Journal articles on the topic 'Coptic Philosophy'

This article discusses similar developments in the expression of negation in the histories of Egyptian-Coptic and Arabic and explores the evidence for these respective developments being related by language contact. Both Coptic and Arabic have undergone a development known as Jespersen's Cycle (JC), whereby an original negative marker is joined by some new element to form a bipartite negative construction. The original marker then becomes optional while the new element becomes the primary negator. We present the results of a corpus study of negation in late Coptic, showing that, at the time when Arabic speakers began to settle in Egypt, the bipartite negative construction still predominated. This being the case, we argue that native speakers of Coptic learning Arabic as a second language played a key role in the genesis of the Arabic bipartite negative construction. More generally, we give reasons to doubt the a priori preference for internal explanations of syntactic change over those involving contact, as well as the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive. Rather, we suggest that not only purely internal but also (partially) contact-induced change can profitably be accounted for in terms of child language acquisition leading to a change in the grammars of individual speakers.

Despite decades of research, it remains surprisingly difficult to identify the origins of the works preserved in the hoard of Coptic manuscripts discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945. Even as unearthed “Gnostic” gospels continue to make headlines, many academics repent intoning these old, fiery heretics, and some have even called for an all-out dispensation of the term “Gnosticism.”2 Yet a felicitous piece of external evidence seems to offer a more stable foundation for identifying the date and sectarian provenance of several of the most difficult works discovered at Nag Hammadi, the so-called “Platonizing” treatises of the “Sethian school” of Gnosticism.3 Porphyry, the top pupil of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (third century C.E.), remarks that, there were in his [Plotinus's] time Christians of many kinds, and especially certain heretics who based their teachings on the ancient philosophy. They were followers of Adelphius and Aculinus, who possessed a lot of writings by Alexander the Libyan, Philocomus, Demostratus and Lydus, and also brandished apocalyptic works of Zoroaster, Zostrianus, Nicotheus, Allogenes, Messus and others of that kind.4

In his Life of Plotinus (16), Porphyry makes reference to certain gnostic ‘revelations’ under the names of ‘Zoroaster and Zostrianos and Nicotheus and Allogenes and Messos and many others of this kind’ which were circulated in Plotinus' school and refuted by Plotinus and his students, including Porphyry himself. Porphyry claims to have made ‘several refutations against the book of Zoroaster’ while Amelius apparently wrote some ‘forty volumes against the book of Zostrianos’. The surprising discovery of Coptic gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi Library under the specific names of Allogenes (Nag Hammadi Codex XI.3) and Zostrianos (VIII.1) and the close relation of these texts to The Three Steles of Seth (VII.5) and Marsanes (x) has led to the general consensus that we now possess some of the actual texts mentioned by Porphyry.

AbstractThe philosophical debate presented in these pages (edition, translation and analysis) is extracted from a 13th-century Coptic Arabic summa ecclesiastica. The venue is alleged to have taken place in Alexandria under the aegis of its proper founder. In a gathering of five philosophers or sages (ḥakīm-s) coming from India to the Maghreb, passing of course through Greece, amongst whom was present the great Aristotle, Alexander's preceptor and the undisputed authority that summed up the debate and put an end to it. The disputation turns on the existence or not of a supreme creator and organizer, reminding the public sessions convened by the Sassanid and Muslim Rulers. However, the mise en scène here is linked without contest to the famous encounter of 325 b.C. between the Macedonian Conqueror and the Brahmans or Indian gymnosophites. We know how this episode was glossed in different ways in the Greek literature until it was “recovered” in an apologetic monotheistic view by the new Christian imperial order from the 4th century a.C. onward. Although our Coptic writer from the Middle Ages intends to prove with the text he offers to us the rightness of the “miaphysite” teaching of his Church, he, or his source, stands fully in line with that tradition, despite the fact that we could not trace a specific source from the rich variety of linguistic traditions on the matter. All the same, the ideological and linguistic analysis of the text brings us to suggest a Greek original that goes back to Late Antiquity.RésuméTiré d'une somme ecclésiastique copto-arabe du XIIIe siècle, le débat philosophique que nous présentons ici (édition, traduction et analyse), est prétendu avoir eu lieu à Alexandrie, sous l'égide de son propre fondateur. S'y trouvent réunis cinq sages ou philosophes (ḥakīm-s), venus depuis l'Inde jusqu'au Maghreb, passant bien sûr par la Grèce, dont la délégation ne manque pas d'inclure le grand Aristote, le précepteur d'Alexandre le Grand et l'autorité incontestée qui récapitule et clôt le débat. La ‘dispute’ porte sur l'existence ou non d'un créateur-ordonnateur suprême, rappelant les sessions publiques convoquées par les souverains sassanides ou musulmans. Mais la mise en scène ici se rattache incontestablement à la célèbre rencontre du Conquérant macédonien avec les brahmanes ou gymnosophistes indiens en 325 av. J.-C. On sait comment cet épisode a été glosé de différentes manières dans la littérature grecque, jusqu'à sa cristallisation dans le Roman d'Alexandre, avant d'être “récupéré”, dans une perspective monothéiste apologétique, par la nouvelle donne impériale chrétienne depuis le IVe siècle ap. J.-C. Si notre auteur copte du Moyen Âge arabe veut voir dans le texte qu'il nous livre une confirmation de la doctrine “miaphysite” de son Église, il se situe néanmoins, lui ou sa source, dans cette ligne-là, sans qu'on ait pu, pour autant, en retracer la source dans les différentes traditions linguistiques existantes. Ceci dit, l'analyse idéologique et linguistique du texte du débat nous mène à suggérer, comme source immédiate, un original grec de la Basse Antiquité.

