söndag, maj 03, 2009

Darian Leader, Del I

Ric Stultz, History of Violence (2006).

Angående drottning Victoria, Lady Diana, Hamlet, Iliaden, 9/11, CSI etc:

"[E]very documented human society has mourning rituals which involve public display [---] The decline of mourning rituals in the West is linked to the mass slaughter of the First World War. The surplus of the dead - and bereaved - was far more extreme and concentrated than in earlier warfare. What sense would it make for a community to mourn every single soldier when the corpses were hardly even countable? [---] Without the symbolic support of mourning rites, images of death simply proliferate to the point of meaninglessness." (p. 72)

"Most Western human beings in fact watch images of death every night in the TV shows about crime investigation and murder. It is amazing to realize that this is what most people do after work: they watch programmes in which someone dies and whose death is subsequently explained and made sense of. The fact that this is reiterated endlessly suggests that death is ultimatel
y not something that can be made sense of. And that the increasingly violent images multiply in the absence of a symbolic framework that might mediate them." (p. 74)

"The poet tells us that 'Nature mourns with the mourner'. This comment provides the crucial link between the personal and the social that we are looking for. It suggests that our own access to mourning can be helped if we perceive that other people are mourning too." (p. 75)

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