Events

Presentation at the 5th biannual European conference of Society for Literature, Science & Arts "Figurations of knowledge", Berlin, Germany, July 2-7, 2008 (Stream 1: Inspiration & intuition)

In our research we focus on the thresholds, passages and incommensurabilities between psychiatry and spirituality. More specifically, we ask: How it happens, in terms of observable and accountable practices, that phenomena such as hearing the voice of God, having an apparition of Virgin Mary or suffering from demonic oppression are sometimes understood as symptoms of mental illnesses or, other times, as elements of true spiritual or religious experience? Assuming that it simply is psychiatry, which produces the former, and pastoral practice, which pushes such cases to the latter end, is misleading. The field of practices we study is much more complicated. A useful methodological tool for observing subtleties of our phenomena is taking a symmetrical stand toward them, i.e., taking the spiritual and the psychiatric equally seriously. In our paper we would like to discuss the movie “Exorcism of Emily Rose” (Scott Derrickson, 2005), a combination of horror and court drama, in which a priest is sued for causing death of a young woman by performing exorcism on her. We analyze various means by which the film maintains undecidability for us, as audience, as for the key point of the story: was the young woman, Emily Rose, sick, or possessed? The aim of our analysis is to show what such a symmetrical approach might mean and what implications it could have for research practice, which also can be seen, after all, as a kind of trial.

Doublets in petanque

ZK & KM (both PK 1293, Vojnův Městec) - 5th place (out of 40 doublets). The tournament took place in the park of Jaroměřice castle. It began with four qualifying rounds (the Swiss system), then the best 16 doublets in play off. After failing to get in quarter-final, in a wonderful and dramatic match, we succeeded in 5-8th place play offs to win the 5th place (the final match against Oldřich Brož and Vlastimil Vejmělek from our petaque club in Vojnův Městec). A good day :)

Theatrical performance