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This paper identifies a counterforce in contemporary political discourse which challenges academic tendencies toward pessimism and cynicism with a political posture of hopefulness. Locating in the politically active science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin a similar impulse to this counterforce, this paper argues for using Le Guin's works in the college Rhetoric or English classrooms to model a means to engage with social and political injustice from a position built on hope and not cynicism. Tracking Le Guin's use of metafictional commentary on the process of both reading and writing science fiction, this paper ultimately locates a challenge to our pinched views of human potential and social possibilities in the way of meaningful political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We defend in this essay Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of suspicion against Toril Moi’s debunking of it as a misguided interpretation of the practice of critical inquiry, and we relate the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy to the hermeneutics of suspicion. For Ricœur, empathy would not be a mere psychological mechanism by which one subject transiently identifies with another, but the ontological presence of the self with the Other as a way of being —listening as a human action that is a fundamental way of being with the Other in which “hermeneutics can stand on the authority of the resources of past ontologies.” In a rational reconstruction of what a Ricœur-friendly approach to empathy would entail, a logical space can be made for empathy to avoid the epistemological paradoxes of Husserl and the ethical enthusiasms of Levinas. How this reconstruction of empathy would apply to empathic understanding, empathic responsiveness, empathic interpretation, and empathic receptivity is elaborated from a Ricœurian perspective.

Recent advocates of postcritique urge scholars not to read texts suspiciously but instead to regard texts as capable of saying what they mean and, accordingly, to take those meanings seriously. While a suspicious disposition underlies much of introductory composition pedagogy, especially the teaching of argument, postcritique has made little entry into discourses of undergraduate instruction. Attending to the New Sincerity movement in American literature, film, and music after 1980, this essay examines how teaching texts that emphasize their own sincerity (and the difficulty of achieving sincere expression) can encourage students to regard argument and interpretation not as suspicious practices but as means for a generous mode of description that does not sacrifice the complexity of a given text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the hermeneutics of suspicion, this article explores how the critical theory of human rights inspired the Latin American perspective of emancipation, which questions the conventional, Eurocentric universalism of human rights. A causal and philosophical-legal investigation is developed, based on the methodology of documentary analysis of bibliographic sources. The research identifies three key tools in Latin American thought that have influenced the devaluation of the imposed vision of human rights: emancipation ideologies, culture and literature. It shows how there have been various social and cultural movements that promote said emancipation. Finally, the research opens new lines of study on the viability of establishing a Latin American culture of human rights, challenging the Western knowledge imposed in this multicultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ricoeur Studies / Etudes Ricoeuriennes is the property of University of Pittsburgh, University Library System and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of this text is to reconstruct the meanings of the concept of hermeneutical truth, as it has been defined and explained in the main projects of modern hermeneutics (Dannhauer, Chladenius, Meier, Schleiermacher, Fr. Schlegel). I will explore the epistemological side of this concept, different from its meaning in hermeneutic ontology. Understood as correctness by modern hermeneutics, truth has been related to the authorial intention. The thesis I am arguing is that the meanings of hermeneutical truth and, related to them, the modern theories of authorial intention differ according to the metaphysical presuppositions that define the thought paradigms of modernity (Cartesianism, Kantianism, Romanticism and German Idealism): the centrality and activism of the self, the rationality of the self, the dependence of knowledge on the ideal of method, the discovery of the unconscious. Some modern hermeneutical theories express the tensions between these philosophical paradigms. However, I will argue that the authorial intention remains a limit of interpretation that prevents the risks of arbitrariness and hermeneutic relativism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we understand the critique of mainstream media (MSM) in a political moment where intense suspicion of media and journalism has been normalized in reactionary discourses? This article addresses this question from a discourse theoretical perspective that is supported by a corpus-assisted interpretivist analysis of how the terms "MSM" and "mainstream media" were articulated in a January 2021 sample of more than 11,000 tweets from different time zones. We begin by clarifying the political stakes of our argument and situating the historical emergence of "mainstream media" as a discursive category. Our Twitter analysis highlights the "logic of equivalence" established between mainstream media and other identities and the normalization of a moralized representation of media as a corrupt ally of government. We conclude by speculating on how we might affirm a radical democratic conception of media critique in a cultural context where anti-MSM rhetoric can float easily between different discourses and ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of this paper is an examination of the practical dimension of contemporary philosophical culture, both in relation to the idea of wisdom in traditional philosophy and in relation to psychoanalytical practice. In the first part of the paper, we determine what philosophical culture is, primarily by emphasizing the differences between that culture and the scientific-technological culture. In the second part of the paper, we show that such a philosophical culture has fallen into a crisis. In the third part of paper, we offer a way out of that crisis, in the form of psychoanalysis, which criticizes the primacy that philosophical culture accords to consciousness, logic, diachronic and linear ways of thinking. In the fourth and last part of the paper, we present the shortcomings of this psychoanalytical model. As a solution, we offer a new model of philosophical culture, created by the synthesis of philosophy, psychoanalysis, but also other discipline of human thought, which has similarities with Nietzsche’s anticipation of Gay Science, as well as with Jasper’s idea of transcendence.

