160 research outputs found
Touching Freud's dog: H.D.'s tactile poetics
No full text"Do not touch me", Frau Emmy warns Freud in 1889. "Do not touch", Freud echoes in 1933. This time, he is referring to his pet chow, Yofi, warning H.D. that "she snaps - she is very difficult with strangers". Examining the prohibition in light of work by Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, this article charts the withdrawal that always interrupts touch. Despite Freud's taboo, however, H.D.'s writing seeks to make contact in strange and unnerving ways. Developing Julia Kristeva's account of the semiotic, this paper proposes a literature of touch. Reading H.D.'s poems, alongside Tribute to Freud, and her letters, the author demonstrates that H.D.'s poetics are always haunted by the very (im)possibility of contact
Identification of BRCA1/2 p.Ser1613Gly, p.Pro871Leu, p.Lys1183Arg, p.Glu1038Gly, p.Ser1140Gly, p.Ala2466Val, p.His2440Arg variants in women under 45 years old with breast nodules suspected of having breast cancer in Burkina Faso
No full textBreast cancer is the top cause of cancer mortality among women in the world and the second in Africa. The aims of this study were to: i) identify women with breast nodules suspected of having breast cancer ii) sequence the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes and iii) screen mutations. From 2015 to 2016, 112 women aged from 35 to 44 years, who had come for consultation in the gynecology/obstetrics and the oncology department of the University Hospital Yalgado Ouedraogo, voluntarily agreed to participate to this study. Whole blood was collected from those with mammary nodules. The genomic DNA was extracted using Qiagen kit. FAST KAPA was used for genomic DNA amplification and the purified PCR products were analyzed by direct sequencing using Big Dye v1.1 and ABI 3730 automated sequencer. Nucleotides substitutions were determined. We identified BRCA1 SNPs rs1799966, rs799917, rs16942, rs16941, rs2227945, and BRCA2 SNPs rs169547, rs4986860. These identified variants are found mostly in cases of benign tumors of breast or ovarian cancer with familial history of breast cancer. This study in Burkina-Faso, is the basis for improved and more specific genetic testing, and suggests that additional genes contributing to an increased risk of breast cancer should be analyzed
Relationality, polemics, incommensurability: thinking the political at the intersections of the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault
No full textPhDThis thesis is focused on the intersections of ontology and politics in the work of Michel
Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In particular it concerns the ways in which these two thinkers
offer accounts of (ethical, social, political) relations which exceed a traditional dichotomy
between transcendentalism and empiricism. Both Derrida and Foucault show universal
foundations to originate in an anterior play of differences 'between' the transcendental and
empirical. However, as this thesis shows, each thinks this anterior 'medium' of relations in
radically incommensurable ways: as differance or aporia in Derrida and as power and
problematization in Foucault. As such, each necessarily views the other as failing to account
for the ‘true medium’ of relationality and so of its violent effacement and disavowal. This
incommensurability, it is argued, results in a polemic between them which is explicit in their
competing accounts of Descartes’ Meditations and implicit throughout all of their work. This
thesis traces the polemic between Derrida and Foucault across their accounts of subjectivity,
ethics and politics. It is argued that in their engagements with each of these fields they
employ parallel politicizing strategies which are nevertheless wholly exclusive of one another.