This article begins with a review of studies in perception and depth psychology concerning the experience of exposure to sacred artworks in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox contexts. This follows with the results of a qualitative inquiry involving 45 Roman Catholic, Eastern and Coptic Orthodox, and Protestant Christians in Canada. First, participants composed narratives detailing memories of spiritual experiences involving iconography. Then, in the context of a darkened room evocative of a sacred space, they viewed artworks depicting Biblical themes and interpreted their meanings. Stimuli included “Western” paintings from the Roman tradition—a selection from the Gothic, Northern Renaissance, and Renaissance canon—and matched “Eastern” icons in the Byzantine style. Spiritual experience narratives were analyzed in terms of word frequencies, and interpretations of sacred artworks were analyzed thematically. Catholics tended to utilize emotional language when recalling their spiritual experiences, while religious activity was most often the concern of Protestants, and Orthodox Christians wrote most about spiritual figures and their signifiers. A taxonomy of response styles was developed to account for participants’ interpretations of Western and Eastern artworks, with content ranging from detached descriptions to projective engagement with the art-objects. Our approach allows for representation of diverse Christians’ interpretations of sacred art, taking into consideration personal, collective, and cultural-religious sources of meaning. Our paradigm also offers to enrich our understanding of the numinous or emotional dimension of mystical contact.

Saint Mark the Evangelist (Cyrene around 10 AD – Alexandria April 25th 68 AD) was a member of the Jewish tribe o Levi. He is nephew of Saint Barnabas, close associate of Saint Paul and Peter to whom he was secretary. In the New Testament he is mentioned eight times and Mary mother of John called Mark is mentioned for the ninth time. The first Christian community in Jerusalem gathered in his mother Mary’s home. According to some sources Jesus ate his last supper in Mark’s mother Mary’s house. He is worshipped by: The Roman Catholic Church, The Orthodox Church, The Coptic Church, the eastern Catholic churches, the Lutheran Church. He is multiple patron. Worship of Saint Mark the evangelist in Croats’ Christian traditional culture is reflected in legends; cathedrals and churches consecrated to that evangelist; toponyms; chrematonyms; processions and blessings of fields, crops, vineyards; folk celebrations (fairs); helping the poor; cult shrines; folk divinations and sayings; bonfires; oral lyrical poems; prayers. The paper cites the results of field research conducted from the year 1997 until the year 2016. About fifty legends, prayers, customs, rituals, processions, divinations have been originally recorded among Croatian Catholics in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia. The paper (re)constructs the life of Saint Mark the Evangelist on the basis of the New Testament, tales and legends. Further, the aim of the paper is to save from the oblivion the old legends, customs, rituals, processions, oral lyrical poems, prayers, divinations and to point out their social and aesthetic function using the multidisciplinary interpretation. Inductive-deductive method and methods of description, comparison, analysis and synthesis are used alongside the filed research work.

The article deals with the history of relations between Gregory Lukyanov, Russian Egyptologist and antiquarian, and his colleagues from the Kondakov Archaeological Institute in Prague in the 1930s. The article is based on materials from Czech archives (Archives of the Art History Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the collection of manuscripts of the Slavonic Library in Prague). The author of this work reveals the unknown page of the history of scientific communications in the midst of the Russian emigration, shows the existence of intellectual contacts between the «Russian Czechoslovakia» and «Russian Egypt». The article is devoted to the analysis of the internal contacts of Gregory Lukyanov, the motives of his professional activity abroad, the basic directions of his cooperation with colleagues from Prague and attempts to create there a collection of Coptic textiles and to publish its catalogue, which unfortunately failed. For the first time, the history of translation of «The Poem of Pentawer» by Lukyanov and attempts of publication of its Russian translation have been described. The author reveals the various contradictions between Gregory Lukyanov and his Prague colleagues that arose in the process of scientific communication.