Copyright of Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

What is the history of the desire to be good? Many people lead rich and fulfilling lives without asking themselves such a question, so it may be extravagant to expect the early modern English settlers in Algonquian territory to have done so. But maybe not. Many settlers were ready, after all, to commit great violence in the name of goodness. Just as importantly, they were also eager to cultivate lives committed to that virtue—and to chase that project across an ocean. This essay attends to some of the conditions and consequences of neglecting to critique one's own motivations in the pursuit of goodness. It examines some of the earliest writings of English settlers in Wampanoag territory: the Separatists at Plymouth, the merchants and protocapitalists at Ma-Re Mount, and the spectacularly inept thieves and starvelings at Wessagussett. Across these settlements, this essay observes a frequent correlation—on the one hand, a conviction of superior ethical knowledge among English settlers; on the other, an addiction to a paranoid epistemology. In these texts that ethics and this epistemology complement each other powerfully. That power's historical conditions come to light when we look beyond the conventional antagonism between Plymouth and Ma-Re Mount, Bradford and Morton; and instead, reckon with their similarity, and with the conveniently familiar distraction the cliché of their antagonism provides next to the alien and alarming challenge to the Christian vision of goodness that one clumsy Wessagussett settler, Phinehas Pratt, unhappily encountered. His ineloquence testifies to the unthought intertwinement of ethics and epistemology in colonial encounters, and to how dearly settlers sought scientific certainty as a substitute for the terrifying intuition that their ideals of goodness and their God were not, in fact, as universal as they had once thought. Their terror can be our gain. It invites modern historians and literary critics to examine the motives and the methods of our own pursuits of goodness in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper focuses on New Historicism that emerged in the 80s of the last century, through the contribution of Stephen Greenblatt, the American critic who coined the name of the new school of critical theory and whose 1980 study, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, introduces the defining operational concepts of the theoretical and applied approach proposed by the movement. As John Brannigan observes, “it is a constant feature of new historian approaches to tend to study a considerable number of texts belonging to the same historical epoch and to postulate, or argue, that each epoch establishes its own way of manifesting itself: power” (Brannigan 2001: 174). In terms of text analysis, critics of the new historian orientation aspire to identify the way in which literature influences and is influenced by the social, cultural and ideological context in which it fits, either by correlating several texts of different invoices belonging to the same era or by focusing on a particular literary work, most often considered exemplary in that culture. An example of the new historical analyses devoted to a single literary work is provided by DA Miller’s essay, “Disciplines in Different Voices: Bureaucracy, Police, Family and Bleak House” (1983). The thesis that the critic argues is that Charles Dickens’ novel, House of Shadows, represents and gives visibility to the prison system in Victorian England, confirming, on the other hand, to readers the feeling of security generated by belonging to the family and/ or the free society outside the detention space and warning them, on the other hand, the dangers of rebellion and nonconformism. Professor Dana-Andreea Percec’s book starts from a premise that has gained more and more academic authority in recent decades, with the development of fields such as (the new) historicism. Literary studies have become increasingly receptive to an interdisciplinary approach to texts, including data from various areas of the social sciences. One of the most profitable associations remains that between literary criticism and history, in the form of the new historicism. The movement emphasizes the importance of the role played by the historical context in the interpretation of artistic creations. Thus, the past becomes open, hermeneutically, like a text, the writings having meaning only in relation to other writings, their value depending on the value given to them, directly indirectly, by the discourses of the time. In other words, in the author’s opinion, the meaning given to a text by the initial readers remains unchanged. The difference is that today's critical readers are more aware of the political and cultural conventions of the past than the ancient public, because the latter assumed these models as part of the collective imagination.

