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The article considers the ambiguous characterizations of The Merchant of Venice in light of Protestant and Catholic interpretations of the Eucharist, and raises implications for masculine gender construction in the opposition between Jewish and Christian cultural and theological perspectives. The argument focuses on the character of Antonio, whose masochistic self-sacrifice distorts Paul’s theology of grace. The homoerotic element in Antonio’s drive toward self-sacrifice is crucial in the play’s disruption of orthodox theological positions, and the waning tradition of homoerotic amity evoked by the playwright is related to the connection between amity and Eucharistic theory suggested in the Catholic Thomas Wright’s commentaries on the Sacrament, contemporaneous with the play. Shylock’s independent masculinity, not his effeminacy, ultimately operates as the real source of anxiety for the play’s Christian men, and the narrowing of Christian atonement to the romantic self-interest and masochism of the repressed Antonio contributes to The Merchant’s key suggestion that masculine identity remains dependent on the necessary and rigorous self-discipline imposed by the “law”—theological, moral, and sexual. The play thus implicitly addresses challenges posed by a theology of grace to the process of masculine self-fashioning in the social context of the Reformation.

Polanski's The Pianist (2002) displays a particular approach of music. The artistic commitment, which is the main subject of the movie, allows the director to question how an individual can face Evil. The way the music is used in this movie in not an unexplored topic of research. However, no study has so far sought to thoroughly show how an analysis of The Pianist can shed new light on Polanski's reflection about the status and function of music, which plays an essential role in the director's filmography. Thus, the main aim of our article will be to question in which way and to what extent music appears to the lead character as a means of survival and resistance against the Nazi's dehumanization process. We will also show that Polanski's vision of music, far from being naive or excessively idealistic, proves to be fundamentally ambivalent.

Keywords: Chopin, Le pianiste, musique de film, Roman Polanski, Shoah, Chopin, film music, The Pianist, Roman Polanski, Shoah

This article explores how the globalized concept of « blackness » that circulates via American hip-hop culture offers a certain reference point that allows many young Ethiopian Jews to anchor themselves within the Israeli landscape. I address the way in which dynamics related to identity take shape through Israeli and Ethiopian constructs of race and ethnicity. In particular I look at one of many strategies used by Ethiopian Israeli youths to stake their place in Israeli society, that is the claim of being Black Jews. This racial label is appropriated by numerous teenagers by way of their identification with hip-hop culture. I propose to analyze how the discourse they produce is articulated to the history and experience of African-Americans, while keeping in mind the constant changes experienced by their community since the beginning of the 19th century and the socio-cultural, political and religious distances that differentiate Israel from the United States.

Keywords: Culture des jeunes, hip-hop, négritude, racialisation, Éthiopiens Israéliens, Youth culture, hip-hop, blackness, racialisation, Ethiopian Israelis, Cultura Juvenil, hip-hop, negritud, racialización, Israelíes Etíopes

In light of charges of High Treason, Louis Riel's Defence Counsel pleaded non compos mentis, not guilty by reason of insanity. The prisoner disagreed with his counsel and protested his sanity three times during the trial. With his own lawyers discrediting the validity of his political and religious ambitions, Riel was unsatisfied with his counsel. Similarly, critics, activists, and nationalists also have had an awkward time effectively responding to the question of Riel's insanity. This paper considers the uses of Riel's insanity defense, in particular the opinions of the various psychologists whose judgments determined Riel's fate, his trial, and many of the posthumous responses.

The Jewish commentary of Genesis 2,7-14 shows a dynamic of differentiation of categories along two oriented axes. The urban morphogenesis of Paris, as Gaétan Desmarais has described it by importing René Thom's Catastrophe Theory in the study of urban establishment, is compared to this Hebrew schema. Pierre Legendre, founder of the Anthropology of the Dogma, enables us to ponder the fact that analogies and differences between those two schemata conform to the structural relationship prevailing between Judaism and Christianity.

Keywords: morphodynamique, Genèse, Juif, chrétien, lettre, forme, urbanisme, anthropologie, Paris, corps, dogme, morphodynamics, Genesis, Jew, Christian, letter, shape, urbanism, anthropology, Paris, body, dogma

Israel is the contested homeland of both the Jewish-Israeli and the Arab-Palestinian peoples. In the practice of tourism, Israel highlights sites of Jewish history and tends to neglect those of Palestinian history.Many of the Palestinian villages and heritage sites were destroyed by Israel in 1948 and onwards, or were gradually dilapidated due to lack of official care. Large-scale Palestinian roots tourism does not exist, due to the impossibility of most Palestinians to gain access into Israel.This paper explores an unusual form of roots tourism: the encounter between Jewish-Israelis and Palestinian depopulated villages that are located today within the boundaries of Israeli tourist sites. The paper demonstrates that the villages are largely ignored or marginalized in the information given to the public. The tourism authorities therefore underestimate the roots of the Palestinians in the country and portray an overall picture of a Jewish country, with very minor Arab heritage.

Keywords: Israel, Palestine, memory, nationality, tourism

Différance is probably the most seminal “lemma” of all termini technici of Jacques Derrida's thought. However, from Derrida's texts, one can establish no single definition or precise content of any sort for this word or concept which is “neither a word nor a concept”. How, then, can one translate such a term, with all the difficulties that arise, for example, from the use of the letter “a” which creates an oral utterance indistinguishable from the “other” différence, or the ambiguous play on “defer” and “differ”, etc.? This text examines various translating strategies through the study of three receptions of the term, in Portuguese, English and Finnish.

AbstractThe aim of this article is to take a fresh look at Romanticism's arch ‘infidel', Thomas Paine. My approach is to place his key work The Age of Reason (1795) in the context of what Derrida in Spectres of Marx calls ‘spectropolitics'. Derrida coins this term to describe the way in which ‘effectivity phantamolizes itself,' and I want to use Derrida's insight to explore the specifically visual dimension of Paine's ‘phantomal' image. I will show that there are three components to the spectropolitical transformation of Paine: his demonization in the 1790s as the diabolical seducer of the common reader; his ‘resuscitation' in the post-war period by Richard Carlile and other ‘apostles'; and the ironic conjunction between this contested ‘apotheosis' of Paine and his Deistical debunking of Christian revelation as vulgar spectacle. I focus my discussion around George Cruikshank's print The Age of Reason (1819) in order to show that caricature was a major spectropolitical force in the Romantic period and the apposite cultural medium for negatively ‘phantamolizing' Paine, though this tactic always ran the risk of further enhancing his ‘cult' status in radical martyrology. The larger critical aim of the article is to open up a new area in Romantic studies: to redefine Romanticism in terms of ‘spectropolitics' gives popular visual media such as caricature a primary rather than secondary critical function, and it allows us to rethink and revalue the ‘phantasmagoric' transformation of Romantic politics and culture.