Negli ultimi anni, nell’ambito delle ricerche per la Regolazione Naturale della Fertilità (RNF) si sono sviluppate diverse tecniche diagnostiche riguardanti i dosaggi ormonali, le sostanze contenute nel muco cervicale e la viscosità del muco: al fine di trovare un indicatore della fertilità semplice ed accurato, di cui la donna potesse servirsi. Il Monitor Ovarico ideato da Brown, attualmente usato in diversi Centri internazionali di insegnamento dei MN, è uno degli strumenti più precisi, attualmente disponibili, per monitorare l’attività ovarica; esso è in grado di individuare l’evento ovulatorio in un arco di 12 ore, e dimostra senza dubbi il momento in cui l’ovulazione è avvenuta. È uno strumento diagnostico di laboratorio che può essere utilizzato sia da coppie che desiderano distanziare una gravidanza, sia da quelle che la stanno ricercando, nel desiderio di aderire generosamente al Progetto di Dio sulla loro unione coniugale. Tuttavia, ogni strumento tecnico-diagnostico che studia la fertilità è da considerare un supporto scientifico ai Metodi Naturali (MN), ma non è in grado, da solo, di sostituirsi ad essi. La tecnologia, infatti, va accompagnata dalla proposta di un cammino di riflessione sul vero significato della Procreazione Responsabile. È l’insegnante dei MN che trasmette alla coppia quello “stile” di rispetto e attenzione per l’altro e di accoglienza della fecondità come dono, aiutandola a crescere nell’amore e nell’apertura alla vita.

We are at a symposium in the house of Lysiteles of Athens in the last month of the 111th Olympiad, 328 BCE. The guest of honour is Charicles, a handsome and athletic young Athenian of good family, lately returned from abroad. Dinner has been lavish – the finest Copaic eels and the largest sea pike, Boeotian in their luxury – but this has now been cleared away. The slaves have distributed garlands of myrtle and roses, the pretty flute-girls have struck up their tune, and the symposiarch, master of festivities, has declared his rules for the mixing and drinking of the wine (old Chian, and chilled with snow). Next comes the question of entertainment. The company immediately rejects philosophy and gambling, but Ctesiphon's proposal is taken up with enthusiasm: they will play at riddles, each expressed in the form of a short and witty poem. These, then, are epigrams.

L’insegnamento dei Metodi Naturali viene impartito nel nostro Centro da almeno 20 anni ed esso è sempre stato caratterizzato dalla proposta di uno stile di vita per le coppie, piuttosto che da una mera tecnica per la regolazione della fertilità. Acquisito il valore della propria fertilità attraverso i Metodi Naturali, le coppie sono state soprattutto stimolate a sviluppare un atteggiamento di rispetto e di responsabilità verso la nuova vita che essi possono generare. Inoltre, esse sono aiutate a crescere nel dialogo, nella partecipazione e nel mutuo rispetto. Incoraggiati dai risultati di una precedente ricerca condotta negli anni 1986-1990, nel 1993 avviammo uno studio statistico multicentrico al fine di valutare l'accettabilità, l'efficacia e la diffusione in Italia del Metodo Billings. Furono analizzate 1730 schede di collezione di dati fornite da insegnanti del Metodo Billings che lavoravano in differenti province italiane. Esse corrisposero a un totale di 9360 cicli mestruali esaminati. 502 utenti mostrarono interesse a una semplice conoscenza del Metodo, ma essi non lo hanno applicato poiché erano single oppure erano fidanzati ma non avevano rapporti prematrimoniali. Dei 1228 utenti che hanno usato il Metodo, il 14,8% aveva lo scopo di ottenere una gravidanza, il 55,5% di posporla e il 29,7% di evitarla. Per le 1047 coppie che volevano posporre o evitare una gravidanza, il maggior stimolo ad imparare il Metodo derivava da una motivazione laica nel 50% dei casi e il 40% di queste coppie aveva avuto precedenti esperienze contraccettive. Soddisfazione per gli eccellenti risultati del Metodo si ebbero nell'85% dei "vecchi" utenti e nel 60,4% dei "nuovi", mentre i risultati furono insoddisfacenti nel 4,5% e nel 8,9% rispettivamente. L'associazione con i metodi di barriera fu abituale solo nel 2% dei casi e fu sporadico nel 9,6% degli utenti. La percentuale dell'abbandono nell'uso del Metodo fu del 5.95%. Questi dati mostrano che una precedente esperienza contraccettiva non sembra avere effetti sull'accettabilità del Metodo Naturale e dello stile di vita che esso richiede. La valutazione effettuata con l'Indice di Pearl modificata in accordo con l'Organizzazione Mondiale della Sanità evidenzia 0 gravidanze dovute al metodo, 3,7 gravidanze dovute all’inadeguato apprendimento o insegnamento del Metodo e 13.8 gravidanze dovute a scelta consapevole. In un totale di 66 gravidanze, 19 (28,7%) furono desiderate. Il considerevole numero di gravidanze dovute a scelta consapevole o di gravidanze intenzionalmente cercate, verificatesi perfino in coppie che volevano evitare una gravidanza come prima motivazione, mette in evidenza il progressivo sviluppo in queste coppie di un atteggiamento di apertura verso la vita, che rappresenta il grande successo dell'insegnamento dei Metodi Naturali.

