No abstract
This paper sets out to define what is meant by a spiritual landscape. As such it theorizes the immaterial push of spirit alongside the materiality of landscape by rendering spiritual landscapes as the associate mapping of the relations between bodily existence, felt practice and faith in something immanent but not manifest as such. To achieve this, the paper uses recent debates relating post-phenomenology to one aspect of spirituality-that associated with Christian religion, teasing out how landscape (existence), practice (performance) and affect (immanence) offer up alternative ways to think our being in the world. This is to suggest important new theoretical understandings of how faith and belief, Christianity and phenomenology, recast our notion of being in the world. Thus we seek wider understandings of the importance and centrality of the spiritual landscapes that forge a sense of community, arguing that such a community is already a part of our individual and singular communal disposition.
Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual's consciousness (an objectivation of the individual's will, Schopenhauer would say), the pact must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up to date. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave-sheets serve as swaddling-clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being. 1 Why habit?The idea of habit has long held a place in defining recalcitrant and unreflective modes of being. Recent conceptualisations, however, open up new means for questioning and retheorising habit's role in shaping our contemporary condition. Of late, cultural geography has engaged in diverse problematisations underpinning the ways by which we come to define and challenge the pressing concerns of the day, from ecological states of affairs to financial collapses, and from new technological and social media to micro-biological advancements. Philosophically, a diverse range of theoretical shifts from new materialism, affect theory, speculative realism to feminism and postcolonialism, have provided the conditions by which habit, as a reframed ontological and epistemological perspective, challenges the moral-laden paradigm of the sovereign subject with which it was once embroiled and presents itself once more on the stage of our thinking to question us anew.If we had to point to one moment that has sparked habit's return to the conceptual frontstage, then the recent translation into English of Félix Ravaisson's 2 short treatise Of Habit, originally
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