In the era of pandemics, hyper-digitalization, mass migration, and precarious ecology, the idea of what it means to live as a bodily creature is more important than ever. The authors of this volume aim to 'think' the Unthinkable Body both together with, and beyond, embodied reason.
In the era of pandemics, digitalization, mass migration and precarious ecology, the idea of what it means to live as a bodily creature is more important than ever. Descriptions of the body in religion and philosophy have sought to integrate the sources of Spirit and Matter into a comprehensive framework of embodiment. But what is the status of this paradigm today? In thinking humanity as a unified being of bodily perception, are there not dimensions of corporeal existence that remain constitutively 'unthought', and what are the implications of this insight for religion, politics, and ethics? What is one to make of the body if it is not simply a canvas for meaning, but rather a transgressionary medium made up of diverse forces and affects? What kinds of tensions are involved in the body's materiality and exposed existence to all forms of 'the natural'? What is now the role and limits of 'touch' within our intersubjective social existence? Do we perhaps need to retain the centrality of the 'lived-body' concept as a 'carrier of meaning', or does the weight of the body's material existence force us to abandon it? In this volume various authors have collected responses to these questions to 'think' the Unthinkable Body both together with, and beyond, embodied reason.
Table of contents:
Introduction: Rebekka A. Klein and Calvin D. Ullrich
MEDIUMS OF TRANSGRESSION
Emmanuel Falque: The Death of God and the Death of Man. Along the Guiding Thread of the Body -
Donovan O. Schaefer: The Poverty of Excess. Religion, Affect, and the Unthinkable -
Mathias Wirth: When Substantial and Accidental Bodies Differ. The Case of the Eucharist Transubstantiation and Gender Transition from the Perspective of Reformed Ethics -
Aaron Looney: Two-in-One. Shame, Personhood, and the Creation of Eve -
Theresia Heimerl: Bodies of Salvation and Bodies of Damnation. The Body as A Tool of Ecclesiastical Power Through the Centuries
TENSIONS OF THE MATERIAL
Burkhard Liebsch: Being Exposed and Delivered—A Generative Perspective.Thoughts on Jean-Luc Nancy's Corpus -
Rebekka A. Klein: Antiseptic Bodies. Disembodiment, Immunization and the 'Absolute Body' of Jesus Christ -
Espen Dahl: The Nature of the Body and the Body of Nature -
Calvin D. Ullrich: The Eclipse of the Body? Flesh and Materiality in French Phenomenology -
Kurt Appel: Hegel's Concept of the Cosmic Body and the Absolute. Reflections on the Written and Unwritten Body based on the Science of Logic
TOUCH AND AFFECTIVITY
Tobias Friesen: Ricœur's Early Philosophy of the Will and Its Contributions to the Discourse on Body, Affect, and Emotion -
Thomas Fuchs: The Intercorporeality of Touch -
Rachel Aumiller: Before the Caress. The Expansion of Intimacy in Suspension
BODIES AS LANGUAGES AND TEXTS
Reinhold Esterbauer: Talking About the Lived Body. Some Remarks on a Special Type of Linguistics -
Ulrich H.J. Körtner: Body and Language. Outlines of a Hermeneutics of the Body -
Markus Mühling: The Body. Post-Systematic Theological Reflections -
Gregor Etzelmüller: The Embodied Image of God. The Anthropology of Embodiment in Theological Perspective