The incommensurability between Derrida and Foucault reflects a broader problematic
which any political thought affirming its own finitude cannot explicitly recognize. Postfoundational
accounts of relationality, it is claimed, violently exclude competing
philosophical strategies without the capacity of accounting for this exclusion
When the pen becomes a sword: Race and class consciousness in the literature of the West Indian writers Jacques Roumain, Etienne Lero, Gilbert Gratian, 1993
No full textThis thesis considers the influence of three West Indian writers who contributed to the development of Negritude as a literary, social and political phenomenon. The author shows that the racial awareness central to the Negritude movement was strongly affected by the experiences in Haiti and Martinique in particular. The thesis is comprised of three chapters and a conclusion. The first examines the awakening of racial consciousness in Paris in the 1930s and 40s, placing those developments in literary and historical perspective. This chapter also serves as an introduction to the milieu of West Indian and black American writers who were aggressively active in deriving a literary response to racial oppression. The second and third chapters analyze the roles of individual writers. The second chapter probes the writings of Jacques Roumain. He made an impression with his Marxist analysis of the Haitian situation, pushed for an indigenous Haitian literature, and developed the peasant novel. By using excerpts from essays, poems, and his novel, Gouverneurs de la Rosee, the writer details the influence of this Haitian author on Negritude writers. The third chapter considers two lesserstudied writers, the Martinicans Etienne Lero and Gilbert Gratiant. Gratiant embraced the mixed cultural heritage of Martinique, while Lero fought for an African outlook in initiating Legitime Defense, and through other contributions. An exploration of a small sampling of their work will help to clarify the context of color and caste in Martinique. The conclusion summarizes the authors social critique of French civilization and shows that the experiences of the West Indian authors discussed in the thesis influenced the principal leaders of Negritude--Leopold Sedar Senghor, Leon Damas and Aime Cesaire--and that this can be seen in the conceptions the Negritude movement embraced
Gilbert Durand, science et expérience de l'imagination symbolique = Gilbert Durand, science and experience of symbolic imagination
No full textThe purpose of this article is to contribute to the continuing debate over the relevance of Gilbert Durand's thought, who devoted his dissertation to the structures of the imaginary, both mental and materialized in plastic or literary works. In the 1960s Durand sought to rationalize the imagination of the symbols and myths of humanity to find logic in them despite all cultural variations. Through the analysis of Durand's works such as Les Structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire (1960), L'Imagination symbolique (1964) and L'imaginaire (1994), the author explains how Durand's thought is inscribed in three different traditions : the theological-mystical tradition (i); the psychotherapeutic, Freudian and above all Jungian tradition (ii); and the philosophical tradition of hermeneutics (iii)
Derrida and postmodernity: At the end(s) of history
No full textThis thesis erects and defends the proposition that Jacques Derrida's readings of 'metaphysics in deconstruction' and his raising to theoretical consciousness of the 'differential matrix', have the capacity to inaugurate a 'brave new world' in this postmodern 'age of the aporia'. Beginning with an examination of Derrida's readings of Husserl and Saussure, it is argued that the radical historicity uncovered here qua an originary synthesis of language, time and the other, opens the possibility for greatly more democratising and emancipating self-creations and human solidarities to be thought. In terms of 'self-creations', and borrowing from the work of Elizabeth Deeds Errnarth, Chapter Two follows Derrida as modernity's sovereign subject and its 'History' are dis-placed by an absolutely affirmative postmodern subjectivity whose axiom might be 'I inherit, therefore, I am ... yes, yes ... ' Construed through his deconstructive reading of Kant, Derrida shows the way in which this postmodern subjectivity without alibi, makes of us all (like it or not, know it or not) resistance fighters, so many singularities existing in constant tension with all normalising/totalising tendencies (social, economic, techno-scientific, political, legal etc ... ) which profess to know the secret. Turning to co-extensive 'human solidarities', Chapter Three subsequently demonstrates the way in which Derrida's call for a 'New International', orientated through a 'new figure of Europe', enables us to imagine new polysemic communities (local, national, international) founded on the 'aporia of the demos', a 'foundation' that construes its hyper-relativity as a positive (ethico-political) condition of decision in terms of a radical responsibility (on an individual and communal level) for the moral/aesthetic decisions we make. It is thus that I will argue that Derrida's vision for a 'new world order' is born out of an aporetic condition which is both a risk and a chance of both the best - and the worst - happening; as someone who shares Derrida's desire for a fairer, freer, more peaceful world, one respectful of difference and otherness, I believe this to be a 'poker like gamble' well worth taking. Chapter Four offers a comparative analysis between the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, two theorists counter-signing differently many of the 'same' discourses/ traditions/cultures/languages, etc ... to which they