Quand, vers le milieu du XIIIe siècle, les grammaires coptes apparurent pour la première fois, leurs auteurs ne pouvaient recourir qu’au modèle linguistique arabe dominant : terminologie et catégories grammaticales. La langue copte n’appartient pourtant pas à la même famille que l’arabe ; elle était par ailleurs en voie de disparaître comme langue vivante. À partir de quelques exemples typiques, ayant trait à l’écriture, à la phonologie et à la morphologie, nous essayons de donner une idée de la méthode suivie pour appliquer ou adapter les outils conceptuels et terminologiques arabes dans la description de l’ancienne langue égyptienne à sa dernière phase et de démontrer que, d’une manière générale, les philologues coptes du Moyen Âge ont bien mené leur tâche. Si l’on peut relever des lacunes, celles-ci ne sont pas nécessairement imputables à la tradition linguistique qui a servi de modèle, mais plutôt aux conditionnements externes qui ont présidé au labeur intellectuel des protagonistes.

L'immagine del "grembo materno della natura" da cui la ragione umana si deve emancipare per guadagnare la libertà è usata da Kant in uno scritto polemico contro Herder, Mutmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte (1786), che può essere considerato una risposta al libro decimo delle Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, uscito nel 1785. Seguendo il racconto biblico, anche Kant pone la prima coppia umana in un "giardino", un luogo sicuro e ben fornito di alimenti; ma il vero inizio della storia è fatto consistere nella rottura di questo equilibrio ad opera della ragione che gradualmente si è sottratta alla tutela della natura, imparando un po' alla volta a dominarla. Kant dichiara di condividere l'ideale rousseauiano di una cultura che non neghi la natura dell'uomo ma la promuova in quella che dovrà diventare la sua condizione fondamentale di esistenza, che è la libertà. Pone tuttavia questo ideale come termine finale del processo storico, non come condizione da recuperare nella sua purezza iniziale, ritornando alle origini, come invece appariva nella visione della storia proposta da Herder, che avrebbe su questo punto frainteso il pensiero di Rousseau.

Abstracttitle RIASSUNTO /title Il nucleo centrale di questo articolo costituito dall'analisi e dalla discussione dei dettagli di cui costituito un quadro storiografico definito: tale quadro nel suo complesso ritrae come strutturalmente simmetriche due descrizioni fisiche che si rintracciano, rispettivamente, in due teorie apparentemente scorrelate per quanto riguarda gli ambiti di ricerca, le problematiche da cui esse sono scaturite e le finalit che si proponeva il loro autore. Si tratta della descrizione dei fenomeni di emissione e assorbimento di luce (contenuta in un articolo di Dirac del 1927 cui comunemente ci si riferisce con il nome Dirac's QED) e di quella dei fenomeni di creazione e distruzione di coppie e+ - e- (contenuto nel cosiddetto modello delle holes dello stesso Dirac, del 1929). Di una tale simmetria si sono gi fatti cenni sparsi in letteratura e l'intento qui di studiarla e approfondirne i termini in modo da sostenere la seguente tesi: il rapporto tra le due teorie in esame non si configura soltanto nei termini di un parallelismo, ma soprattutto in quelli di un preciso percorso storico, che sostenibile su un piano logico. Il Dirac's holes model, cos, risulta come il frutto di una riflessione iniziata in seno alla Dirac's QED a proposito dei fondamenti matematici e degli schemi concettuali della nuova meccanica quantistica: nelle due strutture teoriche, infatti, possibile individuare alcune forme permanenti che, estratte da un contesto teorico e riproposte nell'altro, comportano un trasferimento e una generazione di conoscenza.

La diagnosi prenatale si è ormai imposta nella prassi medica come un esame indispensabile per accertare la presenza di più o meno gravi malformazioni embrio-fetali, e l’esistenza nel feto, o nell’embrione anche preimpianto, di condizioni genetiche a cui sono associate gravi malattie o sindromi. E’ oggi chiaramente riconosciuto da documenti ufficiali che l’esecuzione della diagnosi prenatale deve essere sempre preceduta dalla consulenza genetica, e che questa ha le caratteristiche e il valore di un vero e proprio atto medico. In realtà, la consulenza pre-diagnosi serve a dare al medico l’opportunità: 1. di stabilire se esiste o meno la “indicazione” alla diagnosi prenatale; 2. di decidere sulla effettiva “fattibilità” della diagnosi prenatale; 3. di fornire alla donna e -meglio- alla coppia, in modo comprensibile, tutte le informazioni necessarie affinchè la decisione, strettamente personale, di eseguire o no la diagnosi sia pienamente “informata” e “libera”; e 4. di preparare e accompagnare i richiedenti nell’inquietante interrogativo sul dopo-risultato, e per eventuali decisioni a risultato ottenuto. Come ogni atto medico, la consulenza genetica esige preparazione, continuo aggiornamento e seria responsabilità, la quale impone attenzione a tutti gli aspetti deontologici ed etici particolarmente implicati nella diagnosi prenatale.