The article concerns itself with representative readers' responses to Afterland by Lauren Beukes. In line with Beukes's reputation, the novel has received acclaim. However, other readers have noted lacunae and negative representations that can fruitfully be viewed from the perspective of a hermeneutics of suspicion, which allows for an analysis of the affective sensibility of a text, and a human rights framework, which emphasises all humans' right to equality and freedom from prejudice. The world of Afterland, featuring the aftermath of the death of most people with prostates, offers an opportunity for dramatically reconceptualised gender roles and behaviours, and the possibility for readers to experience the effects of transportation into a narrative and the alleviation of out-group anxiety. Such processes allow for prejudice reduction and an increase in empathy. Through a close reading of sections of the novel, and by focusing particularly on the instance of transgender, I note that the novel fails to figure transgender rights as human rights through its representations and lacunae. Other representations of gender, sexuality and, to some extent, race are also at variance with the need for increased vigilance about the rights of marginalised and at-risk individuals during a pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last twenty years, a number of anthropologists have questioned the discipline’s “epistemology of intimacy” to show that in some parts of the world, Otherness plays an integral role in the construction of social unity. While Otherness has been rehabilitated as a productive, even unifying, relationship in certain contexts, it remains an insecure premise through which to relate in parts of the world where people idealize pure mutual identification and believe in the reality of witchcraft. In such places, Otherness is always implicated as a dangerous potential in even the most intimate relationships. South African churches have long resisted this potential in the ways that they relate to fellow Christians in church and to the social world beyond it. In contrast to their “hermeneutics of faith”, I pay specific attention in this paper to a church in South Africa whose religious ethic centred on a radical “hermeneutics of suspicion” that led believers to relate to their own bodies, fellow churchgoers, and a wider social world in terms of socially threatening Otherness. I argue that members of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, where this ethic was elaborated, found in radical Otherness the possibility of an ontologically singular position from which they could attempt to remake social worlds that would be immune from witchcraft – without exposing themselves to the dangers of new social relations.

This article explores the cognitive science of religion to discover the challenges and implications for theology by providing a critical evaluation through the lenses of philosophy, evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Four positive implications of the cognitive science of religion are identified. Firstly, the cognitive science of religion can function as a strong hermeneutics of suspicion through which theologians can criticise dogmatic and authoritative religions and theologies. Secondly, the cognitive science of religion invites scholars of religion and theology to consider the evolutionary view of survival. Thirdly, the discipline's counter-intuitive concept of God could provide the basic material for theology. Finally, the folk psychology this field depends on can be harmonised with theological emphasis on the weak. Despite these positive comments, it is nevertheless clear that a constructive encounter between the cognitive science of religion and theology should follow a careful critique of the former. Thus, I criticise that the cognitive science of religion is excessively dependent on evolutionary psychology and overemphasises a reductionist explanation of religion as merely a by-product of evolutionary adaptation whilst this study almost precludes any nonreductionistic model of mind such as 'connectionism' and 'enactionism' as well as any holistic interpretation of religion and theology. Finally, I conclude that theology of nature is a proper method for establishing a relationship between the cognitive science of religion and theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that Ricoeur’s concept of suspicion is significant for present-day neurocognitive studies on literature, with regard to the issues of embodiment, bodily simulation, and interpretation of textual latent meanings. Ricoeur’s practice of suspicion is one of the two poles of our present inquiry on literary texts, being the second a neurohermeneutic approach that we have developed in past studies (Gambino and Pulvirenti, Storie, menti, mondi; “Neurohermeneutics. A Transdisciplinary Approach to Literature”).We will refer to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, a principle which is often quoted in literary critical discourse but not always precisely defined, considering it as an act of mistrustful interpretation, which bases on intersubjectivity and aims to disclose latent and hidden meanings in sign systems, specifically in literary texts, which is the field of our inquiry.In the perspective of what we here define as neurohermeneutics of suspicion, the reader becomes an interpreter, questioning the text with regard to its multilayered surface features as marking inferential clues unveiling secondary meanings. The meaning-making process depends on a creative act of the reader’s imagination embodying mental (re-)construction of the situation described by a text. Therefore, suspicious interpreting does not rely in either the text, the author, the reader or the cognitive and cultural context, but in their complex and dynamic relationship, pivoting around the common human nature rooted in corporeity. We claim that particularly in the postcritical venture, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics may be helpful in refiguring the pleasure of deciphering the fictional worlds of literature, challenging the reader to “play” with the text intended as a terra incognita of inexhaustible multiple meanings.

