Re-Imagining Text — Re-Imagining Hermeneutics

With the advent of the digital age and new mediums of communication, it is becoming increasingly important for those interested in the interpretation of religious text to look beyond traditional ideas of text and textuality to find the sacred in unlikely places. Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological reorientation of classical hermeneutics from romanticized notions of authorial intent and psychological divinations to a serious engagement with the “science of the text” is a hermeneutical tool that opens up an important dialogue between the interpreter, the world of the text, and the contemporary world in front of the text. This article examines three significant insights that Paul Ricoeur contributes to our expanding understanding of text. First under scrutiny will be Ricoeur’s de-regionalization of classic hermeneutics culminating in his understanding of Dasein (Being) as “being-in-the-world,” allowing mean-ing to transcend the physical boundaries of the text. Next, Ricoeur’s three-fold under-standing of traditionality/Traditions/tradition as the “chain of interpretations” through which religious language transcends the tem-poral boundary of historicity will be explored. The final section will focus on Ricoeur’s understanding of the productive imagination and metaphoric truth as the under-appreciated yet key insight around which Ricoeur’s philosophical investigation into the metaphoric transfer from text to life revolves

W. J. T. Mitchell's Core Ideas on Image and Text

This study examines the important ideas of W.J.T. Mitchell’s theories on image and text. The link between word and image has long been a topic of controversy, from Plato's differentiation between "word" and "image" in ancient Greece to the current debates around image-text interaction in AI technology. The study of images and words, or iconology, frequently leads to discussions about how politics, power, reality, and value are related to images and texts. An eminent iconologist, William John Thomas (W. J. T.) Mitchell coined the phrase "pictorial turn" in 1994 to counter the linguistic movement, which had replaced the importance of images with language. Mitchell’s theory of image and text covers important ideas such as the pictorial turn, metapicture, biopicture, and the idea of image and text as mixed media. His work covers a broad range of subjects, from media aesthetics, visual culture, iconology, to image theory. The necessity to examine Mitchell's contributions to the study of image and text is expanding as his theories become more and more well-known worldwide.The purpose of this essay is to examine Mitchell's concepts, paying special attention to the dynamic interaction between word and image. In summary, Mitchell's "pictorial turn" positions pictures as dynamic entities and emphasizes their importance in scholarly discourse and culture. His work addresses unresolved questions concerning the nature of images, their connection to language, their historical relevance, and their effect on viewers. Mitchell challenges the traditional understanding of images as passive objects by introducing the idea of "metapictures"—images that reflect on their own nature—and transforming images into active subjects that are capable of self-theorization. The distinction between text and image is blurred by this reinterpretation, which also promotes a greater understanding of the nuanced ways that visual culture influences and reflects the human condition

Digital Image

This paper considers the ontological significance of invisibility in relation to the question ‘what is a digital image?’ Its argument in a nutshell is that the emphasis on visibility comes at the expense of latency and is symptomatic of the style of thinking that dominated Western philosophy since Plato. This privileging of visible content necessarily binds images to linguistic (semiotic and structuralist) paradigms of interpretation which promote representation, subjectivity, identity and negation over multiplicity, indeterminacy and affect. Photography is the case in point because until recently critical approaches to photography had one thing in common: they all shared in the implicit and incontrovertible understanding that photographs are a medium that must be approached visually; they took it as a given that photographs are there to be looked at and they all agreed that it is only through the practices of spectatorship that the secrets of the image can be unlocked. Whatever subsequent interpretations followed, the priori- ty of vision in relation to the image remained unperturbed. This undisputed belief in the visibility of the image has such a strong grasp on theory that it imperceptibly bonded together otherwise dissimilar and sometimes contradictory methodol- ogies, preventing them from noticing that which is the most unexplained about images: the precedence of looking itself. This self-evident truth of visibility casts a long shadow on im- age theory because it blocks the possibility of inquiring after everything that is invisible, latent and hidden

Проблема міської ідентичності у філософській антропології (THE PROBLEM OF URBAN IDENTITY IN PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY)

Розглянуто низку перспектив, завдяки яким чи можемо описати і дослідити міську ідентичність як філософсько-антропологічну проблему. Фокусується увага на тактики і стратегії людського тіла у повсякденному просторі, активну діяльність і досвід суб’єкта, текст і традицію міста. (This paper considers to extent in which aspects we can describe and explore the urban identity as a philosophical and anthropological problem. It is focused on the human body tactics and strategies in the everyday space, active practice and experience of the subject, text and tradition of the city.