Con ingegneria tessutale (IT) si fa riferimento a un campo disciplinare che applica i principi dell’ingegneria e delle scienze della vita per la realizzazione di sostituti biologici che ripristinino, mantengano o migliorino le funzioni di tessuti o organi. Questo nuovo settore di ricerca e applicazione clinica, che attualmente consente di realizzare principalmente cute, cartilagine e osso semiartificiali, può in prospettiva sostituire le tecnologie dei trapianti di organi naturali. Ma l’ingegneria dei tessuti pone dei quesiti bioetici: alcuni di tipo generale, implicati anche da altre questioni di interesse bioetico, altri ad essa peculiari. Quesiti generali sono, per esempio, i limiti della donazione di tessuti e i rapporti tra il mercato e la scienza. Un problema che l’ingegneria dei tessuti pone invece con sfumature inedite verte sullo statuto da riconoscere ai prodotti bioartificiali: entità che utilizzano (in alcuni casi) tessuti umani, ma che si collocano al confine tra naturale e artificiale. Interessante è, inoltre, nella ridefinizione della coppia naturale/artificiale, il ruolo assunto dal diritto, che in particolare con le norme sulla brevettabilità del biologico - integra ormai la scienza nella definizione delle stesse realtà scientifiche, e che diventa, quindi, al pari della scienza, un elemento fatturale da sottoporre al vaglio etico. Data la novità della materia, l’articolo ha un intento essenzialmente descrittivo: l’esposizione dei più importanti conseguimenti dell’ingegneria dei tessuti e dei temi di interesse bioetico che esigono un dibattito.

Da circa trenta anni la diagnosi prenatale di sindromi causate da alterazioni dell’informazione genetica è entrata nella prassi dell’assistenza medica. Criteri deontologici e considerazioni etiche circa il rispetto delle giuste esigenze e diritti della coppia parentale, da una parte, e dell’incolumità del concepito, dall’altra, avevano portato a stabilire alcune precise indicazioni per l’esecuzione della diagnosi prenatale: l’età della madre non doveva essere superiore ai 35-38 anni. Nella prospettiva eugenistica che sta prevalendo nella società, appoggiata anche da provvedimenti legislativi, tale criterio venne considerato insufficiente perchè sarebbero rimasti a farne parte ancora troppi soggetti “indesiderati”, affetti da serie e gravi malformazioni. Furono, perciò, intraprese indagini al fine di trovare altri parametri atti a rivelare abbastanza presto durante la gravidanza un aumentato rischio di patologia cromosomica per un embrione o un feto, quali il test delle alfa-feto-proteine, e il triplo-test. Dal punto di vista etico, è buona e lecita la ricerca di un corretto ed efficiente metodo predittivo di rischio di feto affetto da patologia cromosomica e la sua applicazione qualora il fine per cui il metodo venga applicato sia buono, ossia non abbia scopi eugenetici, e non rechi danno alla donna, al bambino o alla società. Dal punto di vista deontologico, supposta la bontà etica gli autori sottolineano soprattutto l’obbligo del consenso informato all’esame, ossia una completa e rigorosa informazione e un severo controllo di qualità; in altri termini, un accertamento esatto dell’età gestazionale del feto e una corretta definizione del rischio.

Abstract The development of the Egyptian palatals ḏ and ṯ has long been a thorny issue in Egyptian linguistics. No convincing phonological rule for it has been identified so far. In the present paper I argue that the distribution of these phonemes is the result of inter-dialectal borrowings between a pre-Coptic dialect (C‑Dialect) in which ḏ , ṯ → c = ϫ and a pre-Coptic dialect (T‑Dialect) in which ḏ , ṯ → t = ⲧ. It is then argued that the attested Coptic dialects derive from T‑Dialects with lexical borrowings from C‑Dialects. A preliminary discussion of the sociolinguistic contexts of these dialects is presented in the second part of the article, where it is suggested that the C‑Dialect may have been associated with the area of the cities of Avaris/Pi-Ramses/Tanis and may have become a prestigious dialect and thus a source of lexical borrowings starting from the 19th dynasty.

