Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Browse by:



Displaying: 61-80 of 673 documents


61. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Clay Lewis

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This paper looks at authoritarianism as an expression of nihilism. In spite of his rigorous critique of Platonism, I suggest that Nietzsche shares with Plato an authoritarian vision that is rooted in the cyclical experience of time. The temporality of the eternal return unveils a vista of cosmic nihilism that cannot possibly be endured. In the absence of metaphysical foundations, the vital will to power is assigned an impossible task – to create meaning from nothing. I suggest that when confronted with the horror of the ungrounded void, the self-overcoming of nihilism reverts to self-annihilation. The declaration that God is dead becomes the belief that death is God. I trace Nietzsche’s cosmic nihilism back to Plato’s myths and the poetic vision of Sophocles and Aeschylus. I argue that Nietzsche’s overcoming of nihilism is itself nihilistic. However, this does not mean that Nietzsche’s project is as a complete failure. On the contrary, I suggest that Nietzsche’s deepest insight is that the good life does not consist of the pursuit of truth, but the alleviation of suffering.

fiction

62. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Carol Roh Spaulding

view |  rights & permissions | cited by

poetry

63. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Michaela Mullin

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
64. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Michaela Mullin

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
65. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Michaela Mullin

view |  rights & permissions | cited by

66. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2

view |  rights & permissions | cited by

67. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Wei-Hsin Lin

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This article provides a Lacanian reading of one of the short stories of Zhang Ailing, a Chinese writer. It is intended to explore the possibility of employing Lacan’s theory of the symbolic order to the interpretation of a Chinese text, as well as to broaden our understanding of Zhang’s work and to unlock the potential of the applicability of Lacan’s ideas. The final part of the article will draw on Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan to illustrate how Zhang, unlike most of her contemporaries, is exempted from the obsession with China and how this obsession can lead us to the conclusion that whatever we chase obsessively in life is nothing but nothingness.

68. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Frederick Kraenzel

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Biological, social, and technical causes of the splendor and decline of classical music are examined and found insufficient. Evidence shows that music involves unconscious motivation. The classical summit predominantly included part of the German Awakening, showing that this motivation was, at least in part, collective. The German Awakening was a phase of the Western turn from religion to a world view centered on conscious human experience and power. The decline of classical music parallels developments in literature, science, and history as this world view approaches a stage of exhaustion.

69. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Anthony F. Badalamenti

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This paper proposes that the Gilgamesh epic is constructed as an encoded expression of the wish of the people where it arose to have a more responsible king. The decoding builds to a deeply encoded structure, emerging as a precursor from which all other encodings are derived. Enkidu, Utnapishtim, and the episode of a spiny bush in the Great Deep decode as three assaults on the king’s grandiose self-seeking, a character trait that supports his abuse and tyranny over Uruk’s people. Shamhat, the priestess of Ishtar, decodes as the king’s instrument with which to bring Enkidu under his own influence and to thwart Anu’s reason for creating him—to balance the king. Ishtar decodes as one who creates indebtedness from the king to her in order to later express how the king defaults on his responsibilities. The subtlety of the encoding structure reflects the depth of anxiety in the people of the epic’s time about their king sensing their anger, as well as the length of time over which the epic was elaborated.

70. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Andrew Ball

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In the latter period of his work, Samuel Beckett began to devote much of his writing to exploring the nature of the voice and the gaze. Even those works that directly concerned silence and blindness implicitly thematized the voice and the gaze by embodying their absence. With later works, Beckett began to call into question the way in which these phenomena contributed to the constitution of subjects, modes of self-identification, and their relation to chosen objects of desire. In the 1950s and 1960s, Beckett produced dozens of short pieces of prose and theatrical works that wholly dispensed with traditional plot and character in favor of a series of experimental reductions, for example, to breath and light (Breath), to a disembodied voice (Company, Eh Joe, That Time, Cascando), or to a mouth illuminated by a point of light (Not I). Jacque Lacan, who would come to secure the place of the voice and the gaze in the philosophical canon, wrote and lectured on these concepts at the same time. If brought into dialogue, the work of each thinker—each highly nuanced and complex in its own right—can serve as a hermeneutic tool for better elucidating the function of the voice and the gaze and the role that they play in the formation of subjects. A great deal of critics have erroneously overlooked Lacan’s insistence that when he invokes these concepts he is not speaking about the phenomenal voice or the gaze of perception as such; similarly, Beckett’s work, though it directly thematizes their phenomenal aspects, treats these concepts in a thoroughly Lacanian manner.

71. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Pritha Kundu

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The interface between literature and medicine has long been an area of interest for researchers. It is difficult to conceptualize any singular methodological approach for such an interdisciplinary field. However, the theoretical developments in Bioethics are promising. Besides, literary texts representing medical themes and characters have created a cultural discourse of Bioethical problems in the modern world. Borrowing its title from Shaw’s famous medical satire, The Doctor’s Dilemma, the present paper aims at exploring how far a bioethical approach—with special reference to the doctor-figures represented in some twentieth century literary works—can be helpful in delineating the complexities involved in issues like the doctor-patient relationship, medical ethics and the rapidly growing technological orientations in the modern world.

72. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Tanja Staehler

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
While certain levels of fear and anxiety seem quite appropriate to the experience of birth, it is detrimental if they become overwhelming. This article strives to understand birth-related affects more thoroughly by asking which affects are commonly involved, and how they come about. Martin Heidegger provides the most developed phenomenology of affects available to us. A phenomenological perspective proves useful because its close description allows categorising affects into mundane ones like fears—evoked by specific entities and circumstances—and existential ones like anxiety. Anxiety concerns our existence in its entirety and brings us face to face with the fact that we are finite beings in a groundless existence. Giving birth means needing to negotiate existential affects in a mundane situation. The birthgiving woman is dependent on others to take her seriously in her experience of affective turmoil in which anxiety and wonder, fears and anticipatory anxiousness come together.

73. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Beverley Catlett

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Madness has long been an object of fascination in the Western cultural, literary, medical, and philosophical consciousness, and rightfully so; the human mind is the incredibly powerful, profoundly dynamic lens through which we inevitably perceive reality, and when that lens is corrupted by a defect of health or experience, the results are astounding. Illnesses such as schizophrenia continue to confound scientists to this day, whereas the cause-and-effect designs of other disorders such as PTSD are easily understood.

74. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Daniel Kaplin, Derek A. Giannone, Adrianna Flavin, Laura Hussein, Sruti Kanthan

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In this paper, we examine similarities between Sigmund Freud’s tripartite theory of personality to foundational works across various religious and philosophical movements. First, conceptual similarities to the id, ego, and superego are illustrated through scriptural verses and commentators of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Next, elements of the tripartite theory in the Eastern religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism are explored. Finally, this Freudian theory is viewed in relationship to various philosophical works from Ancient Greece to modern day. We suggest these earlier tripartite approaches emanating from diverse religious and philosophical movements emerge as a broader universal understanding of man from which Freud could have profited in developing one of his most seminal theories.

75. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Antonio Reyes

view |  rights & permissions | cited by

76. Janus Head: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Antonio Reyes

view |  rights & permissions | cited by

photography

77. Janus Head: Volume > 15 > Issue: 2
Matthew Ziff

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
78. Janus Head: Volume > 15 > Issue: 2
Matthew Ziff

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
79. Janus Head: Volume > 15 > Issue: 2
Matthew Ziff

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
80. Janus Head: Volume > 15 > Issue: 2
Matthew Ziff

view |  rights & permissions | cited by