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Rewilding is regularly connected to re-enchantment. In some rewilding projects, ecological restoration merges with narratives of wonder, enchantment and spirituality. While rewilding’s association with re-enchantment appears as part of its appeal, it is also criticised as anthropocentric, escapist or naive. This article aims to formulate a thorough conceptual understanding of rewilding as re-enchantment by situating it within the critical framework of (dis)enchantment developed in the early 20th century by Weber and Horkheimer and Adorno. Connecting this framework to contemporary, phenomenologically inspired accounts of enchantment and critiques on the mechanisation of nature, this article aims towards a new perspective on rewilding as a critical discursive practice of re-enchantment. Rewilding, like re-enchantment, can be seen as a valuable attempt to formulate alternatives to the modern paradigm and programme of disenchantment. Situating rewilding within a broader cultural context and historical perspective, this approach allows for assessing rewilding as part of modern (counter-)culture at large. Moreover, through a detailed account of (re-)enchantment in rewilding on a phenomenological, theoretical and relational level, this article gradually develops a conceptual understanding of re-enchantment as a valuable concept for ecological restoration and cultural transformation.

Many scholars have understood conspiracy theories as sense-making mechanisms. Among them, a particular strand further inspected them in parallel with religion and magic. This comparison bears the risk of framing conspiracy theories as irrational interpretations and anachronisms with respect to contemporary ways of explaining reality. This contribution takes off from the reflections of those who have highlighted this risk. It tries to confront the possibility of using the concept of enchantment without implying a normative judgment on the irrationality of conspiracy theories. This paper carries out this effort by closely inspecting Max Weber’s texts. I argue that Weber’s notion of enchantment and disenchantment allows for a punctual use of both, devoid of normative implications. After setting out this non-normative notion of enchantment, this paper examines the characteristics of the enchanted worldview and its usefulness in reading conspiracy theories. Finally, this paper supports this effort using the identified characteristics to systematise a reading of conspiracy-based accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article presents the results of a survey conducted between 2014 and 2016 among young adults from the Tunisian-Algerian border region of Kef. We collected several social trajectories of “unemployed graduates” a few years after the overthrow of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s regime on January 14, 2011 in order to understand how the bubbling of democratic expression carried by powerful collective mobilization movements linked to the end of the dictatorship can influence the daily life of an age group that is particularly mediatized but invisibilized or instrumentalized by the public authorities. These trajectories show us first of all the disenchantment of an age group with blurred contours that is linked to the situations of socio-economic injustice that they experience on a daily basis. These young people express a feeling of exclusion in the face of the many inequalities suffered in the family circle, confronted with numerous inter-generational conflicts as well as the weak presence of the public authorities. These demands, which are hardly heard by the authorities and the elites, express a demand for more social equality in everyday life, more freedom of movement and, more generally, recognition by the State. The injustices that young 'unemployed graduates' experienced daily are also forms of social demand. In other words, we can see a real process of identity building among citizens in training and the emergence of a “social critique” aimed at combating social immobilism and “post-revolutionary” disenchantment. In this difficult context, social and geographical mobility are therefore necessary resources for young adults in order to take the initiatives they feel are necessary to compensate for the shortcomings they experience because of their social and geographical origin. Young “unemployed graduates” suffer from many forms of precariousness, which they accumulate, as well as from social and territorial inequalities. However, they develop many professional projects. These generally aim to access micro-entrepreneurship and/or a migratory project, whether these mobilities are realised or planned, and whether they are short or long distance. They thus show a strong determination to fight the social immobility to which they feel assigned and, to do so, they multiply the crossing of social and territorial universes. Their initiatives are sometimes not very visible to those around them. They start by building what they lack most, i.e. relational skills in order to create circles of solidarity, friendship, mutual aid and professional advice, in Tunisia and sometimes also abroad. They then combine these skills with different forms of mobility in order to build their own trajectory and try to escape the identity assignment of citizens on the margins of society. In order to grasp the different key moments and places that participate in the elaboration of their future, we have mobilised the usual tools of comprehensive sociology (interviews, life stories, observations) by conducting interviews in Tunis and in the Kef region. This information was then analysed using methods relating to the analysis of social relations, in particular the so-called “name generator” protocol. By proceeding in this way, it becomes possible to highlight individual trajectories that are similar to chance encounters, often random, but which the people concerned know how to grasp. However ephemeral they may be, these contacts are in fact likely to provide essential resources for access to social autonomy for those who build them. These links, which may be one-off or last a lifetime, can counterbalance “vertical” aspirations that are often disappointed and the constant feeling of being up against the wall. They can sometimes be a real resource for upward mobility, but more generally, as collective commitment wanes a few years after the fall of the dictatorship, they restore a sense of belonging and can be an antidote to disenchantment.

