If originating from acts of (in)visibilization, the visible and invisible are ethically imbued. This volume outlines an ethics of in-visibility in an interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophy and theology, cultural history, art and media theory, sociology, literary and gender studies.
The hyphenated phrase 'in-visibility' indicates that the visible and the invisible are inseparable and yet in tension with each other. If originating from acts of (in)visibilization, both the visible and the invisible are ethically imbued. Whether we see or overlook each other, respect or dismiss another's dignity, remember or forget a history of crimes against humanity, our (over)sight has an impact on our interaction. What, then, is implied in seeing the human being as created in the image of an invisible God, as
imago Dei? Which (re)sources in Judaism and Christianity can counter idolatry in the sense of cognitive captivity and experiences of abandonment after the Shoah? In addressing such questions, this volume outlines an ethics of in-visibility in an interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophy and theology, cultural history, art and media theory, sociology, literary and gender studies.
Table of contents:
Claudia Welz: Introduction: Dialectics of In-Visibility in Religion, Art, and Ethics
I. Ethics, Media, MonstrationArne Grøn: Ethics of In-Visibility -
Daniel Dayan: Embattled Visibilities: Major Media and Visibility Entrepreneurs -
Hannes Langbein: The Gaze and the Image: Some Reflections on the Phenomenology of the Image of God in the Face of Marina Abramović
II. Memory, Forgetting, and the Misuse of ImagesAlana M. Vincent: Imitation and Finitude: Towards a Jewish Theology of Making -
Melissa Raphael: Antidotes to Captivation and Spell-Bound Forgetting: The Counter-Idolatrous Figure of the Human in Modern Jewish Theology and Art -
Christina von Braun: The Symbol of the Cross: A Visual Symbol Become Flesh in Anti-Semitism
III. Religious Heritage in Humanism, Modernity, and PostmodernityIben Damgaard: 'Who will not wonder at this Chameleon'? Pico and Kierkegaard on Human Dignity and Imago Dei -
Paul Mendes-Flohr: Jewish Intellectuals Confront Modernity: Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, and Leo Strauss -
Elliot R. Wolfson: Givenness and the Disappearance of the Gift: Ethics and the Invisible in Marion's Christocentric Phenomenology
IV. Jewish Thought after the ShoahChristian Wiese: God's Passion for Humankind and Human Responsibility for the Divine: Anthropology and Ethics in Hans Jonas's and Abraham J. Heschel's Post-Holocaust Interpretation of Imago Dei -
N. Verbin: Protest and Resentment as Theological Responses to the Shoah -
Claudia Welz: Imago Dei and Crimes against Humanity: Jewish Perspectives on an Ethics of In-Visibility
