Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 2008"

Refusing Able(ness): A Preliminary Conversation about Ableism

Abstract: Feminist Rosemary Tong long ago alluded to the profound possibilities of using critical disability studies theory to recomprehend and respatialize the landscape of thinking about race and gender as sites of signification. This piece presents a preliminary conversation in the emergent field of studies in ableism and desires to not only problematize but refuse the notion of able(ness). Our attention is on Ableism's production and performance. Such an exploratory work is indebted to conversations already commenced by Campbell, Hughes and Overboe. My approach is three pronged. Firstly I explore the problem of speaking/thinking/feeling - about the Other (in this case persons referred to as 'disabled people') and the 'extraordinary' Other, the 'Abled'. This conversation is captured under the banner of "The Ableist Project". Here I argue it is necessary to shift the gaze of contemporary scholarship away from the spotlight on disability to a more nuanced exploration of epistemologies and ontologies of ableism. As part of this project of exposure my second task then will be to tease out the strands of what can be called "Ableist Relations", including the effects of the compulsion to emulate ableist regulatory norms. Finally, as part of a commitment to make the necessary connections between theory and practice, I look at the tasks ahead in the refusal of Ability and the commitment to a disability/not-abled imaginary.

Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

Abstract: Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. With "Gardens", Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, "Gardens" is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison's earlier classics, "Forests" and "The Dominion of the Dead". Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility - and its enduring importance to humanity.

Cosmopolitanism in the modern social imaginary

Abstract: ing in the backseat of an old Land Rover through the desert southwest of Khartoum. There was no road, but the landscape, mostly flat, was marked by the occasional saint’s tomb distinctive to Sudanese Islam. My companions and I hadn’t seen another vehicle for a couple of hours when one appeared as a tiny dot on the horizon. It was headed our way, and as is typical both cars slowed down to see who else might be passing through the seemingly empty desert. My curiosity was mild–I had been in the Sudan only a month or two and didn’t think I’d know anyone–until I realized that in fact I did know the face looking back at me through the window of the other Land Rover. It was my friend Vaughan, an Oxford classmate from years earlier. We both shouted and our cars stopped. The reunion was a pleasure. It seemed very old-school, and we laughed about how many Oxford classmates of different generations had run into each other in the Sudan over the last 150 years. More than a few, I’m sure, each taking pleasure in his or her cosmopolitanism (and more than a few in colonialism, too). Vaughan and I caught up on families and careers and work on multiple continents. Being citizens of the world was going well for both of us. Vaughan was an attorney by the time of our reconnection, working for Chevron, which was developing oil 1⁄2elds near Bentiu in the Southern Sudan. A university professor supported by the Kellogg Foundation, I had come to Sudan on the heels of traveling through China and was teaching at the University of Khartoum while my wife Pam worked for the U.S. State Department’s Of1⁄2ce of Refugee Affairs.

Literature after 9/11

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction: "Representing 9/11: Literature and Resistance," Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn Part One: Experiencing 9/11: Time, Trauma, and the Incommensurable Event Chapter 1: "Portraits of Grief: Telling Details and the New Genres of Testimony," Nancy K. Miller Chapter 2: "Foer, Spiegelman, and 9/11's Timely Traumas," Mitchum Huehls Chapter 3: "Graphic Implosion: Politics, Time, and Value in Post-9/11 Comics," Simon Cooper and Paul Atkinson Chapter 4: "'Sometimes Things Disappear': Absence and Mutability in Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York," Stephanie Li Chapter 5: "Witnessing 9/11: Art Spiegelman and the Persistence of Trauma," Richard Glejzer Part Two: 9/11 Politics and Representation Chapter 6: "Seeing Terror, Feeling Art: Public and Private in Post-9/11 Literature," Michael Rothberg Chapter 7: "'We're not a friggin' girl band': September 11, Masculinity, and the British-American Relationship in David Hare's Stuff Happens and Ian McEwan's Saturday," Rebecca Carpenter Chapter 8: "'We're the culture that cried wolf': Discourse and Terrorism in Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby," Lance Allen Rubin Chapter 9: "Still Life: 9/11's Falling Bodies," Laura Frost Part Three: 9/11 and the Literary Tradition Chapter 10: "Telling It Like It Isn't," David Simpson Chapter 11: "Portraits 9/11/01: The New York Times and the Pornography of Grief," Simon Stow Chapter 12: "Theater after 9/11," Robert Brustein Chapter 13: "Real Planes and Imaginary Towers: Philip Roth's The Plot Against America as 9/11 Prosthetic Screen," Charles Lewis Chapter 14: "Precocious Testimony: Poetry and the Uncommemorable," Jeffrey Gray Afterword: "Imagination and Monstrosity," Robert Pinsky Contributors Index

