Other Side of This Life : Death, Value, and Social Being in Thomas Pynchon's Fiction

This dissertation analyzes the interrelationship between death, the conditions of (wo)man s social being, and the notion of value as it emerges in the fiction of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon (1937 ). Pynchon s present work includes six novels V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity s Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006) and several short stories. Death constitues a central thematic in Pynchon s work, and it emerges through recurrent questions of mortality, suicide, mass destruction, sacrifice, afterlife, entropy, the relationship between the animate and the inanimate, and the limits of representation. In Pynchon, death is never a mere biological given (or event); it is always determined within a certain historical, cultural, and ideological context. Throughout his work, Pynchon questions the strict ontological separation of life and death by showing the relationship between this separation and social power. Conceptual divisions also reflect the relationship between society and its others, and death becomes that through which lines of social demarcation are articulated. Determined as a conceptual and social "other side", death in Pynchon forms a challenge to modern culture, and makes an unexpected return: the dead return to haunt the living, the inanimate and the animate fuse, and technoscientific attempts at overcoming and controlling death result in its re-emergence in mass destruction and ecological damage. The questioning of the ontological line also affects the structuration of Pynchon's prose, where the recurrent narrated and narrative desire to reach the limits of representation is openly associated with death. Textualized, death appears in Pynchon's writing as a sudden rupture within the textual functioning, when the "other side", that is, the bare materiality of the signifier is foregrounded. In this study, Pynchon s cultural criticism and his poetics come together, and I analyze the subversive role of death in his fiction through Jean Baudrillard s genealogy of the modern notion of death from L échange symbolique et la mort (1976). Baudrillard sees an intrinsic bond between the social repression of death in modernity and the emergence of modern political economy, and in his analysis economy and language appear as parallel systems for generating value (exchange value/ sign-value). For Baudrillard, the modern notion of death as negativity in relation to the positivity of life, and the fact that death cannot be given a proper meaning, betray an antagonistic relation between death and the notion of value. As a mode of negativity (that is, non-value), death becomes a moment of rupture in relation to value-based thinking in short, rationalism. Through this rupture emerges a form of thinking Baudrillard labels the symbolic, characterized by ambivalence and the subversion of conceptual opposites.

Beatific Enjoyment in Scholastic Philosophy and Theology: 1240-1335

This dissertation examines the concept of beatific enjoyment (fruitio beatifica) in scholastic theology and philosophy in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century. The aim of the study is to explain what is enjoyment and to show why scholastic thinkers were interested in discussing it. The dissertation consists of five chapters. The first chapter deals with Aurelius Augustine's distinction between enjoyment and use and the place of enjoyment in the framework of Augustine's view of the passions and the human will. The first chapter also focuses upon the importance of Peter Lombard's Sentences for the transmission of Augustine's treatment of enjoyment in scholastic thought as well as upon Lombard's understanding of enjoyment. The second chapter treats thirteenth-century conceptions of the object and psychology of enjoyment. Material for this chapter is provided by the writings - mostly Sentences commentaries - of Alexander of Hales, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Peter of Tarentaise, Robert Kilwardby, William de la Mare, Giles of Rome, and Richard of Middleton. The third chapter inspects early fourteenth-century views of the object and psychology of enjoyment. The fourth chapter focuses upon discussions of the enjoyment of the Holy Trinity. The fifth chapter discusses the contingency of beatific enjoyment. The main writers studied in the third, fourth and fifth chapters are John Duns Scotus, Peter Aureoli, Durandus of Saint Pourçain, William of Ockham, Walter Chatton, Robert Holcot, and Adam Wodeham. Historians of medieval intellectual history have emphasized the significance of the concept of beatific enjoyment for understanding the character and aims of scholastic theology and philosophy. The concept of beatific enjoyment was developed by Augustine on the basis of the insight that only God can satisfy our heart's desire. The possibility of satisfying this desire requires a right ordering of the human mind and a detachment of the will from the relative goals of earthly existence. Augustine placed this insight at the very foundation of the notion of Christian learning and education in his treatise On Christian Doctrine. Following Augustine, the twelfth-century scholastic theologian Peter Lombard made the concept of enjoyment the first topic in his plan of systematic theology. The official inclusion of Lombard's Sentences in the curriculum of theological studies in the early universities stimulated vigorous discussions of enjoyment. Enjoyment was understood as a volition and was analyzed in relation to cognition and other psychic features such as rest and pleasure. This study shows that early fourteenth-century authors deepened the analysis of enjoyment by concentrating upon the relationship between enjoyment and mental pleasure, the relationship between cognition and volition, and the relationship between the will and the beatific object (i.e., the Holy Trinity). The study also demonstrates the way in which the idea of enjoyment was affected by changes in the method of theological analysis - the application of Aristotelian logic in a Trinitarian context and the shift from virtue ethics to normative ethics.