The article is about six French Special Military Operations (SMOs) that were conducted in Islamic countries in the MENA region between 2011 and 2022. It provides an explanation of their historical, geopolitical, and military contexts while also assessing their compliance with international law. The text introduces two innovative concepts, the Holland doctrine and the Macron doctrine, and analyses both their successes and failures. Ultimately, the article concludes by addressing the question of why these SMOs achieved military success but failed to meet political objectives, resulting in a significant disillusionment among French political and military elites, as well as the participating soldiers.

Achebe’s magnum opus, Things Fall Apart, circles around a Nigerian community and the life of the Ibo people. It illustrates the life of local people before and after the British colonisation. The novel gives an account of Okonkwo’s life as a highly valued member of an Ibo clan, during the colonisation period. In this article, I intend to argue that the life of this clan was enchanted before colonisation. Later, I seek to elaborate on how this enchanted life is affected by Western civilisation and Christianity and how these elements disenchanted the Ibo people’s worldview. The liveliness of matter for Ibo people and the immateriality of objects for Christians contributed to two opposing ontologies. While Western ontology seeks to define, limit, and measure everything, the Ibo tradition gives space to the elements of magic, wonder, and fear. The sheer forces of Western rationality and Christianity served as potent elements that drained the Ibo culture of meaning. Furthermore, I posit that the emergence of Western tradition within Ibo culture caused Okonkwo’s suicide and identity crises.

This study investigates how Martin Heidegger’s notion of “the thing” (Das Ding) can help rescue modern disenchantment with regard to its root in the World, a concept developed from “being-in-the-world” presented in Being and Time, and later taken as a participant in the bilateral polemos illustrated in die Gestalt (signifying Being’s strife to disclose itself against the Earth: self-concealing concealment). In Section 1, I analyze the occurrence of disenchantment by critically reviewing several thinkers’ discussions of it, pointing out that “faciality”—which has structured the modern Western understanding of reality—is the cornerstone of ontotheology, as well as the collapse of it: disenchantment. In Section 2, to demonstrate how Heidegger’s rediscovery of usefulness in a de-subjectified discourse of signification has challenged the positivistic view attached to “faciality”, I examine Heidegger’s idea of “readiness-to-hand,” revealing the basic temporal–spatial units composing the “handiness” of categorical beings and its relation to Dasein, progressing thereon to the analysis of a thing-centered worldview of Heidegger’s phenomenology. In Section 3, I demonstrate how this thing-centered worldview has the potential to form a preparative stage for re-enchantment of the World by uncovering the concealed existentiality within things, aligning with Heidegger’s polemos in his philosophy of art.

Beliefs in cover-ups take the perspective of conspiracy theories. This study examined demographic, ideological, and work-related attitudes (disenchantment, equity sensitivity) and ideas about events being covered up. Over 500 working adults completed a number of questionnaires including beliefs about official cover-ups and conspiracies (CT), work-related disenchantment, sensitivity to equity, personal demography as well as religious and political beliefs. CT and Work Disenchantment measures both had a good internal reliability. Correlations and regressions showed that sex, education, ethnicity and political beliefs, as well as a sense of entitlement and disenchantment at work, predicted beliefs in cover-ups. Facets of work disenchantment, particularly perceptions of organisational hypocrisy and personal disrespect at work were significantly related to the belief in cover-ups. Research implications and limitations are acknowledged.

