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Squarely challenging a culture obsessed with success, an acclaimed
philosopher argues that failure is vital to a life well lived,
curing us of arrogance and self-deception and engendering humility
instead. Our obsession with success is hard to overlook. Everywhere
we compete, rank, and measure. Yet this relentless drive to be the
best blinds us to something vitally important: the need to be
humble in the face of life's challenges. Costica Bradatan mounts
his case for failure through the stories of four historical figures
who led lives of impact and meaning-and assiduously courted
failure. Their struggles show that engaging with our limitations
can be not just therapeutic but transformative. In Praise of
Failure explores several arenas of failure, from the social and
political to the spiritual and biological. It begins by examining
the defiant choices of the French mystic Simone Weil, who, in
sympathy with exploited workers, took up factory jobs that her
frail body could not sustain. From there we turn to Mahatma Gandhi,
whose punishing quest for purity drove him to ever more extreme
acts of self-abnegation. Next we meet the self-styled loser E. M.
Cioran, who deliberately turned his back on social acceptability,
and Yukio Mishima, who reveled in a distinctly Japanese
preoccupation with the noble failure, before looking to Seneca to
tease out the ingredients of a good life. Gleefully breaching the
boundaries between argument and storytelling, scholarship and
spiritual quest, Bradatan concludes that while success can make us
shallow, our failures can lead us to humbler, more attentive, and
better lived lives. We can do without success, but we are much
poorer without the gifts of failure.
Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe
charts the intellectual landscape of twentieth century East-Central
Europe under the unifying theme of 'precariousness' as a mode of
historical existence. Caught between empires, often marked by
catastrophic historic events and grand political failures, the
countries of East-Central Europe have for a long time developed a
certain intellectual self-representation, a culture that not only
helps them make some sense of such misfortunes, but also protects
them somehow from a collapse into nihilism. An interdisciplinary
study of this sophisticated culture of survival and endurance has
been long overdue. Not only is it charming and worth studying in
its own right, but with the re-integration of the 'new Europe' into
the 'old' one and the emergence on the 'Western' European
intellectual scene of many authors from the 'East,' such a culture
will also shape the European mind of the 21st century. This volume
decodes and explores this culture of 'precariousness' from the
complementary angles of philosophy, political theory, intellectual
history and literary studies. Expert contributors look at a wide
range of topics, from philosophical martyrdom to collective
suffering to geographical fatalism, and explore the works of key
authors in the field including Cioran, Kolakowski, Kertesz, Bauman
and Zizek. This book was originally published as a special issue of
Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
The religious landscape in Europe is changing dramatically. While
the authority of institutional religion has weakened, a growing
number of people now desire individualized religious and spiritual
experiences, finding the self-complacency of secularism
unfulfilling. The "crisis of religion" is itself a form of
religious life. A sense of complex, subterraneous interaction
between religious, heterodox, secular and atheistic experiences has
thus emerged, which makes the phenomenon all the more fascinating
to study, and this is what Religion in Contemporary European Cinema
does. The book explores the mutual influences, structural
analogies, shared dilemmas, as well as the historical roots of such
a "post-secular constellation" as seen through the lens of European
cinema. Bringing together scholars from film theory and political
science, ethics and philosophy of religion, philosophy of film and
theology, this volume casts new light on the relationship between
the religious and secular experience after the death of the death
of God.
Despite philosophers' growing interest in the relation between
philosophy and literature in general, over the last few decades
comparatively few studies have been published dealing more narrowly
with the literary aspects of philosophical texts. The relationship
between philosophy and literature is too often taken to be
"literature as philosophy" and very rarely "philosophy as
literature." It is the dissatisfaction with this one-sidedness that
lies at the heart of the present volume. Philosophy has nothing to
lose by engaging in a serious process of literary self-analysis. On
the contrary, such an exercise would most likely make it stronger,
more sophisticated, more playful and especially more
self-reflexive. By not moving in this direction, philosophy places
itself in the position of not following what has been deemed, since
Socrates at least, the worthiest of all philosophical ideals:
self-knowledge. This book was originally published as a special
issue of The European Legacy.
Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe
charts the intellectual landscape of twentieth century East-Central
Europe under the unifying theme of 'precariousness' as a mode of
historical existence. Caught between empires, often marked by
catastrophic historic events and grand political failures, the
countries of East-Central Europe have for a long time developed a
certain intellectual self-representation, a culture that not only
helps them make some sense of such misfortunes, but also protects
them somehow from a collapse into nihilism. An interdisciplinary
study of this sophisticated culture of survival and endurance has
been long overdue. Not only is it charming and worth studying in
its own right, but with the re-integration of the 'new Europe' into
the 'old' one and the emergence on the 'Western' European
intellectual scene of many authors from the 'East,' such a culture
will also shape the European mind of the 21st century. This volume
decodes and explores this culture of 'precariousness' from the
complementary angles of philosophy, political theory, intellectual
history and literary studies. Expert contributors look at a wide
range of topics, from philosophical martyrdom to collective
suffering to geographical fatalism, and explore the works of key
authors in the field including Cioran, Kolakowski, Kertesz, Bauman
and Zizek. This book was originally published as a special issue of
Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
Cinema has a long history of engaging with the theme of sacrifice.
Given its capacity to stimulate the imagination and resonate across
a wide spectrum of human experiences, sacrifice has always
attracted filmmakers. It is on screen that the new grand narratives
are sketched, the new myths rehearsed, and the old ones recycled.
