-state capitalist system. To explore this proposition, let us adopt an approach that is highly unorthodox in the field of international political theory: the analysis of myths. 2 We will focus here on an interpretation of a millenarian religious myth, universalised through the Judeo-Christian tradition: the myth of the Tower of Babel. Ancient and enigmatic, this myth appears in almost identical form in different places and cultures throughout the history of Mesopotamia. As with all myths that have resisted the passing of time, this one contains truths and
Tower of Babel and the resulting curse of linguistic confusion placed upon mankind by God in the biblical book of Genesis to explain the creative and emancipatory potential of the multilingual element of postcolonial transcultural interactions: On the other side of the bitter struggles against domination and for the liberation of the imagination, there opens up a multiply dispersed zone in which we are gripped by vertigo. But this is not the vertigo preceding apocalypse and Babel’s fall. It is the shiver of a beginning, confronted with extreme possibility. It is
projects were unviable from the start. Many towers of Babel were erected only to meet the same fate as the first. The Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste in alphabetischer Folge von genannten Schriftstellern bearbeitet und herausgegeben von Johann Samuel Ersch und Johann Gottfried Gruber (Leipzig 1818–1889) was discontinued though 167 volumes had been published.7 Statistics as practiced by Quetelet and his contemporaries was an expression of the nineteenth-century desire for general, well-ordered knowledge. For many of the participants, the
THE WORK OF Edouard Glissant, about the historical connection between language, power and domination, has been the central guiding force of this book. I mentioned, at the beginning, how his use of the Tower of Babel story has helped me to think about the liberatory possibilities of the multilingual talk that took place in the heterogeneous and multiethnic market places around Piazza Garibaldi in Napoli. Beyond the linguistic confusion, violences and silences of the postcolonial world, he argued that it was possible to build the Tower – in every language
significance for his work, as well as for the discussion of the language of poetry, is his T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection, First Language. The book’s very title invites polemical debate.25 Does it mean one’s mother tongue, the language with which, or into which, one is born and which one learns first? Or does it refer to the myth of the Tower of Babel and stand for the first language ever, the one people spoke before they tried to erect the Tower, before their language was confounded? The first language in that second, mythological sense is the Ursprache, the root of
. 48 Interview with Professor Davies conducted by the author; A. Hibble, D. Kanka, D. Pencheon, and F. Pooles, ‘Guidelines in general practice: the new Tower of Babel?’, BMJ , 317:7162 (1998), 862–3, quotation at p. 862. 49 For instance, in one cartoon, a practitioner and patient are seen in the consulting room, with the doctor confronting a handful of guidelines. The caption reads: ‘Let's see, how shall we monitor your blood pressure this time?’: D. Evans and A. Haines (eds.), Implementing Evidence-Based Changes in Healthcare (Abingdon
the tradition of ‘standing mastheads’, to which Melville admits the builders of the pyramids, the tower of Babel, Simon Stylites, Napoleon ‘upon the top of the tower of Vendome’, George Washington and Admiral Nelson. The implication with each of Melville’s genealogies is of an infinite series, the effect of the act of 70 Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature associating being to have one thing show through another, so that finally the form of each particular instance is lost, substituted by the likening feature, the continuous element. There are
. Asked to write down the names of those she wishes to die, she writes, Faustus-like, ‘DIS MANIBUS. Pontia devotes to hell Filamor, Violinda and Sylvanus’ (ii, p. 22). Earlier, in declaring her own fitness to rule, Pontia claims that ‘[a] Crown he merits, who piles Tow’r on Tow’r / To scale the Stars, and ristle Soveraign Pow’r’ (i, p. 14). In associating herself and her ambition with the Tower of Babel, Pontia declares herself – like a witch – to be a rebel against God. This rebellion against God is conflated with a challenge to the ‘Soveraign Pow’r’, associating
article from 1971 that was a harbinger of the future was Lars Gyllensten’s review of the book in Dagens Nyheter . Gyllensten, a famous author and a member of the Swedish Academy, began with a historical review of doomsday prophecies and singled out the legend of the Tower of Babel as ‘one of the foremost archetypes in our mythological equipment with which we and our ancestors have tried to interpret our destinies and adventures’. According to Gyllensten, the historical experience of unfulfilled doomsday prophecies was a dilemma
sense, both positive and negative were essential: the one negated the other. The presence of both created a ‘non-self-contradictory’ ethical system, where the Hebrews were redeemed, while their enemies were destroyed. Frye described several main Falls in the Bible, beginning with the physical banishment from the Garden of Eden. This represented humankind’s alienation from nature, and allegorised humanity’s acquisition of sexual knowledge, and the knowledge of good and evil.15 The myth of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9) became significant, as an attempt to build