The femme fatale of film noir has come to be regarded as an expression or symptom of male paranoia about the shifting dynamics of gendered power relations in patriarchal Western culture. This theoretical perspective is influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which, according to philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is grounded in the “School of Suspicion” because it sees consciousness as false, an illusion shrouding darker, disturbing truths (Ricoeur 33). However, while the femme fatale has become firmly established as a subject of suspicion, her male incarnation, the homme fatal, has generally been overlooked and any research that has been done on the figure to date has attempted to align him with the same latent anxieties as those underpinning the femme fatale. I will explore the validity of this assumption by examining the neo-noir films Mr Brooks (Bruce A. Evans, 2007) and The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom, 2010). Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner), the eponymous character in Mr Brooks, is a husband, father, extremely wealthy and successful businessman, philanthropist, and Portland Chamber of Commerce man of the year. But this homme fatal character is also a “deadly man” who has a powerful addiction to serial murder. On the one hand Earl enjoys killing immensely, but the rational, logical part of his mind tells him that he should stop before he gets caught. This creates an internal battle which is played out on screen, with these two sides of Earl’s psyche portrayed by two different people: realistic Earl and reckless, indulgent Marshall (William Hurt). In The Killer Inside Me, Deputy Sheriff and homme fatal Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) narrates the tale of how he came to be a brutal and sadistic serial killer, offering a variety of psychoanalytically grounded reasons and excuses for his despicable behaviour that ultimately leave the audience no more enlightened about his state of mind at the end of the film than at the beginning. I will argue that these figures are problematic within the context of Ricoeur’s theory of suspicion and that the self-reflexive insight and knowledge of Freudian theory depicted by these hommes fatals suggests that the construct cannot be read merely as a male incarnation of the femme fatale. Rather than being a subject or object of paranoid expression, I contend that the homme fatal is instead a catalyst for it. Psychoanalysis and the School of SuspicionThe premise of Freudian theory is that our consciousness is just the surface of our mental apparatus, and that hidden underneath in the unconscious part of our mind is a vast body of other material such as fears and desires that we have repressed because they are too disturbing for the conscious mind to contend with. Although we are unaware of these buried emotions they still impact upon our lives, surfacing in the form of neurotic symptoms (Freud 357–58). For Freud, the latent content of the psyche can be brought to the fore through psychoanalysis and by accessing and understanding unpalatable truths, the manifest symptoms they create can be alleviated (358). Thus, for Ricoeur psychoanalysis functions as a “demystification of meaning” (32) because it seeks to explain irrational symptoms. Ricoeur argues that Freud and fellow theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche are “masters of suspicion” (35) because of their common view of consciousness as false, opening the path for critical interpretation as an “exercise of suspicion” (33). However, suspicious interpretation is not just a practice for mental health practitioners and philosophers. It also has an established history as a method for exploring the relationship between socio-cultural anxieties and their expression in film and popular culture. According to literary theorist Rita Felski, the popularity of the use of psychoanalysis to study culture is partly inspired by the deeply ingrained and taken-for-granted nature of Freudian schemata (5), but a suspicious analysis also brings with it a form of substantive pleasure: “a sense of prowess in the exercise of ingenious interpretation, the satisfying economy and elegance of explanatory patterns; the gratifying charge of inciting surprise or admiration in fellow readers” (Felski 18). In film theory psychoanalysis is a well-recognised way of exploring underlying socio-cultural fears and anxieties that manifest on screen through visual and narrative depictions. The Femme Fatale and SuspicionThe femme fatale of film noir is a popular subject for suspicious interpretation by feminist film scholars including Mary Ann Doane, Elisabeth Bronfen, Pam Cook, and Kate Stables. Her beautiful, powerfully seductive exterior juxtaposed with a cold, cunning, and ruthless interior has earned the femme fatale a reputation as a manifestation of male fears about female sexuality and feminism (Doane 3). As Bronfen asserts: “One could speak of her as a male fantasy, articulating both fascination for the sexually aggressive woman, as well as anxieties about female domination” (106). In classic film noir of the 1940s and 1950s the femme fatale is generally considered to represent a projection of paranoid male fears over increased economic and sexual independence of women generated by World War II (Cook 70). Similarly, in neo-noir productions such as Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) and The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994), the femme fatale is seen to function as an expression of anxiety over the postmodern collapse of traditional roles governing sexual difference occasioned by second-wave feminist movements, along with an increased presence of women in the public sphere (Stables 167). For example, in both Basic Instinct and The Last Seduction the femmes fatales are successful businesswomen who are also ruthless killers with an insatiable appetite for sex, wealth, and power. The Homme FatalWhile the femme fatale has been prowling around the dark alleys of noir, another deadly creature, the homme fatal, has also been skulking in the cinematic landscape. He can be found in early thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 classic