Continuity, constellation, and unworking: an exploration of language in Nietzsche

This project is an investigation of language in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. The framing question is whether Nietzsche’s treatment of language as an explicit philosophical theme in published work and notes of the early 1870s is in fact only an early interest abandoned by the later work and notes in which the treatment of language as such does not assume such a central role. I suggest that if we consider language not as a unitary concept but as a constellation, a network of shifting thematic nodes, we find that language remains a chief interest throughout the Nietzschean corpus, but that its constitution is continually shifting as the texts emphasize changing nodal points. I then apply this suggestion to the reading of various Nietzschean texts in an effort to trace the changing constellation of language. First, in texts from the early 1870s, including The Birth of Tragedy, the essay “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense,” and unpublished notes from the period, we find the thematic nodal points of truth, origination, perception, and rhetoric. Then, in later texts like Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morality, as well as posthumously published notes from the mid-to-late 1880s, we find the nodal point of the Subject come to the fore. Finally, in the last text, Ecce Homo, writing and self-narrative emerge as dominant nodal points in this changing constellation of language

Aberrant Relationships in the Book of Genesis: The Pollution of the One Flesh Relationship as Found in Genesis 2:24

Genesis is a book of beginnings. Furthermore, Genesis describes the beginning of the relationship between man and woman. That relationship, as found in Gen 2:24, becomes the standard ideal for the one-flesh union set forth by God. Sadly, Genesis 3 tells of the beginning of sin, and how sin damaged the ideal union. And, although sin has persisted and flourished, the standard of Gen 2:24 never changed, nor was it replaced. Thus, the following dissertation seeks to locate, examine, and discuss the various one-flesh, man-woman relationships in Genesis. The first chapter of this research examines the one-flesh relationship found in Gen 2:24. Then the primary focus looks upon the various passages that expose aberrant or polluted unions between men and women as they refused to follow the ideal paradigm. This study first looks at polygamous unions – Gen 4:19–24; 16:1–16; 26:34–35; 28:6–9; 29:15–30; 29:31–30:24; 34:1–31; 35:22, and 38:2. Then it examines relationships built upon lust and the personal gain that can be obtained from lust – Gen 6:1–3; 9:18–25; 12:10–20; 19:1–11; 20:1–18; 26:6–11; 38:11–30; and 39:7–20. Additionally, another section studies unions characterized by depraved sexual aberrance – 19:30–38 and 38:6–10. Lastly, there are two passages found in Genesis, chapter 24 and Gen 41:45, that appear to uphold the ideal standard set forth in Gen 2:24. Those two passages are covered in the last chapter of this paper. The last part of this paper summarizes that not only does Gen 2:24 remain the standard for the union between man and woman in Genesis, it became the regulatory idea behind passages in the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, and the New Testament that address godly relationships

Making kin and taking care: intra-active learning with time, space and matter in a Johannesburg preschool

This research explores the lives and learning of a group of Grade R children and their human and non-human collaborators, (myself included) paying particular attention to the agency of the material environment. The learning spaces of a preschool and its neighbouring park emerge as key players in the lively thinking-with that is sparked off by our engagements with each other: people, other creatures, plants, spaces, things, energies, pasts, presents and futures. The spaces cannot be separated from their relationships with time and matter (of which we are a part), nor from the stories, habits and patterns of our engagement with them. All of these connected things, material and discursive, work in the research as lively assemblages or apparatuses that change and are changed by ongoing and unanticipated events. Photographs and video clips produce new ideas about and with the data created through the project and rather than reflecting reality, these visual forms diffract with time and space to offer the researcher and the participants new and different sensory, conceptual, affective and temporal experiences. These differences make a difference to the thinking that emerges. Relationships of accountability and belonging are recognized as central concepts in the learning with the park and the preschool. Paying attention to the choices we can make about taking care of our human and nonhuman relations or 'kin’ invites new thoughts about what it means to learn together in an inner-city preschool. Learning together requires a posthuman ethics that pays attention to what matters in the entanglements of learning and the becoming response-able to one another