In this paper, I turn to Adam Phillips’ recent discussion of the vexed nature of cure in psychoanalysis to consider the structural differences between mental and physical health. I examine how psychoanalytic thinking raises questions for naturalistic ways of thinking about mental health and for broader crisis narratives that are becoming prevalent in Western modernity. In the latter half of this paper, I draw a comparison between thinking about matters of health and ways of thinking in the philosophy of education. I suggest that the lure of cure can be detected in statements of universalist aims and ends for education (which themselves have come to invoke conceptions of wellbeing and mental health in modern times). I also explore Phillps’ account of psychoanalysis as ‘something better than a cure’ and consider its implications for future thinking in the philosophy of education.

This article seeks to offer a socially and politically situated analysis of the disenchantment produced by sociological research categorised as critical. It offers a step-by-step comparison of how a study on voluntary work (that produced disenchantment for some, truism for others) was received. It also gives weight to the fact that a research process can also lead to the politicisation of research. The article sheds light on two arguments for the autonomy of engagement that lies at the heart of the critique of a critique: one concerning the autonomy of the actors’ “citizen engagement” and of their relation to work, and the other concerning the autonomy of the researcher’s work and its “commitments”, generally presented as “research neutrality”. This reflexive attention to the effects of the research investigation not only on others but also on the author of the research ultimately questions the social and political scope of the “conception of hostile worlds” inscribed in the “doctrine of separated spheres” of work and commitment that, in the present case, concerns both the object and the practice of research.

This article places Graham Swift’s latest novel Here We Are (2020) in the context of his previous writing and argues that much of his fiction is underpinned by the characters’ desire to transcend the limitations of their ordinary lives and to seek solace or a temporary escape within the realm of illusion. The analysis aims to demonstrate that the opposition between the two realms is the central preoccupation in Here We Are. The wish to surmount the mundane is fulfilled quite literally through the protagonist’s dedication to the practice of magic. The meaning of magic as a craft is briefly discussed, especially its quasi-religious connotations. It is also suggested that magic may be a tentative, personal answer to the problem of the “disenchantment” of the world, as diagnosed by Max Weber a hundred years ago. In Swift’s novel, far from being only a set of professional skills, magic creates an illusory realm, alternative to and more appealing than daily life.

This contribution looks at the different architectures for the institutions of the European Union in Brussels. Based on the ideas of the sociologist Max Weber, and later the theologian Harvey Cox, of an increasingly secularized, disenchanted urban society, the author first analyzes the earlier buildings for the European Community as an expression of a rationalist, even ‘disenchanted’ architectural strategy. This contrasts with the efforts of the European Union in the 21st century, which attempts to strengthen identification with the European Union by various means. One of these strategies—as the author points out—is to increasingly charge architecture with auratic meaning, in other words, to re-enchant it. Nevertheless, both architectural solutions do not offer a nation-like master narrative but are intended—each in its own manner—to represent a network of many individual parts.

This review article is based on re-reading the Joas vs. Weber discussion about the macro-concept of “disenchantment”. For Joas, the Weberian thesis brings together, in a single explanatory model, different social processes that must be differentiated. Joas’s proposal highlights the need to build research models sensitive to the interaction and the play of different logics of action between tension and transaction. The collection of some of the most recent tendencies shows how research on religion and modernity has renewed its interest in “visible religion”, granting a fundamental place to study the different modalities of religious agency in the recomposition of the public domain. Reading these results allows the reconstruction of an epistemological model centered on the logic of action, considering that religion can no longer be studied only on the terrain of its institutional reproduction. Instead, the plurality of religious agency requires observation at different scales: a multiscopic and multisite perspective.

