Death and the Displacement of Beauty: Foundations of violence

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Psychology Press, 2004 - Family & Relationships - 400 pages

The pursuit of death and the love of death has characterized Western culture from Homeric times through centuries of Christianity, taking particular deadly shapes in Western postmodernity. This necrophilia shows itself in destruction and violence, in a focus on other worlds and degradation of this one, and in hatred of the body, sense and sexuality. In her major new book project Death and the Displacement of Beauty, Grace M. Jantzen seeks to disrupt this wish for death, opening a new acceptance of beauty and desire that makes it possible to choose life.
Foundations of Violence enters the ancient world of Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle to explore the genealogy of violence in Western thought through its emergence in Greece and Rome. It uncovers origins of ideas of death from the 'beautiful death' of Homeric heroes to the gendered misery of war, showing the tensions between those who tried to eliminate fear of death by denying its significance, and those like Plotinus who looked to another world, seeking life and beauty in another realm.

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Contents

Redeeming the present The therapy of philosophy
3
Symptoms of a deathly symbolic
12
Denaturalizing death
21
Towards a poetics of natality
35
Out of the cave
45
Introduction
47
The rage of Achilles
51
Odysseus on the barren sea
75
Eternal Rome?
247
Introduction
249
Anxiety about nothingness
256
If we wish to be men Roman constructions of gender
268
Valour and gender in the Pax Augusta
285
Dissent in Rome
299
Stoical death Senecas conscience
315
Spectacles of death
329

The murderous misery of war
102
Whose tragedy?
129
Parmenides meets the goddess
144
How to give birth like a man
167
The open sea of beauty
193
The fault lines of flourishing
222
Violence to eternity Plotinus and the mystical way
342
Notes
358
Bibliography
364
Index
384
Copyright

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About the author (2004)

Grace M Jantzen is Research Professor of Religion, Culture and Gender at the University of Manchester.

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