Since the wide corpus of Chan 禪 literature includes a significant number and a consistent variety of ironic features such as puns, wordplay, extravagant acts, and so forth, a clarification of the role and functions of irony is especially relevant to this framework. The idea of the present essay is that irony works in Chan Buddhism as a functional strategy purposely employed in textual compositions and oral communication. Analysing the Blue Cliff Record, one of the most influential and significant texts (...) in the history of East Asian Buddhism, I individuated three functions of irony that clarify its role in the wider context of Chan rhetoric. Specifically, these functions consist in performing a rhetoric of self-desecration, inducing amusement, and instilling doubt. Upon defining the notion of irony, the current essay expounds on these functions with reference to the text, then the role of irony in the Blue Cliff Record is finally identified as a hermeneutic device. (shrink)

This article examines what the work of New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen brings to thinking about being a postcolonial feminist. Using images from Sen's solo exhibit in New Delhi and New York titled Half Full, I theorize on the complexities that proliferate when thinking about postcolonial feminism. Sen's images play with “an” identity to showcase the hybrid and mobile configuration of postcolonial subjectivity. Sen's provocative aesthetic urges us to rethink defining a set of conditions or tenets for postcolonial feminism. Rather, (...) her aesthetic politics propels through humor and provides a prism to constantly reimagine postcolonial feminist subjectivity by urging a consideration of maps that intersect and overlap. (shrink)

_An exploration of philosophical and religious ideas about humor in modern philosophy and their secular implications._.

This paper explores Ramon Llull’s critique of political astrology regarding both its literary expression and its epistemological foundations. It opens with a discussion of Llull’s reception of the...