Amorosos fantasmas is a novel written by Paco Ignacio Taibo II that belongs to the crime fiction genre and was published in 1989. The sixth installment of his most representative detective saga, the one starring the investigator Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, narrates the research about the murder of a young minor, named Virginia, after trying to escape from a criminal network, located in Mexico City and dedicated to the prostitution of minors, who, with the mediation of a pimp, tried to capture her. This work demonstrates that, as in all the Mexican author's detective narrative, in which the literary formula is always oriented towards political and social denunciation, the novel exudes almost every page disenchantment and frustration at the social injustice and exploitation of more disadvantaged citizens and exposed to the excesses of the corrupt PRI system. In this case, the corrosive denunciation of Taibo II focuses on topics such as violence against women and female sexual exploitation in the urban environment through, first of all, the most relevant female characters in the novel: the victims Virginia and Laura. And, secondly, the analysis of a social archetype deeply rooted in Mexico: that of the pimp, embodied by the character of Manuel. Dedicated to the recruitment of sex servants, in many cases minors, and to the intermediation between them and the client, the novel uncovers the gears of this lucrative system of abuse and domination. Furthermore, in doing so, he is right to portray it as a network in which, although the pimp plays an axial role, there is a collective structure similar to that of a criminal organization that protects the pimp and benefits from his actions.

The article considers a singular film, Von morgens bis mitternachts, directed by Karl Heinz Martin in 1920. This fiction is a major work of the German expressionist current because of the originality of its visual inventions. The faces are painted and grimed. The sets appear unfinished and awkward. We compare this ethical film to works by expressionist painters or engravers to examine how it judges its main protagonists and the evoked society, considering the Christian morality and that promoted by capitalism. On the one hand, the scenic reverie and the motif of the fertile moment play an essential role. On the other hand, the genre of melodrama is renewed because the hero is judged through the figural secretion of evil and the motif of disfiguration.

In 1863, the publication of Vie de Jésus makes Renan part of the movement of “desymbolisation” and secularization of sacred texts. Eliminating the notion of miracles from his writing on religion, Renananticipates the pattern of Weber and Gauchet’s “disenchantment of the world”. It is thus by the methods of scientific analysis (eviction of miracles and psychological explications instead) that Renan is able to piece together the Messiah’s life, putting forward the idea of an organic Parousia, and making sciencea new religious ideal.

This article discusses the drivers behind why Swedes move to Portugal and who these migrants are. The conceptual framework is based on lifestyle migration and considers migration as a process. Using a semi-structured interview guide, designed according to a life-course approach, 36 in-depth interviews with Swedes permanently residing in Portugal were conducted. The findings display that only a small minority of the respondents claimed that the climate, the sense of privilege/affluence and the prospects of being a permanent tourist made them move to Portugal. A majority of the respondents expressed a disenchantment with Sweden, political correctness, and a perceived collapse of the Swedish welfare system. Simultaneously, the respondents describe an escape from everyday problems. Notably, it is not the Swedish middle-class that seems to be moving, and emigrants come from mainly the top or bottom of the social hierarchy.

The presence of the dragon („zmeul”) in the Romanian fairy tale is obvious in two important moments of the subsequent construction of the disenchantment. On the one hand, we have an aggressive manifestation marked by the abduction of the virgin and, on the other hand, we capture it defensively when the hero "traps" its territory. Our intention was to observe to what extent the discourse in the Romanian folklore combines the two elements into a single construct. The disenchantment not only recalls the name of the fantastic being, but will even include it among the nine degrees of the demonic beings, the antipode of the angelic beings. The connection between the dragons and Avestiţa, the female killer, female demon associated by the researchers with Lilith, the undead and the aggressive lion (Nergal), will send us to the Semitic demonology. As demonic beings, they block the passage, a gesture identical to the victim's attack, felt in the form of the disease.