Settler Collective, Founding Violence and Disavowal: The Settler Colonial Situation

Abstract: This paper outlines a number of approaches to an analysis of settler colonial subjectivities, the exploration of a specific state of mind and the detection of a number of paranoiac dispositions in a particular set of political traditions. At the same time, this paper explores the possibility of a Lacanian (i.e. imaginary–symbolic–real) interpretation of what is here defined as the settler colonial situation. First there is an imaginary spectacle, an ordered community working hard and living peacefully Little House on the Prairie style. Then there is the symbolic and ideological background: a moral and regenerative world that supposedly epitomises settler democratic traditions (the ‘frontier’, the ‘outback’, the ‘backblocks’, etc.). Finally, there is the real: expanding capitalist orders associated with the need to resettle a growing number of people. While this paper is aware that the categories of this analysis were initially developed in order to classify individual psychic phenomena and not collective ...

Insiders, Outsiders and Others: Gypsies and Identity

Abstract: The authors offer an account of the formation of Gypsy Identities. The authors argue that although Gypsies are recognisable figures within both rural and urban landscapes, the representations that are made of them tend to reflect an imaginary idea of the Gypsy, which in general, is configured from a non-Gypsy perspective. On the one hand the idea of the Gypsy is romanticised and exotic and on the other it is associated with dirt, idleness and disruption. Both these stereotypes contribute to the negative ways in which Gypsies are seen and have long been used to disadvantage Gypsy communities. The authors apply theoretical ideas about the 'stranger' in society to questions of social positioning of Gypsies. In considering how 'otherness' is created , they examine how 'white' culture differentiates itself and where understandings of Gypsy identity fall within 'whiteness'.

Management Control in Bureaucratic and Postbureaucratic Organizations: A Lacanian Perspective

Abstract: The notion of the postbureaucratic organization has been employed in organization theory to denote a number of movements beyond the control mechanisms of the bureaucratic organization. This article aims to use the notions of the symbolic and the imaginary, developed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and applied to technology studies by Friedrich Kittler, when examining control in these two archetypical organizational configurations. The article argues that the departure from the use of written documents, scripts, and protocols and the increasing emphasis on identity, culture, ideology, and other unobtrusive forms of control can be examined in terms of being a change of emphasis from the symbolic to the imaginary register, from the register of language to the register of images.

The Book of Imaginary Beings

Abstract: Few readers will want, or be able, to resist this modern bestiary. Here you will find the familiar - Gryphons, Minotaurs and Unicorns - as well as the Monkey of the inkpot and other undeniably curious beasts. Borges' cunning and humorous commentary is sheer delight.

Die Tryin': Videogames, Masculinity, Culture

Abstract: Die Tryin' traces the cultural connections between videogames, masculinity, and digital culture. It fuses feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and poststructuralist theory to analyze the social imaginary that is produced by -- and produces -- a particular form of masculinity: boyhood. The author asserts that digital culture is a culturally and historically situated series of practices, products, and performances, all coalescing to produce a real and imagined masculinity that exists in perpetual adolescence, and is reflective of larger masculine edifices at work in politics and culture. Thus, videogames form the central object of study as consumer technologies of control and anxiety as well as possibility and subversion. Moving away from current games research, the book favors a game-specific approach that unites visual culture, cultural studies, and performance studies, instead of a sociological/structural inspection of the form.