An Outlaw Ethics for the Study of Religions: Maternality and the Dialogic Subject in Julia Kristeva’s 'Stabat Mater'

In this essay I examine Julia Kristeva’s transgressive body of work as a strategic embodiment of, and argument for, an ethical orientation towards otherness predicated on the image of divided subjectivity identified by Jacques Lacan but powerfully re-theorised as dialogic by Kristeva. I focus on what is, for Kristeva, a stylistically unique essay – 'Stabat Mater' – which examines a number of institutional discourses about motherhood from the western philosophical, religious, and psychoanalytical traditions, and simultaneously subverts them with a parallel discourse (and enactment) ostensibly by an actual mother. The text itself, I argue, can be read as a performance of dialogic subjectivity and of Kristeva’s conception of maternality, which implies a radical ethical imperative – termed 'herethics' – towards alterity. I propose that this herethical model might heuristically inform current debates regarding the ethical orientations of the study of religions as an academic field

Foucault on the ‘question of the author’: a critical exegesis

This analysis of Foucault's ‘What is an Author?’ produces three main findings. First, Foucault was arguing—subtly yet powerfully—against Barthes's ‘The Death of the Author’. Second, ‘What is an author?’ systematically mystified the figure of the text, even as it clarified the figure of the author by revealing that figure to be an interpretative construct. Third, Foucault's achievement was vitiated by the terms in which it was cast, for his concept of the ‘author-function’ obliterated the personal quality of the author-figure. It is suggested in conclusion that all such interpretative figures—‘text’ as well as ‘author’, and many others besides—merit critical analysis, since these embody the fore-having which precedes interpretation

Apocalyptic Literature and the Study of Early Jewish Mysticism

This chapter examines apocalyptic literature within the framework of “early Jewish mysticism” and compares early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writings with rabbinic and Hekhalot materials. It begins by focusing on apocalyptic literature and the discourse of “mysticism” in religious studies before turning to continuity and rupture in the Jewish discourse of heavenly ascent. It then considers textuality and textual practice in the study of early Jewish mysticism as well as the patterns of similarity and difference between early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature and Jewish ascent texts from late antiquity, including Hekhalot literature. It concludes by highlighting the persistent gap between the literary artifacts that make up apocalyptic and Hekhalot literatures as well as differences in rituals and religious experience

Dread Hermeneutics: Bob Marley, Paul Ricoeur and the Productive Imagination.

This article presents Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutic of the productive imagination as a methodological tool for understanding the innovative social function of texts that in exceeding their semantic meaning, iconically augment reality. Through the reasoning of Rastafari elder Mortimo Planno’s unpublished text, Rastafarian: The Earth’s Most Strangest Man, and the religious and biblical signification from the music of his most famous postulate, Bob Marley, this article applies Paul Ricœur’s schema of the religious productive imagination to conceptualize the metaphoric transfer from text to life of verbal and iconic images of Rastafari’s hermeneutic of word, sound and power. This transformation is accomplished through what Ricœur terms the phenomenology of the iconic augmentation of reality. Understanding this semantic innovation is critical to understanding the capacity of the religious imagination to transform reality as a proclamation of hope in the midst of despair

Becoming-Bertha: virtual difference and repetition in postcolonial 'writing back', a Deleuzian reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Critical responses to Wide Sargasso Sea have seized upon Rhys’s novel as an exemplary model of writing back. Looking beyond the actual repetitions which recall Brontë’s text, I explore Rhys’s novel as an expression of virtual difference and becomings that exemplify Deleuze’s three syntheses of time. Elaborating the processes of becoming that Deleuze’s third synthesis depicts, Antoinette’s fate emerges not as a violence against an original identity. Rather, what the reader witnesses is a series of becomings or masks, some of which are validated, some of which are not, and it is in the rejection of certain masks, forcing Antoinette to become-Bertha, that the greatest violence lies