This article explores the Reformation's influence on the secularization of Western society according to the conceptions of Ch. Taylor and B. Gregory. Both authors point to the Reformation as a watershed moment in this process. However, they focus on different aspects of this historical phenomenon and assess its effects in contrasting ways. In Ch. Taylor's book "A Secular Age" he reviews the Reformation in light of M. Webber's ideas and agrees that it has caused important reverberations, namely: disenchantment of time and space leading to the formation of instrumental reason, rehabilitation of work as a social activity and the spread of high moral standards to the masses, which then became a precondition for the formation of disciplinary societies. Hence, Ch. Taylor perceives the Reformation as a religious factor of predominant social progress. At the same time, he notices that the exacerbation of the doctrine of predestination in Protestantism became an obstacle for the intellectuals of the Modern Age to apprehend Christianity. On the other hand, B. Gregory poses a more critical review of the Reformation in his book "The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society". He argues that doctrinal disagreements caused by Protestants' numerous convictions have consequently hindered contemporary Western society. Some of the unintended effects he identifies are the subjectivization of moral standards and the replacement of the substantial ethics of good by formal ethics of rights. Additionally, B. Gregory asserts that Protestant doctrines were influenced by the metaphysical univocity of being to a certain extent, which entailed the naturalistic character of modern science. However, several of his critics have questioned his research emphasizing the lack of evidence to support this last claim. Critics have also observed that his understanding of the Reformation as a destructive deviation from medieval Christianity is mainly based on an idealized view of the Middle Ages. Still, notwithstanding the one-sided character of B. Gregory's representation of the Reformation and the lack of reasonableness of some of his arguments, he correctly demonstrates its ethical consequences. This allows the conclusion that among the Reformation's consequences were both, those that contributed to the social progress and those that led to the emergence of the new ethical problems. This mean that the one-sided assessment of the Reformation as an exclusively positive or entirely negative phenomenon is inaccurate since it does not take into account the plurality of its direct and indirect, intended and unintended consequences. In this respect, Ch. Taylor is more moderate in his analysis of the Reformation, because he takes into consideration both aspects of its influence, in contrast to B. Gregory who notices only the destructive ones.

One-third of all adults under the age of thirty in the United States of America are ‘nones’. Nones include atheists, agnostics, and those who answer “nothing in particular” to religious survey questions. In this article the authors examine the rise of the nones, drawing upon the work of Mary Eberstadt, Charles Taylor, and Joseph Bottum. We classify the nones into three groups: naturalists, transcendent spiritualists, and non-transcendent spiritualists. After discussing various challenges for evangelization among the nones, we propose some ideas to address these challenges. Here we draw upon the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, and Mariano Artigas. Finally, we discuss some cultural concerns and problems that would probably result if the rise of the nones is left unaddressed.

Much of the literary criticism devoted to interpreting the work of W. Wordsworth tries, on the one hand, to overcome and moderate, or, on the other hand, to directly accept the manifest opposition against science and scientific practices that the poet maintains, mainly throughout his work The Prelude. I will examine the conceptual basis of such hostile attitude by digitally analyzing the lexicon used in this work. The results obtained permit confirming Wordsworth’s hostility towards science, and more precisely, the prejudice that modern science would not allow a humanized perception of nature. But I argue that this attitude is due to a latent enchanted worldview, in a Weberian sense, more suitable for the sentimental description than for the perception and description of the natural landscape based on the explanatory knowledge of nature.

This essay presents an argument for a Collingwoodean social philosophy of art that centres on the opposition between art and magic as developed by R. G. Collingwood in Principles of Art and his folklore manuscript. The author agrees with Collingwood’s critics that one of the most problematic aspects of his aesthetics is its identification of art with the expression of emotion. Nevertheless, he aims to show that a Collingwoodean philosophy of art can dispense entirely with the notion of emotion. Other writers have demonstrated that Collingwood’s understanding of emotion is so broad as to loose firm contours. The author argues that a similar point holds for Collingwood’s treatment of magic. In the light of Collingwood’s interpretative liberty, the distinction between an expression of emotion and its mere release proves hard to sustain. It is argued here that by removing the controversial concept of emotion from the equation, Collingwood’s philosophy of art can be transformed into a more plausible Collingwoodean social philosophy of art where artistic expression reveals not the inner emotional states of the artist, but the contours of the shared habituated codes of communication and comportment, making the audience aware of their second nature as creatures of habit.

Based upon fieldwork conducted in the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Sicily, this paper explores the way in which the disposition, display and commemoration of the dead create meaning for communities of the living. Using two theoretical frames, “the work of the dead,” of Thomas Laqueur, and the Weberian cultural–historical notions of “disenchantment” and “re-enchantment,” the analysis centers on the recent reburial of one of the star mummies of the Catacombs, that of 2-year-old Rosalia Lombardi. Rosalia Lombardi’s reburial, as well as recent forensic medical research undertaken in the Catacombs by teams of scientific experts, shows how the ideological influence and relevance of human dead to communities of the living are, in this instance, transformed from local, to transnational ideological and cultural arenas.

