Trauma and ineloquence

The article is an attempt to interrogate the idea of anti‐capitalist politics in the light Rosa Luxemberg's notion of radical autonomism. My argument is that Luxemberg's hesitation before the Leninist demand for the strategic appropriation of political difference, gestures towards an idea of “the untimely” which is revived in the work of Naomi Klein and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The essence of this idea is that the media‐techno‐scientific organization of capitalism has given rise to unexpected forms of resistance and communication, and that these provide the basis of a new anti‐capitalist politics. In the concluding section of the paper I will present the difference between Klein and Hardt and Negri's versions of anti‐capitalism through a reading of Derrida's Spectres of Marx. I will suggest that if we take the “untimeliness of the untimely” seriously, then it is Klein's gesture of welcome to the different forms of political activism that arise from the global organization of capital, which is closer to the spirit of Luxemberg's anti‐Leninism.     

Introduction to Roundtable on Global Woman

For this roundtable discussion of Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild's anthology, Global Woman, the editors of SGS asked five psychoanalytic thinkers to comment on the collection. That highly important volume has as its theme the global transfer from the Third World to the First World of female labor forces that work in the sex trade or become mail-order brides, maids, nannies, and other kinds of caretakers. Ehrenreich and Hochschild then respond to the psychoanalytic essays. The introduction discusses some of the themes raised both in the book and in the responses. It highlights some of the places where a psychoanalytic and a sociological view complement each other and places where they might clash. The roundtable raises two important questions: what can psychoanalysis contribute to understanding the intrapsychic and interpersonal dislocations wrought by globalization; and what is globalization's effect on the practice of psychoanalysis?     

Patriarchy and incest in William Faulkner's 'Absalom! Absalom!' and Juan Rulfo's 'Pedro Páramo'

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of patriarchy and incest in the work of William Faulkner and Juan Rulfo. Focusing primarily on Absalom! Absalom! and Pedro Páramo, I argue that Rulfo adopts and, at the same time, interrogates Faulkner's patriarchal model of the family: the incestuous relationships that characterize Absalom! Absalom! reappear, under different disguises, in the Mexican writer's novel. My analysis also suggests that both Faulkner and Rulfo were intrigued by the symbolic implications of incest, and exploited these implications in order to talk about the collapse of the patriarchal and cultural order in the post-Civil War South and early 20th century Mexico respectively. The conclusion maintains that, despite Rulfo's reluctance to acknowledge Faulkner's impact on his artistic consciousness, the intertextual dialogue between the two writers should be read both as a form of incest, and as a quest for a new social structure.     

Sweeping the world clean of capitalism: Samir Amin,Abdullah Ocalan and the world of autonomous regions

ABSTRACT

This paper will attempt to rethink Samir Amin's concept of delinking in terms of selective delinking and selective engagement. The notion of delinking is perhaps Samir Amin's most distinctive contribution to alternative development, as well as to a vision of a new kind of politics. Inspired by the ideas of Abdullah Ocalan, this talk will focus on stateless (con)federalism seen as an active dialectical engagement with the modern capitalist world-system, an active process of (dis)engagement capable of modifying the conditions of capitalist world-economy.     

Mirrors and Metarealists: The Poetry of Oĺga Sedakova and Ivan Zhdanov

Abstract

My paper analyses the third volume of Gustav Shpet's Aesthetic Fragments with special regard to his quasi-mathematical formula allegedly expressing 'the aesthetic reception of the word' in a literary work that caps this text. The obviously unserious character of the algorithm proffered by Shpet raises the question of his intentions. The paper argues that this is a case of self-parody, of laughter that Samuel Beckett termed risus purus through which the Russian thinker reacted to the overall ambiguity of the socio-political situation in early 1922 when he wrote his essay.     

Global boundary work tactics: managing work and family transitions in a 24–7 global context

ABSTRACT

This study addresses how today’s global managers navigate their work and family transitions through employing various boundary work tactics in a global context. Interviews with 25 global travelers or international business travelers in dual-career families uncovered how they handle global workflows and protect family time when working domestically or abroad. Patterns emerged across a typology of temporal, communicative, behavioral and physical boundary work tactics. A key contribution is that workplace flexibility in addition to technology allows global managers to maintain connectivity beyond spatial or temporal boundaries. Moreover, technology was perceived as an integral tool by global managers, with few cases of tensions reported from a blurring of boundaries. The research contributes to the nascent literature on work-life balance among global managers. It also provides evidence of how mobile and telepresence technologies are being used in performing global work. Companies are encouraged to foster flexibility among their global managers around viewing time and using communication techniques and technology to manage role transitions. Results suggest that global work approached in this manner can be sustainable as well as beneficial to the individual, his/her family, and the organization.     