This essay offers a broad look at the way critique as a mode, method, and attitude in post-war art history research and teaching intersects with occurrences of critique in humanities scholarship and teaching generally, but also how distorted forms of critique occur in contexts outside the academic field. The essay outlines concerns raised by humanities scholars with what they consider to be an over-reliance on critique as a negative skill, resulting in scholarship that tears down without building up, and self-satisfied debunking of anything that does not stand up to the current era's identity politics. The essay argues that the question of critique is of particular urgency to the field of contemporary art. Here critique is embedded in the material studied—artworks, artistic practices, and discourses—and therefore in dire need of being understood, challenged, and decentered as a method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this essay is twofold: firstly, it is a description a post-critical tendency within the contemporary, Anglo-American humanities; secondly, it presents propositions which broaden the boundaries current in the post-critical current, which lead to the replacement of critical sci-entificity with an affirmation of everyday readerly affects. The claims regarding the rejection of a criticism based on suspicion, formulated by, among others, Rita Felski, accentuate the elite character of reading, the goal of which is the unveiling of the economico- political entan-glement of the text as a product of historical reality. The distrust towards the surface of the text and the illusion of aesthetic autonomy, central for cultural studies, raised the critical atti-tude to the rank of an activity that is revelatory and privileged. The opponents of an unmask-ing criticism underline its limitations—unmasking reveals the ultimate source of every cultural production, the logic of capitalism, the total character of which leaves no chance for change. In defense of change, and in the hope of restoring to literature a widespread interest, there appear tendencies which bring back the individual experience of reading, the basis of which is to be aesthetic pleasure, freed from the historical context and its determinants. In the article, examples of such tendencies will be pointed out, as also will be their consequences caused by the elevation and universalisation of non-professional reading. The rejection of the political task of criticism leads to the questioning of its anti-systemic potential; in turn, the apotheosis of suspicion paralyses the postulative dimension of criticism. For this reason, in the last part of the essay, I propose going beyond oppositional con ceptualisations in the direction of a criti-cism that is situated and material, and whose model, in my rendering, is subordi nated knowledge.

Dog whistles are defined as covertly racialized discourse characteristic of right-wing populist speech, but do they also work in writing? Discovery of dog whistles in literary texts requires a mode of suspicious reading that is important in discursively toxic times, but may also risk circularity. This conundrum is tested in a comparative, suspicious reading of two Trump-era memoirs, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, revealing remarkable parallels between their politics and aesthetics. Vance's populist narrative voice consistently dog whistles 'race' in the very act of disavowing it, suggesting his memoir may be parasitic on Coates'. Close reading contrasts Coates' polysemous 'thick' signification with Vance's incoherent double-voicedness. Ultimately however, a dog whistling relation between the two memoirs remains hypothetical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

D. Z. Phillips is one of the most important philosophers who believe in non-realism about religious language. He was highly influenced by Hume and believed Hume has criticized the arguments for the existence of God in three levels. Although he considers these criticisms as successful ones, by appealing to the hermeneutics of contemplation, he maintains that we should go beyond Hume and contemplate religious concepts. He separates his way from the proponents of hermeneutics of recollection and suspicion. According to him, we should understand religion through contemplating religious concepts and taking heed of the life of believers. In contrast to his claims, his interpretations about religious propositions such as the existence of God, prayer and immortality are not consistent with the believers’ ideas. Furthermore, he has neglected different versions of design argument. That’s why his investigations are incomplete. It can also be said that even though he attempted to go beyond the criteria of logical positivism, he could not do it.

The article presents some connections between Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of queer and her first person academic theory. Beginning from defining queer as a process of being across, I explain what is queer autobiography (by some comments on Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love, 1997), and how we can relate this idea to some more theoretical transformations in Sedgwick’s general project. I am especially interesting in going beyond hermeneutics of suspicion toward reparative reading as a practice of rethinking community. The second goal is to adapt this theoretical transformation with Sedgwick’s own writings.