This essay, which is based upon the perspective of a comprehensive and critical sociology, aims to contribute to the understanding and critique of a recent trend in Brazilian elementary school, herein called “moral disenchantment”. This is a social phenomenon that represents the gradual “reduction of moral diversity” in elementary schools due to a reconfiguration of both the educational demands from the society and the nstitutional offer of schools. Both press for the genesis of a new kind of moral education, whose contours, more or less uniform, reveal traces of a “business ethics”. This ethics tends to conceive of education increasingly as the “delivery of a service” and less as “humanistic formation”. In this essay, particular attention is given to the case of “public school”, which has gradually come to assume certain moral aspects of the so-called “school-enterprise”, in this general movement of homogenization of school moral diversity in Brazil. The analysis of the effects of disenchantment on the public school is carried out in a comparative perspective, given the same effects on other types of school: the “Catholic school” and “military” school”.

In the correspondence with his mother, Federico De Roberto defined its own novel L’Imperio as a “a terrible book”. Published in 1929, when the Sicilian writer was not longer alive, this incomplete novel concluded the project of literary triptych including the novels L’Illusione and I Viceré. What could arouse dismay and abhorrence in its readers was the nihilistic outcome of the plot. In order to explain it, the authors of the present paper show how the political disillusionment, embodied in the novel by the figure of the young journalist Federico Ranaldi, discloses for De Roberto the horizon of European nihilism. Being symbolic of the Italian generation born after the Unification, Ranaldi loses his political ideals when he understands that the politicians have no faith and are no longer right. Disgusted by the conduct of Consalvo Uzeda di Francalanza, the last heir of the ancient “viceroys” of Sicily, now the minister of the Kingdom, Ranaldi is overwhelmed by a radical, pessimistic vision of the world. Thus it is evident that De Roberto was extremely influenced by such philosophers as Giacomo Leopardi, Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann.

What appears striking about Jonathan Coe’s humour in The Rotters’ Club (2001) is how different or separate it is from postmodernism’s textual or ontological playfulness such as defined by Linda Hutcheon, Lance Olsen or Patrick O’Neil. The Rotters’ Club is, among others, a social and historical novel bent on recording the noble and futile battles of the 1970s in England and its humour is then constantly related to a ruthless assessment of the past and to the loss of a series of sustaining illusions. Surprisingly, humour seems to function primarily as a narrative red-herring for the light tonality of the opening chapters leaves the reader totally unprepared for one of the characters’ violent death from an IRA bombing. Not black but bleak, Coe’s humour following this tragic incident eases the didacticism of a novel striving to recapture the particular politics, culture and mores of a bygone era. The bitterness of lost illusions, social as well as romantic, may explain the ambiguity of the novel’s humour, a politeness of despair displayed so as to laugh in order to avoid crying. It will be the purpose of this paper then to try and unravel the complexity of The Rotters’ Club’s humour, desperate yet humanist, cynical yet committed.

This essay begins with a brief discussion of the marginalization of demonology in the study of both Indian Buddhist traditions and Āyurvedic medicine. Unlike the study of Buddhist traditions in other geographic regions, there has been relatively little scholarship on the dialogue between Indian Buddhist communities and the localized spirit deity cults with which they have interacted for more than two millennia. The modern study of Āyurverda, with few exceptions, demonstrates a similar trend in the marginalization of bhūtavidyā, or demonology, which has constituted a legitimate branch of Āyurvedic medicine from at least the time that the earliest Āyurvedic compendium, the Carakasaṃhitā, was composed. This essay argues that this lack of proper attention to Indian Buddhist and Āyurvedic medical demonology is symptomatic of a broader, persistent bias in the human sciences. The essay then examines a handful of stories from the Karmaśataka, a collection of Buddhist avadānas, to argue that certain Buddhist communities may have held their own biases against systems of medical demonology, albeit for entirely different reasons. The balance of this essay then concludes with an analysis of The Sūtra of the Seven Buddhas that presents this work as an example of Buddhist medical demonology.