Sacrifice can provide stories of loss and mourning, betrayal and
redemption, death and renewal, destruction and re-creation,
apocalypses and the birth of new worlds. The contributors to this
volume are not just scholars of film but also students of religion
and literature, philosophers, ethicists, and political scientists,
thus offering a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to the
relationship between cinema and sacrifice. They explore how cinema
engages with sacrifice in its many forms and under different
guises, and examine how the filmic constructions, reconstructions
and misconstructions of sacrifice affect society, including its
sacrificial practices. This book was originally published as a
special issue of Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities.
Cinema has a long history of engaging with the theme of sacrifice.
Given its capacity to stimulate the imagination and resonate across
a wide spectrum of human experiences, sacrifice has always
attracted filmmakers. It is on screen that the new grand narratives
are sketched, the new myths rehearsed, and the old ones recycled.
Sacrifice can provide stories of loss and mourning, betrayal and
redemption, death and renewal, destruction and re-creation,
apocalypses and the birth of new worlds. The contributors to this
volume are not just scholars of film but also students of religion
and literature, philosophers, ethicists, and political scientists,
thus offering a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to the
relationship between cinema and sacrifice. They explore how cinema
engages with sacrifice in its many forms and under different
guises, and examine how the filmic constructions, reconstructions
and misconstructions of sacrifice affect society, including its
sacrificial practices. This book was originally published as a
special issue of Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities.
Despite philosophers' growing scholarly interest in the relation
between philosophy and literature in general, over the last few
decades comparatively few studies have been published dealing more
narrowly with the literary aspects of philosophical texts. The
relationship between philosophy and literature is too often taken
to be literature as philosophy and very rarely philosophy as
literature. It is the dissatisfaction with this one-sidedness that
lies at the heart of the present volume. Above all, a consideration
of what philosophers do from a literary perspective would be an
exercise in self-examination. Philosophy has nothing to lose by
engaging in a serious process of literary self-analysis. On the
contrary, such an exercise would most likely make it more
interesting, more sophisticated, stronger, more playful and
especially more self-reflexive. By not moving in this direction,
philosophy places itself in the position of not following what has
been deemed, since Socrates at least, the worthiest of all
philosophical ideals: self-knowledge. This book was originally
published as a special issue of The European Legacy.
What do Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Jan
Patocka have in common? First, they were all faced one day with the
most difficult of choices: stay faithful to your ideas and die or
renounce them and stay alive. Second, they all chose to die. Their
spectacular deaths have become not only an integral part of their
biographies, but they are also inseparable from their work. A death
for ideas is a piece of philosophical work in its own right;
Socrates may have never written a line, but his death is one of the
greatest philosophical best-sellers of all time. Dying for Ideas
explores the limit-situation in which philosophers find themselves
when the only means of persuasion they can use is their own dying
bodies and the public spectacle of their death. Silenced by brute
force, they cannot argue anymore and have to turn philosophy into
bodily performance. The phenomenology of this unique situation is
as fascinating as it has been neglected.In the manner of a dramatic
narrative, the book tells the story of the philosopher's encounter
with death as seen from several angles: the tradition of philosophy
as a way of life; the body as the locus of fundamental human
experiences; death of a classical philosophical topic; fear of
death as a torturer of philosophical minds; finally, the
philosophers' scapegoating and their live performance of a martyr's
death, followed by apotheosis and disappearance into myth. While
rooted in the history of philosophy, Dying for Ideas is an exercise
in challenging and breaking disciplinary boundaries. This is a book
about Socrates and Heidegger, but also about Gandhi's fasting unto
death and self-immolation as political protest; about Girard and
Passolini, and still about self-fashioning and the art of the
essay; Boethius and Montaigne are discussed, and so are Bergman's
Seventh Seal and Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich
The religious landscape in Europe is changing dramatically. While
the authority of institutional religion has weakened, a growing
number of people now desire individualized religious and spiritual
experiences, finding the self-complacency of secularism
unfulfilling. The "crisis of religion" is itself a form of
religious life. A sense of complex, subterraneous interaction
between religious, heterodox, secular and atheistic experiences has
thus emerged, which makes the phenomenon all the more fascinating
to study, and this is what Religion in Contemporary European Cinema
does. The book explores the mutual influences, structural
analogies, shared dilemmas, as well as the historical roots of such
a "post-secular constellation" as seen through the lens of European
cinema. Bringing together scholars from film theory and political
science, ethics and philosophy of religion, philosophy of film and
theology, this volume casts new light on the relationship between
the religious and secular experience after the death of the death
of God.
Despite its key role in the intellectual shaping of state
socialism, Communist ideas are often dismissed as mere propaganda
or as a rhetorical exercise aimed at advancing socialist
intellectuals on their way to power. By drawing attention to
unknown and unexplored areas, trends and ways of thinking under
socialism, the volume examines Eastern Europe and Russian histories
of intellectual movements inspired - negatively as well as
positively - by Communist arguments and dogmas. Through an
interdisciplinary dialogue, the collection demonstrates how various
bodies of theoretical knowledge (philosophical, social, political,
aesthetic, even theological) were used not only to justify dominant
political views, but also to frame oppositional and nonofficial
discourses and practices. The examination of the underlying
structures of Communism as an intellectual project provides
convincing evidence for questioning a dominant approach that
routinely frames the post-Communist intellectual development as a
"revival" or, at least, as a "return" of the repressed intellectual
traditions. As the book shows, the logic of a radical break,
suggested by this approach, is in contradiction with historical
evidence: a significant number of philosophical, theoretical and
ideological debates in post-Communist world are in fact the logical
continuation of intellectual conversations and confrontations
initiated long before 1989.
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