Articles

Peer-reviewed articles and chapters are highlighted in green. Use the filter bar to search by title, abstract, category, or keyword.

Topic

Keyword

Clear

Sort by

Type Year

Peer-reviewed articles & chapters

Published in external, peer-reviewed venues outside Inscriptions.

2025

"Death is not the end: negative mysticism in Jon Fosse's Morning and Evening." In Philosophy of Final Words, pp. 6–21. Edited by Dr. Valery Vino. Melbourne, Australia: mongrel matter. External Peer-reviewed Link PhilArchive

Continental Philosophy Philosophy of Religion Fosse Heidegger liminality postanthropocentrism political theology

We are accustomed to thinking of death as the ultimate finality. Existential philosophy, including that of Martin Heidegger, has held death to be the absolute limit against which it is possible to think life. Even more so, he held, does death serve to define our humanity, since we, as a species, are the only ones able to contemplate our own finitude. In Morning and Evening the author, critic, and recent Nobel laureate Jon Fosse tears open a rift in the hitherto sutured fabric of liminality that distinguished existentialists from other philosophers, and that has divided humans from animals, and the living from the dead. In this essay we examine how this short text connects with and yet critiques Heidegger's view on liminality, and how it points to a perspective we cannot but call theological in its assessment of life, death, and our place between and beyond these worlds.

Articles in Inscriptions

2021

After religion: the commitment and love of This Life. Review of This Life: secular faith and spiritual freedom, by Martin Hägglund. Inscriptions 4, no. 1. Inscriptions Book Review DOI

Philosophy of Religion Continental Philosophy secular faith Martin Hägglund religion love freedom

Review of Hägglund, Martin (2019), This Life: secular faith and spiritual freedom, Anchor Books: New York.

Other academic writing

2020

"AFK: reclaiming the holy through art." Inscriptions 3, no. 1. DOI

Aesthetics Philosophy of Religion Girard AFK street-art sacred unconscious

Answering to the claim that our contemporary era has lost a connection to the domain of the sacred René Girard held that, contra Sigmund Freud, the myth of Oedipus was not primarily a story of patricide, but a hidden narrative of victimisation and expulsion. As an arch-example of mob logic the myth and Sophocles' play serve to gloss over a brutal and ritualistic sacrifice by claiming that it was the victim who acted in violation of the law; according to Girard the charges against king Oedipus were retroactively invented to justify the initial act of expulsion. In the street-art of AFK we encounter images that activate feelings of persecution and exile, uncovering a possible path to regain our connection to the holy.