Zinovy Zinik's Narratives of Cultural Dislocation

Abstract

The study examines Zinik's use of translation, theatre and misreading as metaphors for the act of border crossing in his novels and short stories. Through close readings of Zinik's novels The Lord and the Gamekeeper, The Mushroom Picker and The Russian Service, it is demonstrated that Zinik integrates these themes into his work with intent to expose novelistic conventions, confuse the boundary between art and life, and blur the roles of the author, reader and literary protagonist. Zinik's invitations to the reader to enter the worlds of his texts and experience cultural dislocation firsthand are continued in his recent short stories, which reflect the social changes and fluid cultural boundaries associated with globalisation. It is argued that, at the same time, Zinik's work reveals the limitations of conventional binary oppositions such as actor/audience and the utopian claims behind translation, interpretation and globalisation. Thus, it asserts the need to affirm new cultural symbols and practices through which individuals will shape transcultural identities as visions of a homogeneous global culture become more prevalent.     

Parting words: Trauma,silence and survival

Abstract

This article examines an enigma at the heart of Freud's work on trauma: the surprising emergence, from within the theory of the death drive, of the drive to life, a form of survival that both witnesses and turns away from the trauma in which it originates. I analyse in particular the striking juxtaposition, in Freud's founding work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of his two primary examples of trauma: the repetitive nightmares of battle suffered by the soldiers of World War I, and the game of the child, faced with the loss of its mother, who plays fort and da (there and here) with his spool. My own understanding of Freud's insight did not emerge, however, simply through a reading of his text but began, in fact, in my encounter with a real child in Atlanta, a child whose best friend was murdered in the street and who is interviewed by the friend's mother. I thus read together the language of the nightmare and the language of the child in Freud's text, and then attempt to understand how Freud's text and the language of the real child shed light upon each other.     

'War Is Not a Map': Irish America,Transnationalism, and Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls

Abstract

This essay argues for a transnational reading of Irish novelist Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls (2007). It contends that O'Connor's revisiting of the period of the American Civil War and its aftermath begs all sorts of questions regarding Ireland and Irish America's historical and contemporary transnational intercessions and responsibilities. As Ireland underwent a period of unparalleled economic prosperity beginning in the mid-1990s, which most commentators attribute to successive Irish governments' commitment to globalization, it began to face new and pressing challenges in relation to its involvement with the rest of the world, particularly with regard to its stance on neutrality and recent immigrants to Ireland. I conclude that Redemption Falls reveals the complexity of Irish and Irish Americans' relationship to notions of whiteness and (racial) innocence and challenges readers to consider how Ireland will conduct its future relations with the global community both within and beyond its borders.     

Figures of history,foundations of law: Acéphale,Angelus Novus,and the Katechon

In this paper, I offer the reader a survey of three figures of history, namely, Bataille's Acéphale, Benjamin's Angelus Novus, and Schmitt's Katechon. My approach will not be to provide an exhaustive exegetical account. Instead I focus on the primary texts and provide the reader with comparative sketches. This is important because each of these figures respond to the crisis of authority in the 1930s. Each of them uses the concept of the moment or now as a way of questioning law, and legitimate authority. My aim is to explore the similarities and differences that relate them.     

On Being Bad and Good: My Brilliant Friend Muriel Dimen

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on Muriel Dimen’s work on ambivalence as an important factor in female identity formation through a parallel with Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend novels.     

Marxist and Neo-Marxist Interpretations of Ethnicity

Abstract

This paper reviews both the contributions and inadequacies of Marxist and neo-Marxist efforts to account for the persistence of ethnicity in modern societies. The former approach relegates ethnic group relations and consciousness in capitalist society either to a vestigial survival of pre-capitalist class relations or as a case of false consciousness. It treats ethnicity as a necessarily dependent variable, and predicts that ethnicity eventually will disappear. Recognizing the continuing significance of ethnic forces in modern capitalist societies, neo-Marxists concerned with uneven development at both an external global and an intra-societal level offer explanations as to how structures of ethnic inequality are functional for capitalist accumulation. Critiques of such theories are offered. The essay concludes by evaluating the limitations and prospects of a Marxist analysis of ethnicity.     

