Christian parables have retained their force well beyond the sphere of religion; indeed, they share with much of modern literature their status as a form of address: Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.There is no message without there first being-or, more subtly, without there also being in the message itself-an address to a capacity or an aptitude for listening. This is not an exhortation of the kind Pay attention!Rather, it is a warning: if you do not understand, the message will go away.The scene in the Gospel of John in which the newly risen Christ enjoins the Magdalene, Noli me tangere,a key moment in the general parable made up of his life, is a particularly good example of this sudden appearance in which a vanishing plays itself out. Resurrected, he speaks, makes an appeal, and leaves.Do not touch me.Beyond the Christ story, this everyday phrase says something important about touching in general. It points to the place where touching must not touch in order to carry out its touch (its art, its tact, its grace). The title essay of this volume is both a contribution to Nancy's project of a deconstruction of Christianityand an exemplum of his remarkable writings on art, in analyses of Noli me tangerepaintings by such painters as Rembrandt, Drer, Titian, Pontormo, Bronzino, and Correggio. It is also in tacit dialogue with Jacques Derrida's monumental tribute to Nancy's work in Le toucher-Jean-Luc Nancy.For the English-language edition, Nancy has added an unpublished essay on the Magdalene and the English translation of In Heaven and on the Earth,a remarkable lecture he gave in a series designed to address children between six and twelve years of age. Closely aligned with his entire project of the deconstruction of Christianity,'this lecture may give the most accesible account of his ideas about God.

Filipino national hero Jose Rizal wrote The Social Cancer in Berlin in 1887. Upon his return to his country, he was summoned to the palace by the Governor General because of the subversive ideas his book had inspired in the nation. Rizal wrote of his consequent persecution by the church: "My book made a lot of noise; everywhere, I am asked about it. They wanted to anathematize me ['to excommunicate me'] because of it ... I am considered a German spy, an agent of Bismarck, they say I am a Protestant, a freemason, a sorcerer, a damned soul and evil. It is whispered that I want to draw plans, that I have a foreign passport and that I wander through the streets by night ..."

An NPR Best Book of 2017 Heiress to the nearly forty-billion-dollar L’Oréal fortune, Liliane Bettencourt was the world’s richest woman and the fourteenth wealthiest person. But her gilded life took a dark yet fascinating turn in the past decade. At ninety-four, she was embroiled in what has been called the Bettencourt Affair, a scandal that dominated the headlines in France. Why? It’s a tangled web of hidden secrets, divided loyalties, frayed relationships, and fractured families, set in the most romantic city—and involving the most glamorous industry—in the world. The Bettencourt Affair started as a family drama but quickly became a massive scandal, uncovering L’Oréal’s shadowy corporate history and buried World War II secrets. From the Right Bank mansions to the Left Bank artist havens; and from the Bettencourts’ servant quarters to the office of President Nicolas Sarkozy; all of Paris was shaken by the blockbuster case, the shocking reversals, and the surprising final victim. It all began when Liliane met François-Marie Banier, an artist and photographer who was, in his youth, the toast of Paris and a protégé of Salvador Dalí. Over the next two decades, Banier was given hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, cash, and insurance policies by Liliane. What, exactly, was their relationship? It wasn’t clear, least of all to Liliane’s daughter and only child, Françoise, who became suspicious of Banier’s motives and filed a lawsuit against him. But Banier has a far different story to tell... The Bettencourt Affair is part courtroom drama; part upstairs-downstairs tale; and part characterdriven story of a complex, fascinating family and the intruder who nearly tore it apart.

Noli me tangere," these are the words of the risen Christ to Mary Magdalene in the Latin Bible translation of John 20:17. Few expressions from the Bible have stimulated so much interest among artists and theologians alike as these three intriguing words. The Noli me tangere motif serves as the basis of an interdisciplinary research programme supported by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders, and entitled "Mary Magdalene and the Touching of Jesus: An Intra- and Interdisciplinary Investigation of the Interpretation of John 20:17 in Exegesis, Iconography and Pastoral Care." In cooperation with the Centre for Women's Studies Theology of the Faculty of Theology of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), the research team organised an exhibition in the Maurits Sabbe Library under the title "Noli me tangere: Mary Magdalene: One Person, Many Images (Maria Magdalena in veelvoud)" (23 February to 30 April 2006). In the first part of the present volume, the four members of the research team, Sabine Van Den Eynde, Reimund Bieringer, Karlijn Demasure and Barbara Baert explore the significance of the Noli me tangere motif each from the perspective of their own particular discipline. The second part of the volume contains a catalogue of the exhibited works with a colour photograph and a short description. The artworks stem from a number of historical periods, running from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries. A variety of genres and artistic media are also represented in this exhibition: graphics, paintings, sculpture and miniatures side by side with devotional art. The research team also invited contemporary artists to contribute their interpretation of the Noli me tangere motif to the exhibition. The painting of the Indian artist Lucy D'Souza represents the fine line between Christianity and Hinduism. The photographer Malou Swinnen photographed a woman from the Philippines while the calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander created a sculpture covered with a veil of letters. The painter Claire Vanden Abbeele was found willing to make her already existing Noli me tangere available for the occasion. The exhibition thus combines artistic periods, artistic media and the various continents of the world. "Noli me tangere: Mary Magdalene: One Person, Many Images" hopes to provide a glimpse of Mary Magdalene that unites both past and present.

