- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Part I Outside
- Outside
- The Weight of Reality
- Doubles
- Shadows
- Part II Chance
- Cause, Choice, Chance
- Part III Passions
- The Altiplano
- Return of the First Person Singular
- Aconcagua
- Seduction
- Truthfulness
- Part IV Belief
- The Stone Axe
- Angels with Guns
- Belief
- Performance
- Voyage
- Part V Justice
- The Future of Torture
- Justice
- The System
- Truth in Reconciliation
- Part VI Irrevocable
- The Babies in Trees
- Mortality
- Dignity
- Irrevocable Loss
- Part VII Gratitude
- Gratitude
- Appendix Philosophy’s Tasks
- Notes
- About the Photographs
- Acknowledgments
The Stone Axe
The Stone Axe
- Chapter:
- (p.85) The Stone Axe
- Source:
- Irrevocable
- Author(s):
Alphonso Lingis
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
An ancient stone axe found in Java. It is a cult object, a sacred object, that belonged to a sacred personage. I know, can know nothing of the processions and the rites in which this stone axe figured, can recover no afterimage of the titanic or demonic figures that appeared in the visions and trances of that religion. The earth has taken it back, and its wood handle and rattan binding have been petrified, joining the stone of the blade. Innumerable once sacred sites are in ruins. They are traces of visions and ecstasies long vanished in the darkness of the past. About them opens the abyss of the inassimilable, the inaccessible, the irrecoverable, the sacred.
Keywords: sacred and profane, sacred in ruins, irrecoverable, inaccessible
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- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Part I Outside
- Outside
- The Weight of Reality
- Doubles
- Shadows
- Part II Chance
- Cause, Choice, Chance
- Part III Passions
- The Altiplano
- Return of the First Person Singular
- Aconcagua
- Seduction
- Truthfulness
- Part IV Belief
- The Stone Axe
- Angels with Guns
- Belief
- Performance
- Voyage
- Part V Justice
- The Future of Torture
- Justice
- The System
- Truth in Reconciliation
- Part VI Irrevocable
- The Babies in Trees
- Mortality
- Dignity
- Irrevocable Loss
- Part VII Gratitude
- Gratitude
- Appendix Philosophy’s Tasks
- Notes
- About the Photographs
- Acknowledgments