Sigmund Freud and his theory of psychoanalysis have been going under the intensive scientific inquisitions for many decades and it appears that this will last for many decades to come. Providing a brief overview of the development of the psychoanalytic theory and the debates for and against it, this paper tries to bring attentions to the psychoanalysis as an interpretative enterprise. Drawing on tire recent trend in the Continental philosophy, it argues that even though it has lost its popularity in academic psychology, psychoanalysis has been gaining a new recognition in Humanities as an art of interoperation. In this context, the value of psychoanalysis as “hermeneutics of suspicion” is discussed

The new millennium has witnessed the emergence of a series of new approaches to literary criticism in the United States that have posed serious challenges to the dominant paradigm of symptomatic reading and the "hermeneutics of suspicion. Focusing on surface reading proposed by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus in 2009, this article examines the background, basic ideas, representative works, academic responses, and recent development of this new interpretative practice. It argues that the rise of surface reading is closely tied to the external and internal crises that American literary studies have undergone in recent decades. With rapid changes in contemporary social, political and technological environments, the underlying assumptions and beliefs of literary studies have also been evolving accordingly. The shift of critical attention from symptomatic reading to surface reading and description in American literary studies might shed light on problems confronting Chinese literary critics and stimulate reflections on the domestic anxiety of theoretical construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the ending of Sibilla Aleramo’sUna donna(1906) in terms of its much-discussed fictionalization of autobiographical material. It then highlights the narrative and literary (dis)continuity that exists between the ending and the book that followed,Il passaggio(1919). Arguing that we can read the movement fromUna donnatoIl passaggioin terms of a hermeneutical shift from suspicion, in Ricoeur’s terms, to a reparative position, to use Sedgwick’s phrase, this essay envisions as fundamental to Aleramo the possibilities inscribed in narrative, the power to move (and remove) one’s body [corpo] from the materiality assigned to women by patriarchy, and to reinsert it within a citational economy of trust in the written word [corpus] and the written word’s surprises. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Autobiografia is the property of Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecinskiego / University of Szczecin Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

It used to be taken for a given fact that children’s literature is written by adults for children. This assumption is contested by the emergence of “another children’s literature”, namely literature about, for, and by children. Facilitated by digital platforms, this alternative type of children’s literature is gathering momentum, compelling us to rethink the (im)possibilities of children’s creative agency. As research into children’s literature is largely premised upon the asymmetry between adult authorship and juvenile readership, we need to rethink some fundamental tenets of this academic field in order to come to terms with child authorship. This article reviews leading publications on the topic, to address the question of how we can best acknowledge, facilitate, and appreciate children’s creative agency as an indispensable dimension of their emergent citizenship. Methodological deliberations are illustrated with references to primary works by child authors about topical societal issues such as ethnic conflict, homelessness, and migration. Its aim is not so much to provide a complete survey of all available publications on the topic, but rather to stake out representative publications that exemplify more and less fruitful approaches to the problem at hand.

Copyright of Dinbilimleri Journal is the property of Dinbilimleri Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Realist and Marxist critiques of humanitarian intervention are distinctively materialistic in scope. The IR literature has already described this scepticism as a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, a term associated with the work of Paul Ricoeur, which aims to unearth the intervenors’ material and geopolitical interests hypocritically hidden behind the pretext of humanitarianism. The article first notes the decontextualised misappropriations of the term as an iconic and omnipotent instrument of doubt, as well as the limitations of the social constructivist response on the matter. By contextualising Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion as developed in his life work, the article then calls for an extension of critique from a hermeneutics of suspicion to a hermeneutics of naïveté. Applied in the critique of the ideology of humanitarian intervention, the article thus calls for a shift of focus from the examination of the distorting (Marxism, realism) and legitimising (social constructivism) functions of this ideology to its integrating function that has allowed the evocation of humanitarian principles as international norms, and uncritically vindicates this arrangement. The article proposes that this hermeneutical detour could allow critique to proceed to a greater analytical depth, opening up a set of critical questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