are both heirs. The chapter examines their respective 'quasi-philosophies of the limit', together with their differing conceptions of the issues surrounding globalisation and universalisation, as well as Baudrillard' s elevation of America (as opposed to Europe) as the exemplary site of resistance against the dangers of totalisation in 'postmodem' societies. The central argument here, in line with my previous remarks, is that Derrida's thought arguably remains 'the best' way to navigate the postmodem condition and the challenges it produces. The originality of this thesis lies in two main areas, the first having to do with my presentation and conception of Derrida's oeuvre and the second having to do with the comparisons made in this study between Derrida and Ermarth and Derrida and Baudrillard. In terms of the former, I offer what I consider to be a unique, sustained, in-depth analysis of the 'development' (on a theoretical and practical level) of the thematics of 'radical historicity' and of 'post-historical man' - effectively the development of Derrida's quasi-philosophy of history- from his earliest works so that they can be seen to inform his later intervention(s) in what are conventionally understood as ethical and political matters; transforming this understanding in the process and, after the end of history's ends (upper case, lower case and the totalising 'history of meaning' per se), quite literally and radically changing the way we see what we call 'the world'. For while in the conventional literature Derrida's politics come late, I argue here that his indeed later political work is but an emphasis of constant political thematics acting as a leitmotif from beginning to end. Turning to the latter, in terms of the comparisons I make - first between Derrida and Ermarth in Chapter Two and more especially between Derrida and Baudrillard in Chapter Four - the claim to originality lies in the fact that there is no comparison of any note or depth in the literature between these thinkers; nothing that compares Derrida's 'affirmative postmodem subjectivity' and its 'inheritance' with Ermarth's 'rhythmic time' and 'muIti-level consciousness', and nothing comparing Derrida's corpus - specifically his optimistic emancipating and democratizing hopes for the future - with Baudrillard's more pessimistic conceptualization of 'simulation society' and the loss of our European universal values under the hegemonic, globalising movement of the 'American model'. The aim of these two comparisons is to support my claim that Derrida's historico-political position is the 'best' way of essaying the quasi-ground of an in(different) politics in such a way that it keeps the future open to what he calls a 'better world' to come, a world without ends
Writing and the rights of reality: usurpation and potentiality in Derrida, Plato, Nietzsche, and Beckett
No full textThe thesis critically evaluates Jacques Derrida's conferral of the rights of reality on writing, focussing on his theory of an arche-text in light of the speculative nature of this theory. The theory is initially considered in the context of Derrida's elucidation of the usurpatory status of writing within the Platonic and Nietzschean texts. This consideration reveals an admission of writing's usurpatory status by both writers while at the same time demonstrating their awareness of the intrinsically speculative nature of this view, the significance of writing lying in its ability to exteriorise the radically indeterminate status of consciousness m relation to reality rather than its ability to displace consciousness or reality The analyses, therefore, not only bring the Derridean hypothesis of a repressive or phonocentric metaphysical episteme into question but also exhibit the historical and philosophical role of potentiality in relation to writing, writing's ultimate significance lying in its capacity to exteriorise our existence as a mode of potentiality. Accordingly, in the second half of the thesis the Derridean theory of writing is countered with a specifically Aristotelian theory of the text as it is exhibited in the prose of Samuel Beckett, an author whose significance lies in his close alignment with Derridean theory within contemporary criticism. It is demonstrated that this identification has obviated an awareness of the significance of potentiality within the Beckettian text, his work consequently being appraised in the previously neglected context of Aristotelian metaphysics
Le dandysme et la mort à travers l'oeuvre de Julien Gracq :
No full textDandyism is approached as a figure of a cultural and decadent resistance to modern egalitarism. The aesthetic points illustrated by dandyism are confronted with the grand movement of social and historiographical thought of the 19th century. They translate in fact a recording of kantian criticism in the artistic manifestation of the second half of the century and the sentimental emergence of the absurd in advance on the beginning of the twentieth century. It is such by the skew of the interdisciplinary game that some large transitional figures (as Jacques Vaché) are approached, to show how they introduce the action of a new literary psyche into the century. Moreover, this new psyche manifests itself according to clearly identifiable psychic effects, because of the radicalisation that they operate of the relationaship with the body. These are the obsessional recurrences of dandyism and they organise themselves clearly around death, the dominant theme. Death offers itself as a privileged vector for psychocritical analysis, to study the modalities of the body representation, hypertrophied by the aesthetic of dandyism, and put them in relation with literary creation. The gracquian corpus signals itself right away by the line tied between an