Demythologizing Myth. How Violence Generates Myth

The Rise of Mimetic Theory / Giornale di Filosofia vol.3 No.1, 2022

Compendium heroicum, 2022

In many of its facets, the phenomenon of violence is present in numerous hero narratives: the trial in battle and war for instance can constitute the point of departure for heroization processes; protecting the defenceless against the violence of others can be told in concepts and narratives of heroism; using one’s own body when faced with the threat of expected violence can be rewarded with hero status. Violence, understood as the wilful damaging of the body of another against that individual’s will, is admittedly not a constitutive condition for heroization processes, but it often accompanies them. The willingness to deliberately subject oneself to the violence of others, to endure it passively or to confront it actively is equally a prominent reason for construction processes of the heroic.1 There is no inherent ontological bond between violence and heroism; however, owing to specific similarities – for instance with regard to their transgressive element, their affective impact, their ambiguous relationship to order and their focus on an identifiable deed – they can be understood as phenomena that are linked to each other through numerous theoretical interfaces. The violence of an action can be veiled as a heroic deed, or the heroic act of establishing a new social system can be accompanied by the violence that Karl Marx describes as “the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” Two central lines of thought proceed from this possible connection between violence and heroism: first, both violence and the heroic call for their legitimation and often find it in references to each other. The heroic thus joins the concepts of ‘violence’ and ‘legitimacy’ and forms with them a tense web of interrelation in which questions as to the reciprocal dependence of the phenomena should be asked. Second, attention can be focused on those involved in violence – perpetrator, victim and audience – and the questions addressed: which agents are heroized; who is doing the heroizing; for which conduct is heroizing happening and which agents can be heroized at all? This also takes into account the observation that heroization processes and experiences of violence are to be understood as historically and culturally contingent phenomena and that a vast number of violent and heroic situations are thus conceivable.

Mythmaking Across Boundaries, 2016

If there is anything that radically set the 20 th century apart from what had gone before, it is the two unprecedented developments: the birth of psychology and the rise of the fantastic. The two processes were not unrelated: psychology came in the wake of discovering that the human mind contains a dimension that is only partially accessible to consciousness. The literary fantastic, in turn, was an attempt to explore this dimension and its influence on the human mind. Both psychology and the fantastic identified myth to be foundational for their fields, either as a record of alternative modes of thought or as a narrative strategy hardwired into human cognitive architecture. One result of this rediscovery of myth has been the proliferation of myth theories. In this chapter I look at four approaches to myth that have not made it into the myth theory canon. These include Immanuel Velikovsky's euhemerist reading of world myths as a memory of cosmic catastrophes and near-extinction events witnessed by various human societies in the past; Julian Jaynes' proposal about Greek myths—especially those recorded in the Iliad—as narrative accounts of bicameral consciousness that preceded our modern subjective consciousness; Sean Kane's comparative perspective on world mythtelling traditions as forms of humanity's dialogue with nature; and Jonathan Gottschall's social Darwinist reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey that positions these texts as narrative testimonies of a struggle for Darwinian fitness within an exacting eco-cultural niche. Starting with a brief taxonomy of myth theories, their types, and contexts in which they emerged and functioned, I call attention to the fact that any theoretical approach to myth is inescapably mythopoeic. Theories of myth are attempts to recreate the meaning of myths once their literal account is " no longer accepted, " 1 and also attempts to identify the source and urgency of specific myths both to the people Züleyha Çetiner-Öktem. Ed. Mythmaking Across Boundaries. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2016

In his essay entitled Zur Kritik der Gewalt, Walter Benjamin has developed a theoretical discourse around the historical meaning of violence, trying to define its essence by isolating the term from the particular circumstances in which Gewalt is applied within the symbolic order of justice. The theoretical construction (or de-construnction, following the analysis made by Derrida in The mystical foundation of authority) of Benjamin's Gewalt opposes simultaneously two historical approaches to the definition of violence: the first one, strictly juridical, claims against the traditions of natural law and positive law; the second, largely hermeneutical, attempts to distinguish the decadent system of mythical violence from the possibility of what is called 'divine violence'. Although this essay will pay particular attention to the problematic dimension in which mythical and divine violence constitute themselves, a brief analysis of the critique against positive and natural law is nevertheless required in order to establish the fundamental relation between Gewalt and justice. According to Benjamin, " natural law that regards violence as a natural datum is diametrically opposed to that of positive law, which sees violence as a product of history. If natural law can judge all existing law only in criticizing its ends, so positive law can judge all evolving law only in criticizing its means ". Even though this opposition is presented as 1 evident, the antinomy is inherently solved in the possibility, given by both the approaches, to evaluate violence exclusively within an order of legitimacy. Wherein positive law assumes violence to be legitimate or illegitimate according to historical assumption, natural law presumes violence to be illegitimate a-priori: legal power becomes for both the tool to resist and contrast the illegitimate violence of the individual. It follows that " the surprising possibility that the law's interest in a monopoly of violence visa -vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law

This paper explores the connections between Trauma War and Spiritual Transformation.

Eldarov E. The Analogy of the Mythologies // Russian Journal. 2002, Feb. 19, , 2002

From schizophrenia to mythology, from mythology to state ideology. The media as a generator of compensatory tales.

McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006

Myth and Emotions, José Manuel Losada & Antonella Lipscomb (eds.), Newcastle upon Tyne (United Kingdom), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017., 2017

The identity of the individual always implies a social aspect: its belonging to a group with which it shares desires, fears and beliefs. This is precisely where myth operates, always in accordance with a conscience of identity related to absolute origins and destinies of the individual or of society. Myth proposes particular and collective solutions (compassion, love, peace) to individual or social problems (anger, violence, suffering). In this way, it shapes public spheres of culture where emotional logic precedes other ways of comprehension of the world, namely rational thought. // La identidad del individuo presenta siempre una faceta social: su pertenencia a un grupo con el que comparte deseos, miedos y creencias. Precisamente ahí también incide el mito, siempre de acuerdo con una conciencia de identidad relacionada con el origen o con el destino absolutos del individuo o la sociedad. El mito propone soluciones particulares y colectivas (la compasión, el amor, la paz) a los problemas individuales y sociales (la ira, la violencia, el sufrimiento). Conforma de este modo esferas públicas de cultura en las que la lógica emocional va por delante de otros modos de comprensión del mundo, particularmente del pensamiento racional.

This edition in three volumes of Mythopoetics: the symbolic construction of human identity, maintains basically the structure and contents of its Spanish counterpart. The present volume, Pathos, Logos and Mythos, corresponds to the second part of Mitopoética, though I have extended the section on rational psychology. In volume one, I defined myth as a communicative social action that generates patterns of collective identity and economic valuation from cognitive processes that follow a liminal dynamic of morphisms. Those valuations are based in emotional protocols, respond to patterns of successful survival behavior adopted by the human group. Volume II, justifies these claims.

Departing from the proposition that the formation of myths is a typical feature of being human, their truth or falsehood is explored. Referring primarily to classical mythology, a myth is defined as a story which attempts to make sense of our inner and external environments. Supernatural agents are the main actors. Various theories about the functions of myths are discussed. Their basic embeddedness within the premodern three-storeyed vision of the cosmos, is set out. The value of myth analysis is illustrated by referring to New Testament Studies, Political Studies, Film Studies, Sociology, Psychology, Communication Studies, and the Science of Management. The article concludes by demonstrating the dangers of reading myths literally, as in fundamentalist Christianity, undermining free and open critical inquiry and leading to mind-control, manipulation, and persecution.