Paulo Coelho's Aleph is a novel about 'time' and the human experience of time via Aleph, a magical point in the universe that renders possible time travel into the era of the Spanish Inquisition to witness the tragic process of condemning a group of young girls to death. The novel is also reminiscent of its precursor, 'The Aleph,' a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. In this essay, I briefly examine Coelho's novel in respect to Borges's short story and the Greek and Judeo-Christian conceptions of time. More extensively, I probe the complexity of Coelho's depiction of time, the two modes of Aleph, and the experience of time and reincarnation by drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's two diverse, albeit intersecting, approaches to time and its dimensions: the Chronos and Aion conceptions of time and the three syntheses of past, present, and future. As the novel delineates the contours of a shared experience of time by a Christian author and a young Muslim musician, I investigate how Aleph, in Coelho's novel, functions as a perennial symbol of convergence and compassion among the followers of ostensibly irreconcilable religions.

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... As his work shows, there is a rich creativity to human spirituality that points not to compartmentalism but to the possibility of non-redemptive or non-fundamentalist porosity, which also indicates, in his view, the possibility of a new universalism. This new universalism is a counter-weight to the solipsism of the quest for authenticity because, for Kahn, it is a form of cosmopolitanism that is built on exchanges and relations between selves and others and importantly privileges these relations as open rather than closed boundaries between subjects, bodies of knowledge, different societies and different civilizations (Kahn, 2016: 153-5;Kahn, 2015: 22-26; see also Safaei, 2018). ...

  • Eleanor Kaufman

There are numerous ways in which the thought of Gilles Deleuze might be aligned with a generally recognizable form of ethics: from Deleuze's beautiful Nietzschean meditations in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy on the ethics of good and bad forces as opposed to the morality of Good and Evil (Deleuze 1988: 17–29), to Foucault's famous designation of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus as a "book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time" (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: xv), to the late profoundly ethical reflections on conceptual personae, philosophical friendship, and even an ethics of "life" (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). This is not to mention the Stoic dictum from The Logic of Sense "not to be unworthy of what happens to us" (Deleuze 1990: 149). While it is specifically the early single-authored work from the late 1960s that will be under consideration here, at issue is a notion of ethics that arguably might not be recognized as such at all, or as in any way resonant with Deleuze. The ethics in question here – what will at times be labeled an "anethics" – is stranger and darker than the more palatable examples listed above, an ethics more in resonance with Lacan as well as with a certain structuralist imperative. © editorial matter and organization Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith, 2011 and in the individual contributions is retained by the authors.

  • Wolfson E. R.