Mixed Race Peoples in the Korean National Imaginary and Family

Abstract: This article discusses the production of ''mixed-race'' subjectivity in South Korea. It asks: how can we understand the lived experiences and histories of mixed-race peo- ple as integral to the logic of national governance, both past and present? Instead of regarding mixed-race people in Korea as an aberration or regrettable phenomenon, this article contends that their ''otherness'' is an outcome of the intensions, contra- dictions, and insecurities of national governance which coheres around discourse and legislation on the family. The testimony of various mixed-race people living in Korea reveals the racial, gendered, and sexual discursive modalities through which they were rendered outside the scope and meaning of Koreanness. Their testimony also corresponds with the discursive limits set forth by the government, particularly in the establishment of laws that govern desired familial relations within the climate of Cold War militarism, industrialization, and the post-democratization era of global- ization and official multiculturalism. The longstanding and still practiced abjection of mixed-race people from South Korean society cannot be understood without explor- ing the intersection between a racial politics of ''blood purity'' and a gendered poli- tics of patriarchy that works in service of an imagined Korean homogeneity.

New and Useless: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Organizational Creativity

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to advance research on creativity in organizations by developing a psychoanalytic perspective from which creativity may be understood as an imaginary construction of the self. This self aims at producing the new and useful yet fails to do so. The useful is only marginally so, and many of the interactions designed to ensure usefulness result in socially useless activities. The article suggests, however, that from a psychoanalytic perspective, the failure of the imaginary is also useful. It is useful to the creative person as subject of the unconscious providing opportunities for struggles with otherness and alienation. Such struggles allow respondents to experience their creative potential and produce something beyond organizational kitsch. The implications for the theory and practice of organizational creativity are discussed.

The Security Imaginary: Explaining Military Isomorphism

Abstract: This article proposes the notion of a security imaginary as a heuristic tool for exploring military isomorphism (the phenomenon that weapons and military strategies begin to look the same across th...

Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science

Abstract: 1. Introduction Part I. The Subject Broached: Otherness, Epistemology, and Ethics: 1. George Eliot and the hypothesis of reality Part II. Ethics Without God, or, Can 'Is' be 'Ought': 2. Is life worth living? 3. Ruskin and Darwin and the matter of matter 4. Scientific discourse as an alternative to faith 5. In defense of positivism 6. How science isn't literature: the importance of differences Part III. Literature, Secularity, and the Quest for Otherness: 7. Victorian realism 8. Dickens, secularism and agency 9. The heartbeat of the squirrel 10. Real toads in imaginary gardens, or vice versa.

Lacan and the Limits of Language

Abstract: This book weaves together three themes at the intersection of Jacques Lacan and the philosophical tradition. The first is the question of time and memory. How do these problems call for a revision of Lacan's purported "ahistoricism," and how does the temporality of the subject in Lacan intersect with the questions of temporality initiated by Heidegger and then developed by contemporary French philosophy? The second question concerns the status of the body in Lacanian theory, especially in connection with emotion and affect, which Lacanian theory is commonly thought to ignore, but which the concept of jouissance was developed to address. Finally, it aims to explore, beyond the strict limits of Lacanian theory, possible points of intersection between psychoanalysis and other domains, including questions of race, biology, and evolutionary theory. By stressing the question of affect, the book shows how Lacan's position cannot be reduced to the structuralist models he nevertheless draws upon, and thus how the problem of the body may be understood as a formation that marks the limits of language. Exploring the anthropological category of "race" within a broadly evolutionary perspective, it shows how Lacan's elaboration of the "imaginary" and the "symbolic" might allow us to explain human physiological diversity without reducing it to a cultural or linguistic construction or allowing "race" to remain as a traditional biological category. Here again the questions of history and temporality are paramount, and open the possibility for a genuine dialogue between psychoanalysis and biology. Finally, the book engages literary texts. Antigone, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Hamlet, and even Wordsworth become the muses who oblige psychoanalysis and philosophy to listen once again to the provocations of poetry, which always disrupts our familiar notions of time and memory, of history and bodily or affective experience, and of subjectivity itself.

Lost in TransNation: Tokyo and the urban imaginary in the era of globalization

Abstract: The 2003 film Lost in Translation has attracted both acclaim and critique concerning its representation of the urban imaginary of Tokyo. Examining both the film representation and the critical responses to the imaginary, this paper discusses how they illuminate some of the emerging issues that Tokyo and Japan face in the era of globalization, such as the loss of the idiosyncratic status of non‐Western modernity that Japan has long enjoyed; post‐(self)Orientalist cultural othering; and the transnational alliance of media and cultural industries in a global cultural economy of branding the nation through media and consumer cultures, all at the expense of the issue of intensifying migration and multicultural situations in the urban space. It will be suggested that both the film and Japanese critiques of the film are lost in the actuality of Tokyo (indeed, of Japan) and its populace, which is being radically transformed by intensifying transnational flows of people, capital, and media imagery.

