Human desire is a fundamental part of our existence. They drive us to seek pleasure, security, and connection with others. But when left unchecked, these desires can lead to destructive and harmful behaviors. In this book, we explore the evolution of human desires, the negative consequences of unchecked desires, and strategies for reducing the power of desires.

Since the late 1970s, theologians have been attempting to integrate mimetic theory into different fields of theology, yet a distrust of mimetic theory persists in some theological camps. In René Girard, Unlikely Apologist: Mimetic Theory and Fundamental Theology, Grant Kaplan brings mimetic theory into conversation with theology both to elucidate the relevance of mimetic theory for the discipline of fundamental theology and to understand the work of René Girard within a theological framework. Rather than focus on Christology or atonement theory as the locus of interaction between Girard and theology, Kaplan centers his discussion on the apologetic quality of mimetic theory and the impact of mimetic theory on fundamental theology, the subdiscipline that grew to replace apologetics. His book explores the relation between Girard and fundamental theology in several keys. In one, it understands mimetic theory as a heuristic device that allows theological narratives and positions to become more intelligible and, by so doing, makes theology more persuasive. In another key, Kaplan shows how mimetic theory, when placed in dialogue with particular theologians, can advance theological discussion in areas where mimetic theory has seldom been invoked. On this level the book performs a dialogue with theology that both revisits earlier theological efforts and also demonstrates how mimetic theory brings valuable dimensions to questions of fundamental theology.

A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson). Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

"Alexandre Kojeve was one of the twentieth century's most important political philosophers, yet among American intellectuals he is known mostly by reputation. Kojeve's reading of Hegel influenced an entire generation of French intellectuals, including Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Eric Weil. His work also inspired Francis Fukuyama's famous thesis in The End of History and the Last Man. Published posthumously in 1981 and available for the first time in English, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right is Kojeve's most political work. This is Kojeve's only sustained discussion of such fundamental questions as justice, law, and the most satisfying form of government." --Book Jacket.

The concept of “camp narratives” rather than “Holocaust narratives” or “Gulag narratives” is based on the assumption that literary accounts of camp experiences share common traits, aesthetically as well as thematically. The book presents readings of camp literature that underscore the similarities between texts about Soviet gulag camps, Nazi camps and about other camp experiences. While literature about Nazi concentration camps still serves as a point of reference for camp narratives in the same way that the Holocaust serves as a point of reference for other genocidal operations, socialist labor and penal camps have become transnational lieux de mémoire in their own right since 1989. This volume intends to provide a theoretical frame as well as an overview of several important European camp literatures and case studies of iconic camp narratives and to take a comparative and transnational perspective on the genre of the camp narrative.

A systematic introduction into the mimetic theory of the French-American literary theorist and philosophical anthropologist René Girard, this essential text explains its three main pillars (mimetic desire, the scapegoat mechanism, and the Biblical “difference”) with the help of examples from literature and philosophy. This book also offers an overview of René Girard’s life and work, showing how much mimetic theory results from existential and spiritual insights into one’s own mimetic entanglements. Furthermore it examines the broader implications of Girard’s theories, from the mimetic aspect of sovereignty and wars to the relationship between the scapegoat mechanism and the question of capital punishment. Mimetic theory is placed within the context of current cultural and political debates like the relationship between religion and modernity, terrorism, the death penalty, and gender issues. Drawing textual examples from European literature (Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kleist, Stendhal, Storm, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust) and philosophy (Plato, Camus, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Vattimo), Palaver uses mimetic theory to explore the themes they present. A highly accessible book, this text is complemented by bibliographical references to Girard’s widespread work and secondary literature on mimetic theory and its applications, comprising a valuable bibliographical archive that provides the reader with an overview of the development and discussion of mimetic theory until the present day.

He observed that it is genetic defect of humans, since evolution from chimpanzees, that they cannot govern other humans in an honest way. All the systems of governing—i.e., military dictatorship, kings, socialism, communism, democracy, etc.—have failed to bring world peace, caused destruction, and prevent wars and exploitation of weaker humans. Hence, he is suggesting a nonhuman government all over the planet so that all creation of God can live in symbioses and spend full lives in happy, normal ways without nuclear war, military police, and jail. Ruling systems will try its best to prevent it, but it is going to happen. It was also four hundred years before Jesus Christ, and he will come back again.