We live in a world that is increasingly difficult to understand. It is not just changing: it is metamorphosing. Change implies that some things change but other things remain the same capitalism changes, but some aspects of capitalism remain as they always were. Metamorphosis implies a much more radical transformation in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging. To grasp this metamorphosis of the world it is necessary to explore the new beginnings, to focus on what is emerging from the old and seek to grasp future structures and norms in the turmoil of the present. Take climate change: much of the debate about climate change has focused on whether or not it is really happening, and if it is, what we can do to stop or contain it. But this emphasis on solutions blinds us to the fact that climate change is an agent of metamorphosis. It has already altered our way of being in the world the way we live in the world, think about the world and seek to act upon the world through our actions and politics. Rising sea levels are creating new landscapes of inequality drawing new world maps whose key lines are not traditional boundaries between nation-states but elevations above sea level. It is creating an entirely different way of conceptualizing the world and our chances of survival within it. The theory of metamorphosis goes beyond theory of world risk society: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but the positive side effects of bads. They produce normative horizons of common goods and propel us beyond the national frame towards a cosmopolitan outlook.

This book starts off from a philosophical premise: nobody can be in the world unless they are born into the world. It examines this premise in the light of the theological belief that birth serves, or ought to serve, as a model for understanding what resurrection could signify for us today. After all, the modern Christian needs to find some way of understanding resurrection, and the dogma of the resurrection of the body is vacuous unless we can relate it philosophically to our own world of experience. Nicodemus first posed the question "How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?" This book reads that problem in the context of contemporary philosophy (particularly the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze). A phenomenology of the body born "from below" is seen as a paradigm for a theology of spiritual rebirth, and for rebirth of the body from "on high." The Resurrection changes everything in Christianity—but it is also our own bodies that must be transformed in resurrection, as Christ is transfigured. And the way in which I hope to be resurrected bodily in God, in the future, depends upon the way in which I live bodily today.

A Translational Sociology provides an interdisciplinary investigation of the key role of translation in society. There is a growing recognition of translation’s intervention in the intellectual history of sociology, in the international reception of social theory, and in approaches to the global literary and academic fields. This book brings attention to aspects of translation that have remained more elusive to sociological interpretation and analysis, investigating translation’s ubiquitous presence in the everyday lives of ordinary people in increasingly multilingual societies and its key intervention in mediating politics within and beyond the nation. In order to challenge a reductive view of translation as a relatively straightforward process of word substitution that is still prevalent in the social sciences, this book proposes and develops a broader definition of translation as a social relation across linguistic difference, a process of transformation that leaves neither its agent nor its object unchanged. The book offers elaborations of the social, cultural and political implications of such an approach, as a broad focus on these various perspectives and their interrelations is needed for a fuller understanding of translation’s significance in the contemporary world. This is key reading for advanced students and researchers of translation studies, social theory, cultural sociology and political sociology.

Why do contemporary writers use myths from ancient Greece and Rome, Pharaonic Egypt, the Viking north, Africa's west coast, and Hebrew and Christian traditions? What do these stories from premodern cultures have to offer us? The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960 examines how myth has shaped writings by Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, William S. Burroughs, A. S. Byatt, Neil Gaiman, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jeanette Winterson, and others, and contrasts such canonical texts with fantasy, speculative fiction, post-singularity fiction, pornography, horror, and graphic narratives. These artistic practices produce a feeling of meaning that doesn't need to be defined in scientific or materialist terms. Myth provides a sense of rightness, a recognition of matching a pattern, a feeling of something missing, a feeling of connection. It not only allows poetic density but also manipulates our moral judgments, or at least stimulates us to exercise them. Working across genres, populations, and critical perspectives, Kathryn Hume elicits an understanding of the current uses of mythology in fiction.

The discussion on the phenomenology of life will continue to be crucial to the general outlook and direction of phenomenological investigations. The imp- tance of it is not only the fact that it is an innovation in the philosophical circle, but it is also an effort that contributes to the re-reading of the hitherto ex- gerated differences between phenomenology and metaphysics. What is new and signi?cant about life is that even though it is evident in the ?ow of the history of philosophy, no philosopher has seriously addressed it. Not many philosophers have said something in particular about life in serious philoso- ical re?ection. The discussion on life by Henri Bergson attests to this and one 3 can hardly point to other deep re?ections elsewhere about the subject. The advantage here about our area is not only that it has extended the horizon of phenomenological thinking, it has also helped to lead phenomenology from the constitutive analysis to a creative impetus that has brought a new point of view to the ?eld, hence raising questions about the general philosophical t- dition from ancient times. This is a reading which my philosophy attempts to investigate about Tymienieckan thought. The emphasis in philosophy till now has been more on reason in its int- lection and pure rational dimension based on the earliest conception of the human person distinguished by rationality.

Presents a collection of critical essays about Kafka's The metamorphosis.

Taking up the work of Meister Eckhart, F. W. J. von Schelling, and Soren Kierkegaard, Political Theology of Life formulates the task of an unconditional affirmation of life. Such a political theology consists of constructing a kenotic eschatology, which puts into question any political attempt to justify and legitimize any world-historical hegemony on a theological foundation. The work thereby argues that in today's neoliberal-secular world of narcissistic mass-consumption in the age of extreme capitalism, such an affirmation of life--released from the grasp of sovereign power--is the highest ethico-religious task of our time. The work shows that each of these thinkers--Meister Eckhart at the epochal closure of the medieval world, and Schelling and Kierkegaard from the heart of the epochal condition of modernity--has exposed open a dimension of infinitude and manifestation that can be truly inspiring for us; that is to say, in the abandonment of all worldly attributes lies a receptivity to the highest gift of beatitude, an opening to the infinitude that sanctifies our worldly existence, which is a radical gift arriving from an origin without origin and without foundation, a gift that does not have to be anchored in the nomothetic operation of worldly hegemonies. Illumination Book Award winner in poetry https://illuminationawards.com/20/2023-medalists

This volume is relevant to Islamicists, phenomenologists, comparatists, metaphysicians, philosophers of religion, and historians of ideas. This book is the first volume in a new and unique book series: Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology in Dialogue. The main aim of this series is to engage in a philosophical exploration, bringing back to the philosophical arena key philosophical issues presently forgotten.

Contributing to our understanding of Ovid, Milton, and more broadly the transmission and transformation of classical traditions, this book examines the ways in which Milton drew on Ovid's oeuvre, and argues that Ovid's revision of the past gave Renaissance writers a model for their own transformation of classical works.

A compelling study for readers interested in the environmental history of Latin America, this book sheds light on the complex history of the Ecuadorian rainforest and the impact oil development. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.