英文摘要 |
Through history, ascetics have been understood as people who submit their lives to a voluntary and systematic self-discipline, abstinence and self-denial ordered to achieving higher spiritual state. On the basis of common patterns found among ascetics, Galvin Flood suggested that asceticism is a performance in which the ascetic performs the memory of a given tradition. The performance per se reveals imbedded ambiguities within the memory of the tradition being passed on. As a performer, the ascetic not only receives a tradition, that shapes him or her at the same time as he or she is challenged by its ambiguities. It is by stepping over and beyond the limits imposed by tradition that the ascetic accomplishes his or her self-integration and saves the memory of the tradition wherein he or she has emerged. While the notion of performance does enable a better appreciation of the phenomenon of asceticism, still it overlooks at the ethical tension on which rests ascetic praxis. The very process that leads the ascetic to reverse the process of his bodily constitution and elevates it to a higher and transcendent realm blesses the transgression of commonly agreed upon consensus and claims a bigger space of out-lawfulness and freedom from common law. Asceticism hence challenges the substratum of common ethics in the same way as it does, simplistic understanding of religion. The reason making asceticism fascinating is the very reason that makes some of its manifestations detestable. To unveil the ambivalence and the outcry for the understanding of the ethical tension inherent to ascetic praxis, this study con-siders suicide attacks as radical ascetic performances. Moreover, it elaborates on hermeneu-tical and ethical questions rising from this perception. |