Noli Me Tangere is Latin for "touch me not." In this modern classic of Filipino literature, José Rizal exposes "matters . . . so delicate that they cannot be touched by anybody," unfolding an epic history of the Philippines that has made it that country's most influential political novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. José Rizal, national hero of the Philippines, completed Noli Me Tangere in Spanish in 1887 while he was studying in Europe. Rizal continued to write, completing a second novel and many other poems and essays, until he was executed by firing squad in 1896. Since then, Noli Me Tangere has appeared in French, Chinese, German and Philippine languages. Two other English translations have made Noli Me Tangere accessible, but Lacson-Locsin’s new translation offered here is the first to work from facsimile editions of the manuscripts and to restore significant sections of the original text. The result is the most authoritative and faithful English translation to date.

The Sacristan is a chapter in the satirical novel Noli Me Tangere of Dr. Jose P. Rizal, the Philippine National Hero written one and half centuries ago depicting the atrocities, cruelties, and abuses of the Spanish friars, conquistadors, 'guardias del civil, ' and other religious authorities as well as the rich and powerful elitists during the Spanish Colonization of the Philippine Archipelago. It is also the story of Sisa, the mother of the two catholic sacristans, Basilio and Crispin who were killed by the Spaniards. The horrible death of her beloved sons and the debasements she endur ed from people led to her lunacy at the end.

In The Promise of the Foreign, Vicente L. Rafael argues that translation was key to the emergence of Filipino nationalism in the nineteenth century. Acts of translation entailed technics from which issued the promise of nationhood. Such a promise consisted of revising the heterogeneous and violent origins of the nation by mediating one’s encounter with things foreign while preserving their strangeness. Rafael examines the workings of the foreign in the Filipinos’ fascination with Castilian, the language of the Spanish colonizers. In Castilian, Filipino nationalists saw the possibility of arriving at a lingua franca with which to overcome linguistic, regional, and class differences. Yet they were also keenly aware of the social limits and political hazards of this linguistic fantasy. Through close readings of nationalist newspapers and novels, the vernacular theater, and accounts of the 1896 anticolonial revolution, Rafael traces the deep ambivalence with which elite nationalists and lower-class Filipinos alike regarded Castilian. The widespread belief in the potency of Castilian meant that colonial subjects came in contact with a recurring foreignness within their own language and society. Rafael shows how they sought to tap into this uncanny power, seeing in it both the promise of nationhood and a menace to its realization. Tracing the genesis of this promise and the ramifications of its betrayal, Rafael sheds light on the paradox of nationhood arising from the possibilities and risks of translation. By repeatedly opening borders to the arrival of something other and new, translation compels the nation to host foreign presences to which it invariably finds itself held hostage. While this condition is perhaps common to other nations, Rafael shows how its unfolding in the Philippine colony would come to be claimed by Filipinos, as would the names of the dead and their ghostly emanations.

Classic story of the last days of Spanish rule in the Philippines.

A hardcover edition of the classic tale of a young soldier's harrowing experiences in the trenches, widely acclaimed as the greatest war novel of all time—featuring an Introduction by historian Norman Stone. Now a Netflix Film. When twenty-year-old Paul Bäumer and his classmates enlist in the German army during World War I, they are full of youthful enthusiam. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught to believe in shatters under the first brutal bombardment in the trenches. Through the ensuing years of horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another. Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel not only portrays in vivid detail the combatants' physical and mental trauma, but dramatizes as well the tragic detachment from civilian life felt by many upon returning home. Remarque's stated intention—“to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war"—remains as powerful and relevant as ever, a century after that conflict's end." Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.