'A local habitation and a name A Kristevan reading of human growth in religion, with a reference to John and Charles Wesley'

Abstract: This study is concerned with the concept of human growth and change: it juxtaposes processes of growth and change in psychoanalytic therapy and those in a religious context. In both situations the relationship between growth and development and the idea of becoming 'good' is considered. Kleinian, Post-Kleinian and particularly Kristevan theory is used to elucidate facilitators of change in psychoanalytic therapy and in the context of Christian faith. The emphases in the theory used here differ from those of more traditional developmental theorists in the study of religion, which rely heavily on ego-psychology and self-psychology, and focus on the autonomous ego and the degree of maturity of forms of religion. By contrast, the emphases here are on the split self, on unconscious drives, phantasies and affects, and on the non-cognitive apprehension of truth. Through an examination of the lives of John and Charles Wesley, the thesis examines the possibility of growth occurring in the context of so-called 'immature’ forms of religion, the means by which this might occur, and the extent to which change is governed by an individual's mental structure and psychological defences. The Kristevan reading allows a less cognitive, 'ego-driven' study of the growth to 'goodness' than does that of the developmental theorists. It thus questions the validity of traditional classifications of forms of religion. It elicits differences between the historical subjects, which demonstrate the importance of personality factors in facilitating or hindering growth. Finally, it enables an exploration of Charles Wesley’s hymns which reveals evidence of erotic and imaginary elements, and the possibility of triadic openness in what some would see as an 'immature' form of belief. This examination also questions Kristeva's own assertion that religious symbolism cannot adequately 'sublimate' the 'abject'.

Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present

Abstract: * Acknowledgments * Introduction * Chapter One: Edenic and Cannibal Encounters * Chapter Two: Paradise (Re)Gained: Dutch Representations of Brazil and Nativist Imaginary * Chapter Three: Regal Brazil * Chapter Four: The Foundations of a National Literary Imaginary * Chapter Five: Modernist Brazil * Chapter Six: Good Neighbor Brazil * Chapter Seven: From Revolutionary to Dystopian Brazil on Screen * Epilogue: Land of the Future * Notes * Bibliography * Index

Anshen Liming or the Religious Dimension of Confucianism

Abstract: There is no doubt that the signs of "Confucian revival" in China have been manifold since the beginning of this century; less clear, however, is the actual significance of contemporary aspirations toward reactivating Confucianism's religious dimension. Given the abolition of the imperial cult of Heaven, the transformation of the traditional academies into modern institutions of learning, the reduction of ancestor worship, and the refashioning of Temples of Culture (wenmiao) into tourist destinations, one can wonder to what extent Confucianism-inspired religiosity might be today more imaginary than real. Could it not be said that contemporary discourses rooted in Confucianism have less to do with the present than with the past or the future, both in terms of commemorating ancient rituals and of dreaming up utopian schemes for their possible restoration? In fact, the modern perspectives claiming such a prestigious past can only be properly understood within the context of a turbulent history that has seen the internal transformation of society and Western influences interact and alter the overall religious landscape. Nevertheless, despite a century's worth of massive destruction, there is still room for the recomposition currently taking place in full view, a process that reveals, most notably, the problematic nature of applying the modern Western concept of "religion" to the Chinese cultural context.(1)The question now is how we can identify, within the current upheavals in Chinese society, phenomena that legitimately attest to a renewal of "religious" Confucianism. The fieldwork conducted in conjunction with this study can provide only an imperfect response to this question. In an environment still profoundly marked by state policy concerning religion, it is best to momentarily suspend use of the familiar categories of the sociology of religion and pay closer empirical attention to a variety of discourses and practices that are ambiguous by virtue of their multiple meanings and the rapid societal changes affecting them.As an example of this new situation, consider the symptomatic proliferation of the multivocal term xin ("trust"). This value denotes a variety of meanings ranging from "trust" to "belief," and its fading or absence in social intercourse is commonly lamented today.For example, a worker who left his home in Hubei to work in one of the new industrial loci along the Pearl River Delta decides one day to quit his job with a state-run shoe manufacturer in Dongguan. He opts to take a job in a restaurant run by a young woman who has embraced Confucian ideals. Through study of Confucius's Analects every morning, both on his own and in groups, he finds a source of daily fulfilment.The working conditions were hard in that factory, " he explains, "but the problem wasn't material; in fact, I made more money there. But at that factory all people thought about was money, there was no trust (xin). I'm much happier here...{2)At the other end of the social scale, a Guangdong-based entrepreneur who is equally committed to the notion of a Confucian renewal also brings up the need for trust, both within his business, where employees are encouraged to take the teachings of the classics to heart, and within the larger social and economic environment.(3)In noting the various contexts in which this term comes up, it would be possible to outline a veritable "general economy" of xin that draws its effectiveness from the resources of traditional Chinese culture and the imperatives of the new capitalist society. Thus, one could highlight three possible realms for this collective virtue: the dimension of "trust" expressed in social interactions; the dimension of "credit" praised in economic relations; and the dimension of "creed" that permeates religious relations in general.

