From crisis to meaning: creativity in the Biblical narrative of Eve and the inversion by F. Kafka

Abstract. The possibilities of creativity in human life depend on discovering the meaning of life. Franz Kafka’s story Before the Law evokes how every attempt at finding this meaning, represented as the law, comes with a crisis and can result in failure. The secret of human existence is all about intimate personal encounters. The other than myself, which is also deeply present inside myself, is not the impersonal thing that it is oftentimes made out to be. In an already published article, we presented a close-reading of Kafka’s text. We only refer to the results in the first paragraph. In this article, we read the biblical narrative on Adam and Eve as a text that is structured by the same economy – the intertwinedness of the I-Thou relation with the I-It relation. But in opposition to the Kafka narrative, the crisis is overcome and results in a new creative perspective on the human condition: the discovery of the ultimate intersubjective meaning of life. The meaning makes love and labour possible. It means that the creativity of becoming human is the result of interaction. The context of our research is a long project on developing a philosophical reading of Biblical texts that was developed at the KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. The methodology is inspired by the Talmudic readings of Emmanuel Levinas and by the philosophical interpretations of the Bible of Paul Ricœur. In this way, we introduce a non-confessional way of understanding religious texts on the creativity of becoming human. Keywords: creation narrative, dialogical thinking, human condition, Kafka, Levinas, meaning of life, Rosenzweig.status: publishe

Functional genomics of maize endosperm filling : a joint transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolic analysis

National audienc

Functional genomics of maize endosperm filling : a joint transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolic analysis

National audienc

Functional genomics of maize endosperm filling : a joint transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolic analysis

National audienc

Sectoral Issues and Environmental Causes: The Mobilization of the French Basque Fishermen after the Sinking of the Prestige

This article analyses the mobilization of French Basque fishermen following the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige off the coast of Galicia (Spain) in 2002. This environmental disaster led to intense political action and bottom-up mobilization in the French Basque region, especially within a profession already undergoing structural changes since the 1990s, partly because of the implementation of the EU Common Fisheries Policy. The Basque fishermen's reactions clearly illustrate the specific stakes and power game at play within the trade. The Prestige disaster occurred at a time of deep changes, if not destabilization, of the sectoral modes of regulation, thus straining relationships between Europe, nations and infra-national bodies. It led to a reorganization of the local institutional order. The management of the crisis also shed light on the paradoxical dimension of a fishing community caught in between solidarity and competitive localism, sectoral interests and environmental issues, unity of the milieu and internal fragmentation. It reopened debate over EU regulations in so far as two competing perceptions of Europeanization were revealed by this crisis — general awareness among professionals of the European dimension in environmental issues vs specific awareness of the EU's extensive regulatory framework for the fishing industry