After discussing different phenomenological modes of presence, I argue that the full force of the icon’s visual language is meant to bring us into an encounter with the listening presence of a person. This begins to emerge through the painting’s natural aesthetic presence as a portrait, but can only come to full fruition for the one who prays. After a phenomenological account of the act of prayer, I show how the experience of the icon takes on a critical structural difference for those who come before the icon in the conviction that the words that they say and actions that they perform are truly communicated to the person who is visibly present.

Given China’s position in Pacific Asia, defining its regional centrality might seem a simple task. But centralities grander than merely geographical have been alleged and contested. Currently some maintain that China is the central kingdom because of its power. But it was conquered by the Mongols and the Manchus, and its present centrality is due more to its economic mass and connectivity than to its military. Others claim that hierarchy is natural to Asian culture, and China is the apex. But neighbors were often cynical about China’s moral stature, and China’s soft power is now at a low ebb. I argue that China was the center of regional attention in the premodern era, and that it has returned to center stage since 2008. The three basic reasons for China’s original centrality and its return were situational: presence, population, and production. The salience of all three disappeared with Western imperialism’s global presence, the devaluation of mere demography, and industrial production. Traditional and current centrality created asymmetric relationships between China and its neighbors, but the regional situations differ fundamentally.

While it is only recently that disgust has been (re)assessed as a category of analysis for the Early Modern period, its temporalities are in need of further investigation. The chapter argues that disgust is triggered and represented by material memory objects in Hamlet and Othello. Here, disgust serves as affective response to the pressure of seemingly paradoxical temporalities – Hamlet’s experience of a past that is embodied in the untimely object of the skull, and Othello’s experience of a ‘future anterior’ that is mediated by and manifested in the handkerchief, respectively. In the two plays, the temporality of disgust is paradoxical: it simultaneously lags behind the memory object from which it recoils and generates the object in the very act of recoiling. By reading the respective temporalities of disgust both tragedies display, I suggest that the affective dynamics of disgust find literary analogy in the structural dynamics of both Hamlet’s and Othello’s fundamental dramatic conflict.

The third chapter turns to the body in erotic poetry. Here the temporal frame widens to embrace the experience of the present within longer human spans, a rhythm over lifetimes garnered through instances of erotic embodiment. Poetry can bind the inexplicable presence of touch to time, and can also summon the past as presence through the reenactment of the poem itself in performance, a dynamic we see at work in Sappho and then again in the modern erotic poetry of Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds – begging the question of why certain poetics recur across time. This is poetry that challenges the ephemerality of embodied experience by showing its power to reenact the force of touch.

The Introduction has three aims. First, it offers a new interpretation of the Seikilos epitaph, one of the most important musical documents from the ancient world. The chapter shows that we can use the Seikilos epitaph as a model for reading carpe diem. Second, the Introduction offers a short history of the carpe diem motif from Homer to late antiquity, analysing its key features and function. Third, the Introduction lays out the methodological framework of the thesis: it is argued that close analysis of the carpe diem motif can advance our understanding of presence, performance, and textuality. These themes have been central to literary studies in Classics and beyond.

Chapters 2 analyses the carpe diem motif in Horace and pays particular attention to wine and calendars. In doing so, the chapter shows how Horace’s lyric is distinct from any lyric poem that was written in archaic Greece. Rich Romans possessed thousands of wine amphorae, and consular dates marked the age of each amphora. The chapter argues that this made wine storage places into huge drinkable calendars, in which the oldest wines were stored at the back, and the younger wines at the front. Every time Horace mentions vintage wines, he accesses this calendar. Time is expressed through wine: opening an old wine creates a moment of present enjoyment, which cannot be repeated. Yet, through vintage wines Horace also brings moments of the past to the present. The chapter combines close readings of some of Horace’s poems with research into epigraphical sources, and ultimately advances our understanding of Roman calendars and fasti.

The Epilogue includes a new interpretation of a late antique poem by Pentadius. The Epilogue also summarises the findings of the book.

Chapter 6, “The Ethic of Presence” synthesizes the fine-grained analysis of the previous chapters with a broad-based, quantitative study of royal depictions and provides a general theory of the role of inscribed bronze vessels in the formation of the Zhou state. Drawing on theories of subject–object entanglement, the chapter captures how the ancestral cult and its accoutrements facilitated both the dissemination and the appropriation of royal ideology, helping balance interests within a shared Zhou interaction sphere.