Qual é o lugar do aluno com deficiência? O imaginário coletivo de professores sobre a inclusão escolar

Abstract: This study aimed to make a psychoanalytic investigation of the collective imaginary of Higher Education Professors regarding school inclusion. A group interview was carried out with 12 faculty members of Language and Pedagogy Programs for the collective imaginary approach. For that, the Thematic Story-Drawing Procedure was used as mediator-dialogical resource. Each professor individually produced drawings and stories on the theme "inclusion student". Through this clinical material, analyzed through the psychoanalytic method, four unconscious psychological fields were collected: "his mother's boy", "(un)capacities", "where's Wally?" and "the pain and the pleasure". In this set, such fields indicated that school inclusion is experienced with anxiety by professors, whose collective imaginary conceives that the student with a deficiency must be cared for by his(er) mother. Thus, it is understood that school inclusion demands, in addition to technical information, space to care for the emotional aspect of these professionals.

Mapping the Imaginary—Maps in Fantasy Role-Playing Games

Abstract: This paper deals with cartographic representations as means of communicating the imaginary using maps in fantasy role-playing games as an example. Drawing on SCHUTZian accounts of intersubjectivity and communication we understand maps as one of many strategies to deal with the problem of "medium transcendencies" posed by communicating with others. The methodology of "sociological hermeneutics" (SOEFFNER) is introduced as means of approaching maps and the interactions they are involved in. In our analyses of maps used in role-playing games we can then show that maps are not only a means of locating oneself but also a means of actively creating a meaningful place in which we are entangled. Thus, maps help to form a sense of belonging in (imaginary) territories which are only given to us in mediated form.

Modernity, Globality, Sexuality, and the City: A Reading of Indian Cinema

Abstract: This essay examines the impact of modernities and globalities on cities and sexualities in postcolonial India, arguing that it has taken another monumental movement since colonization—globalization— for us to come to terms with our own modernities. The essay argues that the cinematic representation of our cities—as well as of our ambiguous, multiplicitous sexualities—mark these tumultuous changes in our sociopolitical fabric. The city has occupied an ambivalent position in the Indian nationalist imaginary throughout the process of nation-building. It often occupies a confrontational as well as contemplative space signifying modernity and its concurrent promise, as well as ills relative to the ‘traditional’ ethics of a very old culture, even while representing ‘progress’ and ‘development’. Such progress, seen as necessary but demeaning, is perceived as a moral degeneracy of the nation easily analogous with female sexual transgression/ promiscuity with the nation personified as woman. Yet the same signifier simultaneously reveals a metamorphosed autonomy of the female Indian self. Non-normative female behaviour—particularly sexual— has always constituted a liminal space, a site both of empowerment through transgression and containment through regulation. The newly freed urban space thus assumes the metonymic equivalent of available sexual freedom for women, its powers, and its dangers. This essay locates Satyajit Ray’s cinematic oeuvre as central to illustrating this ongoing tension among modernity, globality, sexuality, and the city in India, and reads his films Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963) and Charulata (The Lonely Housewife, 1964) as signifiers of the liminal spaces they propose to explore.

