The New Environmentalism and Global Futures

Brown, Lester R., et al. State of the World: 1990. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Pp. xvi, 253. $9.95. Milbrath, Lester W. Envisioning a Sustainable Society: Learning Our Way Out. Albany: SUNY Press, 1989. Pp. xv, 403. $18.95. Paehlke, Robert C. Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Pp. 325. $25.00. Tokar, Brian. The Green Alternative: Creating an Ecological Future. San Pedro, CA: R. & E. Miles, 1987. Pp. 174. $7.95.     

A Sogdian Drinking Game at Panjikent

This article reconsiders the religio-ritualistic interpretations of the use of the rhyton within eighth-century CE Sogdiana. Through a close art-historical analysis, it argues that three eighth-century wall paintings from Panjikent illustrate a drinking game. This proposal expands the current breadth of meaning attributed to the imagery decorating Sogdian homes. Not only could the paintings illustrate epic narratives, religious veneration, or moral didacticism, but they could also celebrate conviviality, fun, and humor.     

‘F&#% autonomy’: Houellebecq,Submission, and Enlightenment’s ‘last dismaying dregs’

ABSTRACT

This article examines the evolution of Houellebecq’s treatment of History across the span of his novels. Focusing in particular on The Elementary Particles, The Map and the Territory, and Submission, I explore a gradual but discernible movement away from a broadly Comtean understanding of historical destiny, which anticipated the decline of theology and metaphysics and the rise of positivism. Over the course of Houellebecq’s novels, this account of historical evolution yields to a circular rendering of history in which theology and metaphysics alternate as religious and secular dispensations trade power. While The Elementary Particles imagines the techno-utopian fantasy of a genetically perfected humanity, Submission abandons these Comtean-inspired utopian ambitions for a religiously grounded social order maintained under Islam. Crucially, I contend that François’ journey towards conversion in Submission, foreshadowed by the character Houellebecq’s conversion to Catholicism in The Map and the Territory, may be read as a narrative of the West’s exhaustion with Enlightenment and the burdens of personal autonomy. Submission is a novel that doubts the positivist pretention that humanity can move beyond religion and metaphysics, and instead suggests that metaphysics and its attendant doctrine of individual rights and freedom inevitably collapses back into theology.