Suspicion, George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourner, 1944), and A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956). He can also be located in many neo-noir thrillers including Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990), Internal Affairs (Mike Figgis, 1990), Guilty as Sin (Sidney Lumet, 1993), In The Cut (Jane Campion, 2003), Twisted (Phillip Kaufman, 2004), Taking Lives (J.D. Caruso, 2004), as well as Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me. One of the few scholars to examine the homme fatal from a psychoanalytic perspective is Margaret Cohen. In her paper “The ‘Homme Fatal,’ the Phallic Father, and the New Man” Cohen explores breakdown of gender divisions to emerge in neo-noir thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s, which saw a popular movement towards films featuring a female investigator pitted against a deadly male (for example, Internal Affairs, Blue Steel, and Guilty as Sin). Focusing on Internal Affairs, Cohen contends that corrupt cop and homme fatal Dennis Peck (Richard Gere) is a “larger-than-life alternative to the femme fatale” (113). Like the deadly woman, Peck has no morals, he is obsessed with power and wealth, and has no qualms about employing his sex appeal or collapsing sexual intimacy into business in order to get what he wants (Cohen 115–16). According to Cohen, just as the femme fatale is a manifestation of male paranoia about social transformations of gendered power, Internal Affairs crystallises male anxieties about the transformations in gender roles and the place of the new man in 1980s and 1990s postmodern culture (114). However, while hommes fatals such as Dennis Peck can be aligned with the femme fatale as a subject or object of psychoanalytic interpretation regarding repressed fears, other hommes fatals subvert such an analysis through their predisposed insight into psychoanalytic theory and suspicious interpretation. Aside from the films Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me, which I will explore in detail in the coming section, the hommes fatals in Gaslight and Experiment Perilous display a knowledge of Freudian theory, using it to convince their female victims that they are insane, and in Taking Lives the homme fatal uses his psychological prowess to fool a female FBI behavioural specialist assigned to profile him. The psychoanalytical insight depicted by these deadly men is something the femme fatale is not ordinarily privy to (with the exception of Catherine Trammell [Sharon Stone] in Basic Instinct, who has a degree in psychology). This suggests that the homme fatal is not simply a male incarnation of the female archetype, but rather a figure with a certain insight into latent socio-cultural anxieties who deliberately sabotages suspicious interpretation. Pleasure, Subversion, and the Homme Fatal Part of the pleasure of a suspicious analysis of a text is that it allows the critical theorist to act as a detective—“solving mysteries, nailing down answers, piecing together a coherent narrative, explaining away ambiguity through interpretation of clues” (Felski 13). However, in The Killer Inside Me, homme fatal Lou Ford subverts this process, using his knowledge of psychoanalysis in a way that prevents him from being subject to suspicious interpretation. In her paper on the source text from which Winterbottom’s film was adapted, “Being’s Wound: (Un) Explaining Evil in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me,” literary theorist Dorothy Clark argues that “if Lou Ford provides a Grand Narrative, it is one in which he uses the appearance/reality outer/inner world motif to pitch to us a too-apparent Freudian psychoanalytic explanation for his actions” (54). A suspicious reading of The Killer Inside Me is disrupted and subverted by Lou’s employment of a psychoanalytic model to explain what he calls “the sickness.” By offering up a rational explanation for his otherwise irrational behaviour and grounding it in suspicion, Lou continually constructs and then deconstructs the narrative in such a way that it “conceals rather than reveals, continually eluding containment and definition” (Clark 59). According to Clark (51), what distinguishes The Killer Inside Me from the standard detective narrative is that rather than progressing from a state of enigma to one of knowledge, the story eludes knowledge, becoming increasingly complex and uncertain. Although Clark’s discussion focuses on the hard-boiled novel by Jim Thompson (1952), her observations about the character of Lou Ford are equally relevant to the 2010 neo-noir cinematic remake, which is a direct adaptation of the original novel. (Many classic films noir are reworkings of hard-boiled novels. For example, director Robert Montgomery’s 1947 film The Lady in the Lake was based on a novel originally written in 1943 by Raymond Chandler.) In the film The Killer Inside Me, as in the novel, Lou pragmatically detaches himself from his behaviour, and his dialogue creates a continuous state of puzzlement and perplexity that constantly undermines any attempt at understanding through interpretation. In Mr Brooks, any effort at a suspicious reading is equally well thwarted, but the strategy employed is the polar opposite to that used in The Killer Inside Me. In a more conventional “whodunit” narrative structure, Brooks, known as the “thumbprint killer,” might be presented as a mystery. The audience might be provided with the same clues and limited insights that Detective Atwood (Demi Moore) is given, embarking on the same journey of reconstruction, conjecture, and interpretation that she does. A picture might gradually emerge about the killer: his motivations, his rationale, what his fetishes and weak points are, and ultimately, who he is. Instead, the audience is presented not only with the identity of the killer, but the inner-most workings of his mind. According to psychoanalytic theorists, the psychical mechanism that cuts off unpleasant repressed material, blocking it from entering and disrupting the consciousness, is the ego. For Freud, the ego responds to the external world and is grounded in common sense, control, planning, and intellectual rationale (“Ego & Id” 363). However, the repressed can still communicate with the