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Knowledge and Profanation offers numerous instances of profoundly religious polemicists profanizing other religions ad majorem gloriam Dei, as well as sincere adherents of their own religion, whose reflective scholarly undertakings were perceived as profanizing transgressions – occasionally with good reason. In the history of knowledge of religion and profanation unintended consequences often play a decisive role. Can too much knowledge of religion be harmful? Could the profanation of a foreign religion turn out to be a double-edged sword? How much profanating knowledge of other religions could be tolerated in a premodern world? In eleven contributions, internationally renowned scholars analyze cases of learned profanation, committed by scholars ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the early nineteenth century, as well as several antique predecessors. Contributors are: Asaph Ben-Tov, Ulrich Groetsch, Andreas Mahler, Karl Morrison, Martin Mulsow, Anthony Ossa-Richardson, Wolfgang Spickermann, Riccarda Suitner, John Woodbridge, Azzan Yadin, and Holger Zellentin.
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has always been an original reader of texts, understanding their many rich and multiple historical, aesthetic, and political meanings and effects. In Profanations, Agamben has assembled for the first time some of his most pivotal essays on photography, the novel, and film. A meditation on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains, Profanations proves yet again that Agamben is one of the most provocative writers of our times. In ten essays, Agamben rethinks approaches to a series of literary and philosophical problems: the relation between genius, ego, and theories of subjectivity; the problem of messianic time as explicated in both images and lived experience; parody as a literary paradigm; the potential of magic to provide an ethical canon. The range of topics and themes addressed here attest to the very creativity of Agamben’s singular mode of thought and his persistent pursuit to grasp the act of witnessing, sometimes futile, sometimes earth-shattering — the talking cricket in Pinocchio; “helpers” in Kafka’s novels; pictorial representations of the Last Judgment, of anonymous female faces, and of Orson Wells’s infamous object of obsession Rosebud. “In Praise of Profanity,” the central essay of this small but dense book, confronts the question of profanity as the crucial political task of the moment. An act of resistance to every form of separation, the concept of profanation — as both the “return to common usage” and “sacrifice” — reorients perceptions of how power, consumption, and use interweave to produce an urgent political modality and desire: to profane the unprofanable. In short, Agamben provides not only a new and potent theoretical model but also a writerly style that itself forges inescapable links between literature, politics, and philosophy.
The university is an institution that goes back to the Middle Ages. As universitas magistrorum et scholarium, the university was a community of scholars and students gathered around books and preoccupied with study and the search for truth. What is the role of the university today? The meanings of teaching, study, and research have changed. Screens are replacing books, online learning environments are replacing lecture halls, and students are becoming learners. In the context of a growing emphasis on innovation and development, competition among institutions, and the privatization of knowledge, the role of communities of scholars and students is changing. Some argue that the university is entering a new phase; others claim that we face the end of the university. Curating the European University features projects involving new ways of publishing, alternative organizations of departments, proposals for open access and open source, and university architecture and accessibility; it offers a unique contribution to the public debate on the role of the university.
The Thinking University Expanded considers how the university can be extended and developed to an institution of play that becomes a gateway to new compositions and enactments of opportunities and happiness for university academics and students alike. A university of and in continuous play can shape the public sphere in ways that reimagine both the epistemological and political, and the metaphysical and the ethical. Without abandoning the university’s emphasis on thinking, the book examines the prospects of opening the university to ‘a new, possible use’. The singular outcomes-based lens of seeing higher education distorts the humane and ethical nuance of what a university can potentially do and aspire towards. For this reason, the book intends to find a new use for the idea of a university – one that is responsible and responsive in both its pursuit of the truth and being open to different kinds of truth, as made manifest in diverse contexts and life-worlds. This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the field of higher education.
The essays in this collection address the relation between education and politics in new ways. Rather than understanding education simply as the object of political decision-making, or as preparation for politics, the authors of this volume see education as implicated in social conflicts and in the political processes that produce and change social structures. Education, then, is a practice that reconfigures the relations between subjectivities and the political. The collection focuses on several critical cases and theoretical debates where the relation between education and politics demands new articulations. It explores the potential of theoretical languages proposed by Rancière, Laclau, Derrida, Mouffe, Bakhtin, and other thinkers whose work has not yet been fully recognized in its pedagogical meaning.