Abbreviation Method for Some Jointed Relations in Displaying Genealogy

Part 5: Industrial Management and Other ApplicationsInternational audienceIn this research, a new method, named “Joint ABBReviation for Organizing WHIteBasE (JaBBRoW)”, for abbreviating some jointed relations in displaying genealogy using our previous WHIteBasE method, is proposed. The WHIteBasE method has perfectly been able to integrate each relation that includes a married couple and their children, and has been able to display various complex relations with segment intersections easily. This method has a problem that all of inputted layouts are always displayed. The solution is to use the JaBBRoW. It is a hidden boundary that can organize information of some positions using a square area that is set by user’s requirements to abbreviate. Not only the area is movable but also its scale can be compacted and recovered seamlessly by only mouse operations. As a result, arbitrary relations with horizontal and vertical connections in genealogy can be abbreviated easily. Our software that can display genealogy with abbreviation is presented

Iconic women: Martyrdom and the female body in early Christianity

Martyrdom is an inherently corporeal experience often involving horrific torture and directed towards the annihilation of the human body. Our earliest Christian martyrdom narratives, dating from the mid-second century C.E., focus on the bodies of the martyrs and the physicality of persecution. This focus became increasingly more intense from the second century onwards, as is evidenced by the martyr panegyrics of the fourth century. These homilies simultaneously convey horror through clinical descriptions of the persecuted body, and beauty through poetic and romanticised accounts of the tortured body. The present study pursues this preoccupation with the martyred body in the mid-second to late- fourth centuries. Exploring the theological ideas surrounding the martyred body, this study centres on the interpretation of martyrdom as a holy performance enacted beneath the eyes of God. Martyrdom is discussed in relation to early Christian understandings of revelation, ancient notions of body language, and modem theories of performance and communication. Revealing the presence and power of God through their bodies, the martyrs were seen and depicted as teachers, preachers, exemplars, and icons, both in times of persecution and times of peace. This understanding of martyrdom is particularly important for the study of women in early Christianity. While women were excluded from assuming roles as teachers and preachers in the Church, they actively preached the Christian faith through their bodies. By performing martyrdom, Christian women became preachers of the gospel, philosophers of virtue, teachers of faith, and icons of Christ

Trained to consume : dress and the female consumer in England, 1720-1820.

The impact of burgeoning consumerism and a new ‘world of goods’ has been well established in scholarly research on eighteenth-century England. In spite of this, we still now surprisingly little about the consumer. This thesis seeks to recover the figure of the consumer and establish its position as a key economic and social player on both the domestic and international stage. It argues for a significant shift in conceptual and practical attitudes to the consumer over the course of the eighteenth century. The consumer became a positive and productive economic force, and increasing emphasis was placed on training and cultivating this figure throughout a person’s lifecycle. This thesis focuses on the female consumer of dress. Women of the elite and middling sort were often the agents through which concerns about luxury and commercial corruption were raised. They also regularly engaged in the production of the items they consumed, bringing into question the artificial division placed between production and consumption in scholarly work. In order to tackle the nuanced character of the female consumer of dress, this thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining traditional archival research with an examination of contemporary literary, visual, and material culture. This approach paints a picture of a skilled and knowledgeable consumer, whose economic and material literacy was trained from childhood, and maintained throughout the lifecycle

From mental patient to service user: deinstitutionalisation and the emergence of the Mental Health Service User Movement in Scotland, 1971-2006

Until recently research on the history of psychiatry was largely focused on the institutions where this controversial branch of medicine emerged, on its practitioners, treatments, theories and clinical practices, and the shifting social, institutional and legal contexts in which it has developed. Two pioneering figures in the histories of psychiatry and medicine, Michel Foucault and Roy Porter, opened the historiographical field up to much broader perspectives, expanding the range of sources and interpretations to encompass a wide-lens focus on matters such as the relationships between histories of madness and rationality, ‘the patient’s view’ and ‘anti-authority struggles’ by psychiatric patients. The study undertaken here seeks to develop aspects of the historiographical approaches advanced by Foucault and Porter by investigating how psychiatric patients engaged in collective action and campaigned for reform to mental health services in late twentieth-century Scotland. Through an excavation, description and analysis of untapped archival and oral history sources, I chart the spaces of emergence and trace the intersecting lines of descent of the ‘Scottish user movement’ in the era of deinstitutionalisation. By examining the records of patient groups and oral history interviews with activists, I reveal how this small but significant social movement was formed through the interplay between top-down social and governmental practices and bottom-up resistance and action by patients. The study makes visible the characters, voices, settings, events and actions, which made up the changing discursive and social practices of patients groups in Scotland over the last half-century