Chapter 5— in the same typeface, with the same sort of tables, and the same arrangement of the page as its fellow chapters on renal failure, neoplasm, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. This is, as far as I know, the first chapter on death and dying in a major English language medical textbook and it marks something of a landmark.

Das Aufkommen der neuzeitlichen Masturbation kann mit einer Prazision datiert werden, wie sie in der Kulturgeschichte nur selten moglich ist. Es war am 1. Januar 1712, als der anonyme Autor eines kurzen Traktats mit langem Titel eine neue Krankheit nicht nur benannte, sondern sie regelrecht erfand. Geboren war damit jedoch nicht nur eine Krankheit, sondern ebenfalls ein neuer Mechanismus zur Erzeugung von Scham- und Schuldgefuhlen — ein Mechanismus, der eindeutig der Epoche der Moderne angehort und in der Folge eine fast universelle Wirksamkeit entfaltete. Der Originaltitel des Traktats lautete Onania; or the Heinous Sin of Seif Pollution and all its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES [im Text]. Considered with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice And seasonable Admonition to the Youth of the nation of Both SEXES [im Text]. Oder, in der deutschen Ausgabe: Onania oder die Selbstbeflekkung mit allen ihren entsetzlichen Folgen, welche dieses schandliche Laster bei beiderlei Geschlechtern nach sich zieht. Mit geistigem und leiblichem Rat fur diejenigen, welche sich durch diese abscheuliche Sunde bereits Schaden zugefugt haben und dem enthullten Geheimnisse, wie ohne arztliche Hulfe die geschwachten Leibesund Seelenkrafte wieder herzustellen sind. Dem Autor zufolge sei Onanie ein “solch haufiges und [zum Himmel] schreiendes Vergehen”(8. Aufl., 1723:iii, ii), dass allein die Unkenntnis der damit verbundenen Gefahren, die Heimlichkeit sowie die eingebildete Straflosigkeit seine weite Verbreitung erklaren konnten. Es gab fur dieses Vergehen weder die Todesstrafe, die z.B. fur “unnaturliche Unreinheiten” erlassen wurde, noch konnte es wie Unzucht oder Untreue durch spezielle Gesetze geahndet werden.