Education Beyond Education: Self and the Imaginary in Maxine Greene’s Philosophy

Abstract: Developing a theme in dialogue with Maxine Greene's philosophy, this book introduces the reader to what animates Greene's passionate work: the self and the imaginary. It illuminates how Greene empowers us all as learners of the possible, by identifying learning with the power of the imagination. Greene's work promises hope beyond the impasse that often occurs when learning is reified by educational systems. 'Education Beyond Education' illustrates how Greene redefines the notion of the imaginary - and with it, that of the imagination - as that which expands the possibilities of learning beyond the boundaries by which education is often narrowly defined and practiced. Tracing Greene's key arguments, 'Education Beyond Education' offers a strikingly original and empowering way to see and re-position education beyond its customary limits.

Dancing Amidst the Flames: Imagination and Self-Organization in a Minor Key

Abstract: Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari's (1986) formulation of the concept of a `minor literature' and Nick Thoburn's extension of this into a `minor politics' (2003a) this paper examines the relation between the workings of the imagination and forms of self-organization found within anticapitalist organizing of the Industrial Workers of the World and related movements. This paper explores the modulations of the social imaginary found within these particular examples as indicative of a more general process of minor composition. Rather than affirming an already existing and known subjective position (of the people, the workers), it will be argued that rather such campaigns have playfully and strategically redirected and appropriated the social energies found within pop culture to articulate their demands.

The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary

Abstract: The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary, by Erin Graff Zivin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 222 pp. $21.95. Erin Graff Zivin's Tfce Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary explores representations of Jewish presence in the region in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American literature. The book does not present itself as a study of Jewish experience and identity, but is instead an investigation of how literary representations of "Jewishness" bear witness to conflicts that accompany the historical transformation of Latin American societies during the previous two centuries. The key distinction between representations authored by Jewish writers on the one hand, and literary portraits of "Jewishness" by authors who do not necessarily meet any definition of Jewishness (and who in some cases apparently had very limited first-hand experience of "real Jews"), establishes a productive tension. Graff Zivin acknowledges that cultural representations of "Jewishness" have frequently coincided with - at times helping to conceal - real experiences of violence and discrimination against Jewish communities. At the same rime, she insists on the distinction between "Jewish" and "Jewishness" in order to underscore the crucial role played by representation (and thus fabrication, distortion, and figuration) in the unfolding of "real experience." "Jewishness" describes a rhetorical function of naming "differences" that have not been fully assimilated into dominant national and regional narratives of belonging in Latin America. Graff Zivin argues that these literary representations have the potential to secure prevailing hegemonic configurations (by providing negative examples of what the nation must overcome or repress) or to destabilize these operations (by preserving or reintroducing the thought of a remainder that has yet to be assimilated into dialectics of self and other, familiar and stranger, and so on). The Wandering Signifier contains an introduction, three central chapters and a conclusion. Following the initial chapter, which clarifies the concept of "Jewishness," the central chapters are organized around three concepts associated with popular views of Judaism. The first concept is diagnosis, or "Jewishness" as constructed by nineteenth-century medico -scientific (positivist and social Darwinist) discourse. In its most extreme manifestation, "Jewishness" is equated with a biopolitical "pathology" that infects the nation while threatening to undermine key philosophical, political, and cultural distinctions between inside and outside, friend and enemy, citizen and foreigner. Graff Zivin examines the association of Jewish life with social decadence and biological disease in canonical and lesser known nineteenth-century Latin American novels by Jorge Isaacs (Maria, 1867), Julian Martel (La boba, 1891), Ruben Dario (Los raros, 1896), Jose Ingenieros (Al margen de la ciencia, 1908) and Jose Asuncion Silva (De sobremesa, 1925). The chapter concludes with two contemporary Hispanic Jewish women writers, Luisa Futoranksy (De pe apa, 1986) and Margo Glantz ("Zapatos," 1991), who submit this tradition to an active re-reading by proposing new, less derisive juxtapositions of Jewishness with disease and deformity, while also deviating from traditional ways of affirmingjewish belonging. The second concept, transaction, exploits popular associations of Jewishness with money and prostitution. Graff Zivin reminds us that in medieval Europe it was Jews who were relegated to the profession of money-lending while also being inflicted with the social stigmas associated with this vocation (the Jew as greedy, as hoarder, as conspiratorial manipulator of national and international finance). As literary topoi, however, both money lending and prostitution open up new spaces in nienteenth- and twentieth-century novels for reflecting on social interaction as perhaps the two forms of modern sociality par excellence: sex and commodity exchange. …

Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing

Abstract: An attempt to understand the nature of the transcendental and the limits of philosophy and non-philosophy through the works of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.

