Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

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Scholars in theology are also the least likely to hide their work behind the façade of objective, hands off, empirical research and the author of the essays in this book does not hide her self from the reader. This does not mean that we know about her life as we do about Merton’s, but, as with Merton, we gain an intimate knowledge of her ways of thinking and feeling and are able to observe them in these pages as they develop, nourished by and derived from the new philosophies of today, and driven on by current political realities. Hers is a philosophy that is as engaged as Sartre’s but in a rather different way. It is concerned with working out from lived experience exactly what the deictic personal pronouns – you, I and we – mean in the light of radical psychological and sociological research. This research is not simply reacting to and critiquing the tired and damaging norms of western thought but goes beyond them to new lands of new things in the true spirit of Hegel. Petisco’s contribution to this research is closely involved with a language that is open to “the other” – whether radically different others or simply our neighbours – and which exposes and goes beyond the gender divide embedded in its very structure. These essays are concerned with both these areas of self and gender in their discussion of language, and work through them in a spirit of going– beyond not just protesting–at to expose in her words “the collective illusions of our separateness in our societies and languages.”