African Biblical Studies (ABS) can be characterized both as innovative and reactionary: Innovative, because it refuses to be confined by the methodologies, ancient concerns, and principles that govern biblical studies in the ‘west’ (used throughout this article to refer to the majority Euro-American scholars while recognizing the presence of other groups), and instead charts a course that is more interested in making biblical interpretation relevant to present realities. Reactionary, because its driving force is partly a critique of the inadequacy of western biblical studies in providing meaningful responses to concerns that are pertinent to African communities. A genuine ABS is therefore an amalgamation of multiple interpretive methods, approaches and foci that reflect a creative engagement of the African cosmological reality and the Bible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the concept of "communities of practice," this essay recounts the impact of foregrounding representations of community in teaching Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. I argue that the work of collectively reading this text, which itself offers a nuanced perspective on being and belonging, fostered a classroom community self-conscious about its own expectations for membership. Our process reinforced the constant interpretive encounter in graphic narratives between writing and image, facilitating in our class a critique of dominant modes of discourse and fostering a reading practice that helped us probe the limits of communal identity. This was not a process of affiliation with Bechdel's persona, but a dialectic within the classroom of recognition and difference that ultimately binds communities of practice together. Moving beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion to a communal reading, our engagement with the text enabled members of the class to have both literary critical insights and deeply personal discoveries about the communities to which we willingly belong or into which we are placed. Ultimately, this essay recommends the generic affordances of the graphic narrative for this work, suggesting how communities of literary practice need to focus on texts that open modes of affiliation and recognition for diverse student populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue is intended to take forward a sympathetic reconceptualization of the pleasures of popular film and of related forms such as soap operas and pornography. The five articles contained in the special issue vary in length and scope, and are followed by a response piece from a senior scholar. We hope that the dialogic mix of case studies and theoretical or survey approaches brings a liveliness to the treatment of pleasure, and indeed that it encapsulates our sense that pleasure retains a conceptual elusiveness, no matter how often discussed (or experienced). We acknowledge the elusiveness in this introduction, which we have cast in the form of a dialogue to acknowledge our individual motivations and to indicate the different academic and cultural contexts in which we, the two editors, work. We jointly describe the content of the articles at the end of the dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marx and Nietzsche are often compared as practitioners of a hermeneutic of suspicion. I pursue this comparison by focusing on an overlooked similarity between the two. In strangely similar passages, Marx (in Capital) and Nietzsche (in the Genealogy o f Morals) introduce explicitly theatrical scenarios into the course of their discussions, complete with what Marx calls dramatis personae, where we witness a descent into a workshop (in some sense underground) in order to learn the secrets of production--the production, in both cases, of value. But neither scenario conforms to the structure of the discovery of a concealed truth--in fact, each challenges this structure directly. By looking at the specific nature of these theatrical descents, we can come to a better understanding of the task of the philosopher in both Nietzsche and Marx, as well as the distinctive position of historical knowledge within a hermeneutics of suspicion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard makes a powerful phenomenological distinction between fear and anxiety; one fears this or that thing, but one is anxious of "nothing." Kierkegaard understands this terror before the nothing as a revelation of freedom. This is correct but incomplete. Anxiety does, indeed, transcend fear of this or that possibility to encounter possibility itself. But it also transcends guilt about this or that sin, to encounter sinfulness itself, or the general brokenness of the social injustices and cultural illusions into which we find ourselves always already thrown. We see this neglected aspect of anxiety masterfully revealed in David Lynch's, Mulholland Drive. This film opens as a typical mystery plot, but the most important clue in the film is anxiety. The anxiety, which we and ultimately the protagonist, Betty, cannot evade, reveals the inescapability of her responsibility and her guilt in a murder. However, this anxiety also points beyond her personal responsibility for the crime to a deeper understanding of the structural distortions and illusions that permeate Hollywood culture and modern life more generally. In other words, it points us beyond an existential analysis of freedom to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Returning to the plot of the film with this philosophical turn in hand helps us to see past Betty's guilt to the more important theme, the tragedy of her death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the construction process of feminist theologies tying them to the feminist movement and gender studies as an analytical category for understanding the hierarchies and power relations. It looks into the perspective of deconstruction and denaturalization of crystallized bodies in social and family relations perpetrated through cultural traditions. The aim of this bibliographic work is to recall women and ecclesial events that were decisive to remove women from their invisibility and insert them in decision processes, in social struggles, under the perspective of women's ability to reflect, suspect and build hermeneutical and theological thoughts capable for mediating their emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lambda Nordica is the property of Lambda Nordica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)