The symbolism of flowers has always been a significant part of cultures around the world due to their functional meaning in daily life. From their decorative to their aromatic role, flowers and their symbolic meaning trigger emotions, convey wishes and represent thoughts that can not be explicitly expressed. In this regard, an elaborate language based on flower symbolism was developed in many societies, to convey clear messages to the recipient. However, in some cultural contexts, although the flower symbolism has social connotations, it is mainly associated with economic references. As flowers are an essential precursor to fruits, they are inevitably a source of expectations and hence foster a set of hopes and dreams, which can ultimately lead to excitement or disappointment.Through a discourse analysis based on factional narratives, this article explores the parameters through which the symbolism of bifaceted meaning of flowers fictionalises a space that refers to the social reality. This association between the fictional world and social reference has highlighted that writing can profoundly be a means of representing social events through the rhetoric of symbolism. Through a sociological reading approach, this paper aims to analyse how the symbolism of flowers informs the rhetoric of disenchantment that can foster a content-based pedagogy in language learning where silencing practices engender imagery to exercise the freedom of expression.

Este artigo indica algumas implicações do pensamento weberiano sobre a compreensão do trabalho e da forma de administrá-lo. Com base nos conceitos weberianos de racionalidade e de racionalização, é feita uma apreciação do trabalho na história ocidental, com ênfase no momento da passagem do capitalismo tradicional para o contemporâneo. A tese central é a de que as teorias de Weber são um modo válido para compreender o trabalho desencantado da atualidade.This article discusses some implications of Weber's thoughts about understanding and managing labor. Based on Weber's concepts of rationality and rationalization, the article develops an account of the transformations of labor in Western history, stressing the shift from early to contemporary capitalism. The central thesis is that Weber's theories are a well grounded way to explain today's disenchanted work.

The idea of cult centralisation in ancient Israel is investigated as a form of disenchantment. The Temple in Jerusalem can now be styled The House of the LORD and the countryside ought to be bereft of holy places and holy objects. However, the LORD did not stay in his “House”. Was this the start of a global process of disenchantment reaching its culmination in modernity? The question is posed whether the world could still be the enchanted house of man now that the LORD is absent. The article suggests that science associated with the Torah of nature can still discover an enchanted world.

Jacques Henriot conceives the essence of game and play as an attitude, a posture of the subject in his relationship to others and to things. This conception allows to set the gaming attitude in opposition with the relationship we maintain with our most “serious” business: work, war, religion. The antagonism with this last term is particularly underlined by Henriot in his essay of 1969 on play. Yet, if every society leans on a specific conception of what is sacred, we have to deduct from it that the extension of the gaming attitude in the contemporary societies involves a radical transformation of the relationship to the sacred, and thus an identically radical transformation of the social as a whole. The article examines how the gaming attitude tries to re-enchant a modern world which lost its signification, paradoxically reintroducing and deconstructing at the same time a sacred dimension.

The study focuses on the production of three authors, the Uruguayan Mario Levrero (La novela luminosa, 2005), the Puerto Rican Eduardo Lalo (Países invisibles, 2008), and the Cuban Leonardo Padura (El hombre que amaba los perros, 2009). Aside from their temporal closeness, the works also share an apparent “unclassifiability” that results from their imprecise generic condition and use of a complex and ambiguous narrative voice. The study analyzes strategies of “autofiction,” or representations of the “I” (also called “fictions of the author” or “autobiographical simulacra”) and emotions in three very different works. The first two texts, centered on trivial and insignificant quotidian details, do not initially appear to be political narrative, but rather seem to privilege aesthetic concerns. Padura’s novel is clearly a political text, if not also biographical-historical. All three, however, record the disillusion and disenchantment to result from the disappearance of the twentieth century’s social and political utopias.

Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010) drew great attention to a critic and novelist otherwise rarely mentioned in the literary pages of the mainstream press. Its framing and misrepresentation of the content of the book, however, merely confirmed the necessity of Josipovici’s project to reinvigorate critical discourse in the arts – specifically literature in the United Kingdom. In addition to tracing the book’s themes through Josipovici’s earlier critical works, this essay contrasts its reception with a précis and critical commentary of the book’s argument with emphasis on summarising its key themes: the disenchantment of the world, the inward debate of authority, the elimination of choice, and the imitation of an action.