Melancholy Jouissance and the Study of Kabbalah: A Review Essay of Elliot R. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau

Abstract: These “kabbalistic musings on time, truth, and death” originated as the Taubman Lectures delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001. Wolfson summarizes them in his preface to Alef, Mem, Tau (henceforth AMT ): “The goal of my lectures was to illumine the nexus of time, truth, and death elicited from the symbolic imaginary of the Jewish esoteric tradition known by both practitioners and scholars as kabbalah” (xi). Without attempting further to isolate an “argument,” I can, at least, sketch for the potential reader some salient characteristics of these lectures.

Whiting Up and Blacking Out: White Privilege, Race, and "White Chicks"

Abstract: Hollywood spreads the fictions of whiteness around the world.--Hernan Vera and Andrew M. Gordon As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people.--Richard Dyer Introduction In this paper, using insights from critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, we argue that the movie White Chicks, while certainly a comedy, takes seriously the critical capacity of the black gaze to tease out the subtleties of whiteness. We argue that White Chicks, directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans and written by Keenen Ivory Wayans, Shawn Wayans, and Marlon Wayans (the latter two playing the main characters) has the power to produce "the shock of being seen" (Sartre 115). On this score, the Wayans brothers resist the hegemony of the white gaze through filmic agency. Not only through enacting and performing whiteness, but through the mimicry of predominant racist images of the black body, the Wayans brothers are able to create an effective space of opposition and critique. Even the tide of the film, White Chicks, engages in a process of nomination that frames and clearly delineates its theme of interrogation. Due to space limitations, the themes that we explore constitute only a select few of the many important themes generated within this filmic text. One underlying premise that informs our scholarship in this paper is that White Chicks constitutes an important popular cultural site that speaks to complex silent assumptions that inform the American imaginary around issues of race. While we are critical of the class and essentialist presuppositions that inform the expression "urban black behavior," it is our position that the Wayans brothers enact, and indeed exaggerate various stereotypical forms of black behavior in order to interrogate the white imaginary. This does not mean, however, that the Wayans brothers buy into a thin, non-complicated understanding of "blackness." In fact, the Wayans brothers complicate the stereotypes precisely through their filmic exaggerations. Such exaggerations function as a subtext that speaks to the Wayans brothers' sense of self-reflexivity regarding white myths vis-a-vis the black body. And while the white imaginary is no doubt inflected by class and other nonracial registers, our characterization of whiteness as it operates in the film as a signifier of power and privilege is one that captures various social ontological manifestations of whiteness across nonracial variables. Naming Whiteness Under the influence of European travelogues and colonial films, white philosophers, anthropologists, ethnographers, and fiction writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the West came to understand nonwhites as inferior Others. More specifically, the construction of the concept of race functioned epistemologically and ontologically as a prism through which the Other was constructed and rendered subhuman. The Other was deemed inferior in virtually every way--intellectually, morally, and culturally. The Other was constructed as savage, uncivilized, barbaric, evil, lustful, different and deviant in comparison to whites. Whiteness, on this score, served as a metanarrative in terms of which nonwhites functioned as "things" to be exploited and used in the service of white people. "In the white mind, racial others do not exist on their own terms but only as 'self-objects' bound up with the white self" (Vera and Gordon 3). Winthrop Jordan points out that the Great Chain of Being or scala naturae became the ordering hierarchical structure in an age when the West was obsessed with scientific discovery and exploration and "served as a powerful means of organizing the facts of the natural world" (101). Nonwhite bodies constituted part of the natural world; they were constructed as part of the chaotic and exotic natural landscape in need of being ordered, properly identified and categorized, and subdued by those (whites) who thought of themselves as the very expression of a teleological order that privileged whiteness as the quintessence of beauty, intelligence, and cultural and historical progress. …