ON Religion and Society
GCAS Review Journal
Vol. I, Issue 1/2024
Editors: Luca Tenneriello & Francisco González Castro
INTRODUCTION: Art, religions and digital society. Insights in the light of Walter Benjamin
By: Victor Diaz Sarret and Luca Tenneriello
From cupiditas to amor: to build the common through political love
By: Margherita Pascucci
Abstract: In ‘From cupiditas to amor’ I want to develop a trace given by Antonio Negri in the preface to Potentia of poverty. Marx reads Spinoza: “A further passage is necessary [...]: namely, to tie the experience of poverty to an ontology of ‘cupiditas’ [desire], that is, of ‘amor’ [love].” (Negri 2006, ix).
According to Negri, in our struggle against poverty we should pass from cupiditas to amor. But what can it mean today to pass from ‘cupiditas’ to ‘amor’?
For me it is the indication of a need, the urgency of the construction of a politics of love. Today I find its main feature, which I will call the methodology of the construction of the ontological common, outside the realm of philosophy, in the works of two women, the theologian Teresa Forcades and the writer Michela Murgia.
To let philosophy meet theology is a task whose breadth and depth can here only be outlined. We will focus just on one aspect: that aspect of ‘queer theology’ which defines it as routing every hierarchy, every power through a transversality, an openness to multiplicity as constitutive of the new subject we are today. A new subject which is such because constituted in and by the common.
The task of any political love is thus to find the most just ways to let this common constitute itself in affirmative lives.
Keywords: Potentia of poverty; Antonio Negri; Michela Murgia and Teresa Forcades; colpotic ratio; political causa sui.
Margherita Pascucci, Ph.D. (2003, 2004), has published six monographs: Macchina Capitale. Genesi e struttura dello sfruttamento (ombrecorte, 2022); Philosophical readings of Shakespeare.“Thou art the thing itself” (Palgrave, 2013); Causa sui. Saggio sul capitale e il virtuale (ombre corte, 2009), Potenza della povertà. Marx legge Spinoza (ombre corte, 2006, with preface by Antonio Negri; Ghodrate Faghr: Marx Spinoza Mikhanad, translation into farsi by Foad Habibi, Qoqnoos, Iran, 2019; english revised and expanded edition, Potentia of poverty. Marx reads Spinoza, Historical Materialism Series, Brill 2023), Il tempo tessuto di Dio. Un ritratto filosofico immaginario di Dacia Maraini (il ramo e la foglia edizioni, 2021); ll pensiero di Walter Benjamin. Un’introduzione, foreword by Ubaldo Fadini (Il Parnaso, 2002).
Caring for the Child’s Soul in the Late Modern Maelstrom
By: Zechariah Mickel
Abstract: This article employs the tools of phenomenological description to provide an account of the parent-child relation as it appears in the late modern context. Drawing especially from the work of the philosophers Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Levinas, I aim to describe both (1) what we might call the child’s soul and (2) the parent’s responsibility for the child’s soul as it appears within the constraints and violences of human finitude. The soul here is figured as the (partial) visibility of some invisible excess which speaks in the child’s face, and which issues for the parent a call to attention and responsibility. From there, I move into a consideration of the call of the child’s soul as it manifests in the late modern world, paying special attention to some of the key barriers the parent experiences in this sociohistorical milieu as he tries to respond to his child’s call. I consider here the phenomenological critique of modernity in the work of Michel Henry before trying to complement his critique with my own. Important for me is the manner in which speed and consumption come to dominate the human person’s life in the late modern world, and how these together create a maelstrom in which the parent’s attentional and ascetical capacities are greatly diminished, thereby muting in some sense the call of the child’s soul. I argue, therefore, that the responsible parent today must cultivate within himself and within the home environment a way of living otherwise than the way of the maelstrom, in short, a manner of existence which bears those now-strange fruits of patient contemplation and self-restraint so as to let the child’s call resound and to equip the parent for a fuller responsiveness.
Keywords: Parenthood; Childhood; Soul; Modernity; Responsibility; Phenomenology.
Zechariah Mickel is Digital Marketing Manager and Associate Acquisitions Editor at Wipf and Stock Publishers, for whom he also hosts the Theology Mill podcast. He holds an MA in Philosophy from GCAS College Dublin and is the author of The Unthinkable Sacrifice: A Brief Phenomenological Essay on Parenthood (Cascade, forthcoming). His research takes place at the intersections of continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and theology. Mickel lives in Oregon with his wife and two young daughters.
Monstrous Religions: an Ecological-Enactive Perspective
By: Antonio Ianniello
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the possibility of looking at studies inherent in religions from an embodied approach to the mind and more specifically from an ecological-enactive one (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; Chemero 2009; Gibson 1979). In this sense, contrary to approaches that rest on assumptions related to classical cognitivism (Guthrie 1993; Boyer 1994, 2001; Atran 2002), religion would not be a belief system but would emerge based on the agent's dynamic engagement with the environment rich in sociocultural opportunities. I will use the figure of the monster as an example to better define my proposal which is meant to be a suggestion for the development of an approach in the future. Monster and monstrosity appear in extremely heterogeneous contexts ranging from medicine to anthropology, from sociology to medieval studies, from ecocriticism to terrorism studies, or from art to religion. My point is that the monster can be the situated and tangible source within a community from which to start to structure a reflection on the sacred.
Keywords: Monsters; Enactivism; Ecological Psychology; Affordance; 4E.
Antonio Ianniello (Ph.D.) works in the intersection of philosophy and arts. Founding director of Future Monsters, through which he tries to evoke monsters that are approaching us. His research unfolds through a philosophy that uses not only words but also unorthodox means. He has been invited to present his work, among others, by the Venice Biennale-Theater (2020) and the Singapore Arts Festival (2012).