Unconscious Incarnations

Unconscious Incarnations considers the status of the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice, bringing Freud and Lacan into conversation with continental philosophy to explore the heterogeneity of embodied life. By doing so, the body is no longer merely an object of scientific inquiry but also a lived body, a source of excessive intuition and affectivity, and a raw animality distinct from mere materiality. The contributors to this volume consist of philosophers, psychoanalytic scholars, and practitioners whose interdisciplinary explorations reformulate traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as trauma, healing, desire, subjectivity, and the unconscious. Collectively, they build toward the conclusion that phenomenologies of embodiment move psychoanalytic theory and practice away from representationalist models and toward an incarnational approach to psychic life. Under such a carnal horizon, trauma manifests as wounds and scars, therapy as touch, subjectivity as bodily boundedness, and the unconscious ‘real’ as an excessive remainder of flesh. Unconscious incarnations signal events where the unsignifiable appears among signifiers, the invisible within the visible, and absence within presence. In sum: where the flesh becomes word and the word retains its flesh. Unconscious Incarnations seeks to evoke this incarnational approach in order to break through tacit taboos toward the body in psychology and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars and clinical psychologists.

In this lucid and entertaining book, Max Harris offers both a lively introduction to the theater and a sustained meditation on the theatricality of the Incarnation. Arguing that both biblical and dramatic texts should be approached with a theatrical rather than a literary imagination, he offers fresh and scholarly insights into plays as diverse as the medieval "Ordinalia" and Edmond Rostandbs romantic masterpiece "Cyrano de Bergerac," while also probing theatrical theory from Aristotle to Grotowski. At the same time, he renders vividly the comic potential of the gospel narratives and the affirmation of humanity entailed in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. "Theater and Incarnation" moves provocatively and mischievously between the flesh and blood world of the theater and the Word become flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.

Radical Hospitality addresses a timely and challenging subject for contemporary philosophy: the ethical responsibility of opening borders, psychic and physical, to the stranger. Kearney and Fitzpatrick show how radical hospitality happens by opening oneself in narrative exchange to someone or something other than ourselves—by crossing borders, whether literal or figurative. Against the fears, dogmas, and demands for certainty and security that push us toward hostility, we also desire to wager with the unknown, leap into the unanticipated, and celebrate the new, a desire this book seeks to recognize and cultivate. The book contends that hospitality means chancing one’s hand, one’s arm, one’s very self, thereby opening a vital space for new voices to be heard, shedding old skins, and welcoming new understandings. Radical Hospitality engages with urgent moral conversations concerning identity, nationality, immigration, commemoration, and justice, moving between theory and praxis and on to the formative life of the classroom. Building on key critical debates on the question of hospitality ranging from phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction to neo-Kantian moral critique and Anglo-American virtue ethics, the book explores novel possibilities for an ethics of hospitality in our contemporary world of border anxiety, refugee crises, and ecological catastrophe.

This slim book is a compilation of lucid and highly erudite talks given by Swami Ramakrishnananda, which were first published in various magazines of the Ramakrishna Order. Swami Ramakrishnananda, a great monastic disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, a spiritual stalwart of profound realizations, an intrepid seeker and verifier of truth and a titan among honest intellectuals, has handled this theme like a scientist. In the first part, the author elucidates the concept of God through the prism of nine angles. In the second part, he gives interpretative discourses on Hindu mythological lore, traditional concepts, and the divine incarnations through nine chapters. This book would benefit students of Hinduism all over the world.

The Incarnation, traditionally understood as the metaphysical union between true divinity and true humanity in the one person of Jesus Christ, is one of the central doctrines for Christians over the centuries. Nevertheless, many scholars have objected that the Scriptural account of the Incarnation is incoherent. Being divine seems to entail being omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, but the New Testament portrays Jesus as having human properties such as being apparently limited in knowledge, power, and presence. It seems logically impossible that any single individual could possess such mutually exclusive sets of properties, and this leads to scepticism concerning the occurrence of the Incarnation in history. A Kryptic Model of the Incarnation aims to provide a critical reflection of various attempts to answer these challenges and to offer a compelling response integrating aspects from analytic philosophy of religion, systematic theology, and historical-critical studies. Loke develops a new Kryptic model of the Incarnation, drawing from the Greek word Krypsis meaning ’hiding’, and proposing that in a certain sense Christ’s supernatural properties were concealed during the Incarnation.

Are you tired of the same old stuff (S.O.S)? Have you heard enough about the “New Age”? Do you long for something fresh and exciting? Then perhaps this book is for you. It’s not about the same old tired reality that’s been talked about for decades. It’s not a sugar-coated, love and light routine. And it’s not another “feel-good” manual or “how to succeed without really trying” rehash. It’s not psycho babble, quick fix therapy, preaching or lamenting a cause. This book takes a no-nonsense look at what is really happening — behind the scenes, above the scenes and beyond the scenes. It addresses the issues you and I are facing right now and will be facing for a long time to come. It uses the past only as a springboard for stepping into the unknown, into the big picture. It exposes the lies, coverups, deceit, control and manipulation that have kept the people of Earth locked into rigid systems of dogma and despair. But it also offers real solutions that are timely, and yet, timeless. It gives you ideas that can help you put the pieces of the cosmic jigsaw together. And practical advice that can stimulate your creative juices. Get out your surfboard and ride the cutting edge!