exaggerated literary dandyism - that we can observe through the posture of the author and his characters - and a game of morbid fascination. The thesis must surmont the difficulty of an opposition or a theoretical solution to philosophical approaches of death, of a phenomenology of the eye relationship with the body, demarcate and define the mechanism of literary regression, evaluate her stakes into creation, distinguish words, distinguish deaths, define the cathartic game put in action by the look on the face of the cadaver and by the look on the Gracq's dandy character...Le dandysme est abordé comme figure type d'une résistance culturelle, décadente, à l'égalitarisme moderne. Les points d'esthétique illustrés par le dandysme sont donc mis en confrontation avec les grands mouvements d'histoire de la pensée historiographique et sociale du XIXème siècle. Ils traduisent de fait graduellement un enregistrement du criticisme kantien dans les manifestations artistiques de la seconde moitié du XIXème siècle et l'émergence du sentiment de l'absurde à l'orée du XXème siècle. C'est donc par le biais d'un jeu interdisciplinaire que quelques grandes figures transitionnelles, comme celle de Jacques Vaché, sont abordées pour montrer comment elles introduisent insidieusement le ferment d'une psyché littéraire nouvelle dans le siècle. Par ailleurs, cette psyché nouvelle se manifeste selon des affects psychiques très nettement identifiables dans la radicalisation du rapport au corps qu'ils opèrent. Ce sont des récurrences obsessionnelles du dandysme et elles s'organisent nettement autour du thème dominant de la mort. La mort s'offre donc comme un vecteur d'analyse psychocritique privilégié pour étudier les modalités de la relation du corps hypertrophiées par l'esthétique du dandysme et les mettre en relation avec la création littéraire. Le corpus gracquien se signale d'emblée par le lien très fort noué entre un dandysme littéraire outré, dans la position de l'écrivain et celle de ses personnages, et un jeu de la fascination morbide. La thèse a dû surmonter la difficulté d'une opposition ou d'une solution théorique des approches philosophiques de la mort, d'une phénoménologie du rapport de l'i?l avec le corps, délimiter et définir les mécanismes de la régression littéraire, évaluer ses enjeux dans la création, distinguer les moi, les morts, définir le jeu cathartique mis en branle par le regard porté sur l'image du cadavre et par le regard porté sur le personnage dandy de Gracq..
The First Cut; the locus of decision at the limits of subjectivity
No full textThis project examines the concept of decision in philosophical writing, in particular the question of whether subjectivity can be said to constitute a ‘locus’ of decision. The writing of Søren Kierkegaard is the main focus of discussion. Giorgio Agamben, Michel Henry and Jacques Derrida also provide important contributions.
Although for Kierkegaard ‘all decisiveness is rooted in subjectivity’, subjective agency takes the form of an active surrendering to an external unknown authority (God). Kierkegaard uses the term ‘leap of faith’ to describe the moment of decision where subjective transformation occurs.
For Derrida, any decision requires an undecidable leap beyond all reasoning made in preparation for that decision. He extends a reading of faith beyond the theistic by suggesting that Kierkegaard’s unknowable God could also be another name for the ‘structure of subjectivity.’
Giorgio Agamben’s writing on the concept of human life situated at the threshold of categories (socio-political, philosophical, physiological and so on), helps to further the exploration of subjectivity as the ‘locus’ of decision. Michel Henry’s work on The Essence of Manifestation provides a focus for a discussion on the ‘radical subjectivity’ that Kierkegaard proposes as the fulcrum of decision.
The research project as a whole maintains a synergy between these philosophical concerns and the form of their explication. The thesis is made up of both written text and DVD documentation of live works. These instances of practice, whose form and mode of presentation were informed by a specific aspect of the research, are integrated into the thesis to constitute ‘chapters’. The practice can and does function independently in other contexts. However, what is presented in this research document constitutes the outcome of my practice-based PhD project and includes both the ‘theoretical’ and ‘practice’ elements.
Supervisors: Neil Cummings and Howard Caygil
Cutting'aesthetic teeth' : Flannery O'Connor's habit of art
No full textDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e ExpressãoEste trabalho foi sugerido pela afirmação de Flannery O'Connor que sua "dedicação estética" nasceu através do contato com Art and Scholasticism de Jacques Maritain. O propósito foi chegar a uma interpretação do sentido da frase. Uma investigação detalhada foi feita do conteúdo de Art and Scholasticism, posteriormente contrastada com os resultados de uma pesquisa feita em seus ensaios e suas cartas, o que revelou numerosos ecos de diversos trechos constando no texto de Maritain. Três pontos principais foram escolhidos como critérios na análise do hábito artístico de O'Connor: 1) a prática de arte implica uma luta; 2) a arte somente pode ser percebida pelos sentidos; e 3) a prática de arte exige do artista a dedicação indivisa à obra nascente. O estudo conclui que, para O'Connor, o brotar da dentição estética, através da leitura de Art and Scholasticism, significou que, ao perceber na análise da natureza da arte algo com que podia concordar, ela reconheceu tanto sua própria capacidade de tornar-se uma artista literária, quanto sua vontade de assumir a tarefa de desenvolver em sua pessoa o hábito de arte
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