Spirituality is a deeply personal universal human experience, and people with intellectual disability may miss out on the expression of this vital part of their identity, which is a fundamental human right. An understanding of people with intellectual disability as creative communicators has been gained through action research, but spirituality is still a poorly understood aspect of their lives, giving rise to unmet needs. Outdated practices and beliefs about the origins of disability have led to a culture of exclusion or, at best, tokenism. Around the world, reports are still emerging of marginalization, discrimination and even abuse because of negative spiritual attribution or views about cognitive abilities and consequent economic worth. Faith communities and secular care providers need to incorporate new learning about the importance of spirituality for mental health into mainstream planning of care with the involvement of people with intellectual disabilities who communicate creatively as co-producers.

Augustine is rightly regarded as one of the major figures of Christianity. Through him Platonist and Neo-Platonist philosophy was appropriated in the new religious context and there is hardly another thinker of the early Christian tradition who can better illustrate Nietzsche’s remark on Christianity as a Platonism for the people than Augustine. Things are, however, more complicated than Nietzsche suggests. As Étienne Gilson has showed, there is a strong tension between medieval Aristotelianism and the necessity to respect the early foundational authority, which Saint Augustine incontestably was. Aquinas has in this sense a quite complicated relation to his predecessor. In order to understand what is at stake in Augustine’s understanding of the biblical message of love, heavily influenced by Paul, it is important not only to describe the Neoplatonist roots of Augustine’s thought, but also to take the wider ancient context into account – and in this way arrive at a more complete picture of the historical and intellectual setting. The modification Augustine brings to the Aristotelian conception of the soul is hereby particularly revealing. A closer study of the relation between desire and love can shed some light on this highly significant constellation.

Drawing on biblical texts and theological reflections from early Christianity to the present, three prominent ways in which the sacramentality of creation has been nuanced over the centuries are explored: (1) Experiencing the presence of God in the world with focus on Ignatius of Loyola’s final contemplation in his Spiritual Exercises; (2) reflecting on manifestations of God’s goodness, power and wisdom that eminent patristic and medieval theologians discerned when studying the world and novel attributes that are discernible today when informed by current scientific findings; and (3) receiving the Eucharist as a heightened encounter with God that can strengthen individuals and communities to act cooperatively. These three ways of perceiving the world within which we encounter God constitute a formula for venerating Earth that should stimulate Christian attitudes and actions aimed at mitigating impediments to the flourishing of our common home.

Chapter 5 explores Derrida’s analysis of the problem of judgement through an extended analysis of Derrida’s analysis of presence and différance. It analyses three of Derrida’s readings of other philosophers: Plato, Hegel, and Husserl, with the aim of showing how in each case, Derrida believes that the priority of presence (and hence judgement) rests on a transcendental idea that exceeds the given. It argues that despite Derrida’s apparent hostility to the phenomenological tradition, his work is indebted to Sartre, and echoes Bergson’s analysis of resemblance.

This chapter articulates what it calls a ‘planetary poetics’. To set the stage for his presentation, Moraru underscores that not only are ‘globe’ and ‘planet’ hardly equivalent, but they are not givens either. Rather, he argues, ‘globe’ and ‘planet’ are products, something done to the world, made in and out of it. World-making and remaking forms, they are outcomes of worlding, that is, of highly complex, interrelated changes leading to intensified and vastly transformative interactions of the world’s various parts economically, culturally and otherwise, much though the same world’s animate and inanimate systems, at whose expense socio-economic growth and integration have been de facto unfolding, have been concomitantly coming under unprecedented threat or even disintegrating. Where a certain poverty of the critical imagination limits standard takes on the late global era to self-congratulatory ‘uncovering’ of the world-as-globe realities, Moraru’s planetary approach enriches this conventional critical vista by recovering a more nuanced, present-grounded yet future-oriented picture. A record of world-making or world-poiesis, this picture lends itself to a reading whose job is a reverse engineering of sort of planetary poetics by attending to the worldings that have led to the world geocultural aggregate as we know it.

This chapter explicates, explores, and commends Patrick Glenn’s choice to recognize and emphasize the significance of tradition, his master concept for understanding law, in the workings of all legal orders. However, it does not share the evangelical enthusiasm that Glenn suggests should flow from this recognition. That enthusiasm is based, I argue, on a quite idiosyncratic and contestable conception of what traditions ‘truly’ involve, absent contingency or corruption. Glenn believes that recognizing the traditionality of legal orders allows us to see them as open to greater mutual recognition, tolerance, conciliatory living together, than we commonly recognize when we speak in other terms, say, of legal systems, cultures, families, and so forth. Without his excessively sunny conception of the nature of tradition as its foundation, however, a lot of the ‘conciliatory’ hopefulness so winning in Glenn’s writings seems to rest on shifting and uncertain ground. We should acknowledge that law is typically founded on and in traditions, that complex legal orders indeed typically are traditions, simply because these are facts, and important ones. I fear, however, that such acknowledgment will of itself do little to advance the mutual accommodations among legal and social orders that Glenn admirably favours.