Kaikkialla minne hän katsoo, hän näkee Sinut : Johannes Viiniköynnöksen käsitys ruumiillisten ja hengellisten aistien merkityksestä Jumalan tuntemisessa

Johannes Viiniköynnös oli 700-luvulla syyrialaisella kielialueella elänyt erakko ja mystikko, jonka värikkäissä ja runollisissa kirjoituksissa käsitellään monenlaisia hengellisen elämän kysymyksiä. Eräs merkille pantava piirre hänen ilmaisussaan on hengellisten aistikielikuvien runsaus. Tässä pro gradu -tutkielmassa Johannes Viiniköynnöksen kirjoitukset liitetään osaksi patristista hengellisten aistien traditiota. Tutkielmassa selvitetään, miten Johannes ymmärtää sisäisen ja ulkoisen aistitoiminnan merkityksen ja muutoksen hengellisen elämän eri vaiheissa. Kysymys sisältää sekä epistemologisen että antropologisen tason: Ensinnäkin analysoidaan, mikä on ruumiillisen ja hengellisen aistitoiminnan tiedollinen merkitys hengellisessä elämässä ja Jumalan tuntemisessa. Sen ohella pohditaan, minkä roolin Johannes antaa ruumiille ja sielulle tässä prosessissa ja millaisia muutoksia niiden suhteessa tapahtuu hengellisen elämän edetessä. Tutkielmassa tarkastellaan Johanneksen käsitystä aistitoiminnasta sekä askeettisen kilvoittelun että mystisen kontemplaation yhteydessä. Analyysissa osoittautuu, että Johanneksen käsitys ihmisen langenneesta aistitoiminnasta sisältää stoalaisen havaintoteorian elementtejä, jotka ovat välittyneet hänelle Evagrios Pontoslaisen kautta. Johannes painottaa, että ihmisen on irtauduttava aistimaailman impulsseista ja käännettävä katseensa omaan sisimpäänsä, sillä Jumala voidaan oppia tuntemaan vain sielun peilistä kuvastuvana heijastuksena. Johannes Viiniköynnökselle mystinen elämä merkitsee yhdistymistä Kristuksen mieleen, jonka kautta avautuvat kaikki hengelliset salaisuudet. Ne vastaanotetaan aistien kaltaisilla kyvyillä, joita Johannes kutsuu sielun voimiksi . Analyysi hengellisen aistivaikutuksen välittymisestä osoittaa, että Johanneksen aistiteologiassa tapahtuu askeesista kontemplaatioon siirryttäessä myös siirtymä stoalaisen havainto-opin periaatteista uusplatonistiseen emanaatiomalliin, jossa aistivaikutus välittyy intellektin kautta sieluun ja lopulta ruumiiseen. Tutkielmassa tuodaan esiin, että hengelliseen aistikieleen sisältyy myös tiettyjä ongelmia. Se kuvaa aina väistämättä olemisen tapaa, joka muistuttaa ihmisen ruumiillista eksistenssiä aineellisessa maailmassa. Tarkastelussa kuitenkin osoittautuu, että Johannes on tietoinen tästä ongelmasta ja vastaa siihen kuvaamalla mystisen yhtymyksen huipentuman tilaksi, jossa kaikki aistinta lamaantuu. Tästä tilasta voidaan puhua vain apofaattisesti negaatioilla ja paradokseilla, jotka irrottavat Jumalan aistimaailman lainalaisuuksista. Tutkielmassa kiinnitetään huomiota arvoon, jonka Johannes antaa sekä aineelliselle luodulle että ihmisruumiille Jumalan tuntemisessa, ja korostetaan, ettei platonistisen filosofian vaikutus väistämättä tarkoita ruumiin ja hengen dualismia. Lopuksi esitetään, että hengellisten aistien ideaa on hedelmällisintä tarkastella koko hengellisen elämän kattavana tiedollisten kykyjen transformaationa eikä pelkkänä mystisen kontemplaation erityisaspektina.