ego through the id. The psychical id is where the powerful pleasure principle reigns unrestricted; it is the primitive, infantile part of the mind in which immediate satisfaction is all that counts, despite the ego’s best attempts to “bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies” (Freud, “Ego & Id” 363). For Freud, the psyche also contains a third element—the super-ego, a portion of the ego that sets itself over the rest of the ego, creating a tension that is felt consciously as a sense of guilt (Freud, “Ego & Super-Ego” 374). It is a part of Earl’s psyche that only surfaces when he realises that his daughter may have inherited the same killing impulses as him. In Mr Brooks, Marshall represents Earl’s id. He is like an evil clown, set up in opposition to the controlled, methodical, and sensible Earl, whose primary concern is that he might get caught. All Marshall wants to do is have “fun.” With pleasure his sole preoccupation, much of the film centres on the various levels of conflict between Earl and Marshall. Sometimes they are like best friends, laughing together, united in their pursuit of pleasure; at other times, when Earl tries to ignore Marshall or control him by attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings (without revealing the nature of his own addiction), it becomes a battle of wills, with Marshall trying to undermine, goad, and torment Earl into giving in to his impulses. Early in the film Marshall’s persistence pays off when Earl breaks his two-year drought and surrenders to Marshall, indulging in the pure ecstasy of murder. Here, the play between the two characters clearly represents the psychical interaction between the ego and the id. This interplay provides the audience with seemingly transparent insight into the latent mechanisms of Earl’s psyche, eluding enigma entirely and jumping straight into knowledge of the most intimate kind. One cannot speculate about Earl’s latent thoughts because they are there, laid bare on the screen. Further, Earl makes no apologies for his behaviour. He kills because he likes and enjoys it, period, a fact that Marshall is continually reminding him of. His desire to stop is motivated only by the logical, rational, common sense part of his psyche, his ego. Despite the two different approaches to the subject of the killer inside them, both Earl and Lou manage to successfully subvert a suspicious analysis and with it the pleasure to be found in such an investigation. Lou does so by playing games with the audience’s assumptions that there is an underlying reason for his behaviour, expending a great deal of energy providing psychoanalytically grounded excuses for it: he is the victim of childhood sexual trauma, a victim of elemental human passion, he has dementia praecox, he has paranoid schizophrenia, he wants revenge, he is a flower misplaced and wrongly labelled a weed, or perhaps he is just cold-blooded and as smart as hell (Clark 46–49). Mr Brooks, on the other hand, cuts right through all the diversionary tactics and gets straight to the core of what really motivates Earl—a raw instinctual desire for pleasure. Conclusion In feminist film theory (and Western culture in general) suspicious interpretation has become a deeply ingrained and almost taken-for-granted way of understanding meaning. Part of the popularity of a suspicious analysis is the pleasure readers/viewers/critics find in the mystery-solving process of interpretation and the chance to act as detective. However, the neo-noir thrillers Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me exhibit a self-reflexive insight into Freudian theory, the school of suspicion, and the assumptions that accompany it, using that knowledge to deliberately subvert the opportunity for suspicious analysis. Lou plays guessing games with the audience’s desire to solve the riddle of his psyche, generating his own pleasure in the process. In Mr Brooks the audience is denied the opportunity for speculation when it comes to Earl’s mind because the innermost workings of it are laid bare for all to see, leaving no room for interpretation. The only pleasure to be had is Earl’s—the raw and brutal pleasure of killing. In patriarchal Western society the femme fatale is considered to be symptomatic of male paranoia surrounding the breakdown of gender difference and power relations. While, as Cohen suggests, this may also be true of the homme fatal, the figure’s propensity to undermine understanding through psychoanalysis suggests that as a male manifestation of male paranoia the construct of the homme fatal is an insightful catalyst of fear rather than a subject or object of it. ReferencesA Kiss Before Dying. Dir. Gerd Oswald, 1956.Blue Steel. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 1990.Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Femme Fatale: Negotiations of Tragic Desire.” New Literary History. 35.1 (2004): 103–16. Clark, Dorothy. “Being’s Wound: (Un) Explaining Evil in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 42.1 (2009): 49–65. Cohen, Margaret. “The ‘Homme Fatal,’ the Phallic Father, and the New Man.” Cultural Critique. 23 (1992–93): 111–36. Copjec, Joan. Shades of Noir: A Reader. New York: Verso, 1993. Doane, Mary Ann. Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991. Experiment Perilous. Dir. Jacques Tourner. RKO, 1944.Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today. 32.2 (2011) 215–34. Freud, Sigmund. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id and Other Works. London: Penguin, 1991. Gaslight. Dir. George Cukor. MGM, 1944.Guilty as Sin. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Hollywood Pictures, 1993.Internal Affairs. Dir. Mike Figgis. Paramount Pictures, 1990.In The Cut. Dir. Jane Campion. Screen Gems / Columbia Pictures, 2003.Killer Inside Me, The. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Icon, 2010.Mr Brooks. Dir. Bruce A. Evans. Metro – Goldwyn – Mayer, 2007.Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Spicer, Andrew. Film Noir. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002. Suspicion. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. RKO, 1941.Taking Lives. Dir. D. J. Caruso. Warner Brothers, 2004.Thompson, Jim. The Killer Inside Me. London: Orion, 2006.