CFP -- Unseeing the Evil Eye: Powers and Politics of the Apotropaic

The study of Hindu Temples has time and again revealed varied beliefs and interesting facts regarding the intriguing iconology, these formidable beliefs have been backed by the evidential sculptures and reliefs present at the walls and pillars of Hindu Temples. Revelations through such studies decrypts the paths for enormous knowledge and insatiable curiosity. The aim of such studies is to have a better knowledge of the basic ideologies behind the iconoclasm present at the reminiscent of early Hindu Temples.

Social Research, 2016

Notre Dame Systematic Theology Colloquium, University of Notre Dame, Department of Theology: December 14th.

Catholic Historical Review, 2002

Durkheim, the Durkheimians, and the Arts,, 2013

Georges Bataille was an enemy of "art". He loathed all that attempted to redeem the base with appeals to the lofty, cultivated a sustained distrust of "absolutes" and "beauty," and saw through the hypocrisies of high culture and other bourgeois loci of distinction and anxiety. It would then appear misguided to speak of "Bataille and art." However, Bataille was not simply an aesthetic reactionary. Rather he suggested a reworking of the dispositif of "seeing" which, in his view, should be tantamount to being blinded and indeed torn apart. The capstone of knowledge is found in the dialectical inversion of the positivist gaze, in the blind spot of reason and in the liminal passage between the human and its Other. This "site" is moreover one constituted by the unraveling of semiotic coherence and the descent into non-form, night, and void. And paradoxically, it is from within the interstices between this night and the black hole of the eyes that Bataille's "aesthetic" begins; art,if it was to exist for Bataille, was a bastion of dark sensuality where the aesthetic is swallowed by the ecstatic and the value of the work is found in its capacity to call into question the very nature of human project. The Bataillean aesthetic thus cannot be illuminated if one remains bound in conventional notions of art as the province of the painterly, the writerly, the plastic, and the beaux. Bataille tried to outbid art; Outbidding art moved by way of the subversion and refusal of art's formal and structural limitations, its history, its pretensions, in favor of a repositioning of the aesthetic in what it uncomfortably fl ees from-fl ies, excreta, howls. In a broader sense, Bataille outbid ethics, epistemology, and all forms of totemism through a rabid aesthetic that violated rather than consoled. While "outbidding" does RILEY PRINT.

Theopolis Conversations, 2023

This essay will take the form of five theses: 1. Modern apophaticism is systematic, total, and regulative of Christian doctrine. It risks emptying speech about God of any intelligible content and endangers the very possibility of revelation and Christology. 2. This modern transformation of the apophatic impulse reflects Kant, but exposes ambiguities (and perhaps even precursors) in the tradition. Reclaiming negative theology requires an alternative speculative resolution. 3. Prevailing theological narratives have obscured the nature of this crisis, misidentifying German idealism, neo-scholastic “rationalism,” or “univocity” as modernity’s defining sins. 4. Christian thinking must insist that negative theology be set within a robust “theology of language” and given a distinctively Christological “shape.” 5. A series of speculative positions developed in Neochalcedonian theology prove the basis for a renovated apophaticism compatible with faith in the w/Word.

A Conference paper. An attempt to understand the avoidance of interpretations in the late art historical works of the two authors. Question: What kind of an ideology is implicated in the demand for an art historical narrative, which would be laying claim to sensual experiences of images but dismissing all iconological practices? Presented in Image=Gesture: the 5th Nomadikon Meeting. Bergen 9.11.2011.