The rational kernel within Samir Amin’s mythological shell: the idea of a democratic and pluralist world political party

ABSTRACT

Amin’s Leninist-Maoist vision is unlikely to be persuasive to twenty-first century citizens. Nonetheless, there is a rational kernel in Amin’s call for a new worldwide political organization. Some structures, mechanisms and tendencies of the capitalist world economy are relatively enduring and some patterns recurrent, although the world economy is also fluid, constantly changing and evolving. Although waves of globalization have radically transformed human societies and their economic activities during the past 500 years also in many positive ways, the expansion of the international society and world economy has often been characterized by violence, imperial subjection and colonial expropriation and exclusion. There is a rational kernel also within Amin’s analysis of the current world-political situation. Command over space and time by investors and megacorporations is power. Emancipation aims at freedom from domination. The decline of the World Social Forum indicates that progressive politics must move ‘beyond the concept of a discussion forum’. My argument is that emancipation from unnecessary, unneeded and unwanted sources of determination requires global transformative agency and planetary visions about alternatives.     

New Directions in Globalization Indices

Abstract

This paper discusses the measurement of globalization with a view to advancing the construction of globalization indices. It critically analyzes the types of indices that can contribute to knowledge and policy on globalization. Three issues are particularly highlighted: (a) the focus of measurement (i.e. on activities or policies); (b) the dimensions of measurement (i.e. cultural, ecological, economic, political, and/or social); and (c) the units of measurement (i.e. local, national, regional, and/or global). This paper argues that a workable forward strategy should not seek to identify the single best composite globalization index, but rather should work in an interdisciplinary mode towards a set of complementary globalization indices. These quantitative analyses can then be productively blended with qualitative approaches in a fuller assessment of globalization's extent and impact.     

'Traveling Barbies' and rolling blackouts Images of mobility in Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding

Abstract

This article proposes to read Mira Nair's film Monsoon Wedding through a critical framework provided by transnational anthropology. Such a framework suggests that approaches celebrating transnational mobility must be balanced against nationally specific forms of constraint. It is argued that Monsoon Wedding bears out precisely such a balance. Nair's film suggests that the mobility of human lives may not be quite as unfettered as that of cultural commodities. Moreover, the filmic narrative insists on a differentiation within the Indian diasporic community. Similarly, some theorists of transnationalism have cautioned that the concept of a 'diasporic community' may serve to obfuscate class distinctions. At the same time, Nair's film is read in conjunction with theories of commodity circulation. Through the image of the 'traveling Barbie', this article explores the ways in which US cultural commodities may be indigenized, while also suggesting that Indians at 'home' may hardly benefit from such indigenization. Rather, Non-Resident Indians may travel from the US to India to buy a token of their own 'Americanness' in Delhi.     

‘ … half-sick of shadows’: figure and ground in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s imagination of the subaltern

ABSTRACT

This essay moves the category of the subaltern out of the exclusive domain of colonial historiography and resituates it in the context of contemporaneity. Taking my cue from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s insistence on the dream of postcoloniality in the realm of the global, I examine two ‘empirical anomalies’ that redefine subaltern insurgency, cultivate democratic reflexes, and defeat the expectations of their moment and milieu. Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial theory and the specter of capital serves as a framing device to elicit the still-persuasive dimensions of Spivak’s landmark essay for our historical moment. While I remain unpersuaded by both his premises and his conclusions, his argument does throw Spivak’s interventions in the project of Subaltern Studies into relief. My method throughout, in the manner of Spivak and Paul de Man, is one of interruption and undoing; my aim is to delineate what Spivak describes as ‘the resistance fitting our time’.     

Things Temporal Exposé, Passages from Benjamin

Nineteenth-century Paris was for Walter Benjamin the site of a singular historical event, the ur-form of bourgeois modernity. It was a “hellish” time disastrously bent on repeating itself and yet a threshold of great promise and possibility. By focusing on Benjamin's 1935 and 1939 Exposés for The Arcades Project, my paper develops the keywords of the Exposés (Arcades, Fashion, etc.), and elaborates ways in which these objects articulate such different temporal possibilities. For example, “fashion” enacts an eternally recurrent and capital time, whereas “arcades” represent wish images of the past that might be actualized into utopian promises of the future. My argument develops Benjamin's “objective” framing of temporality. In the Exposés specific and phenomenal things communicate temporalities specific to modernity. Objects not only communicate time but also enable the temporal experience of the modern subject. This reading challenges idealist interpretations of temporality grounded within an interiorizing subject. I do not argue that Benjamin privileges an objective temporal horizon “over” the subject but rather that he resituates dialectical possibilities of temporality in the engagement between subjects and commonplace objects.     

'Europe' within and without Narratives of American cultural belonging in and through My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)

Abstract

This article examines My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), a Hollywood romantic comedy in which Greek-Americanness features for the first time. Three tropes are debated that are linked to American social and national self-narration: the first is concerned with the assertion of Greek difference within American identity. The second examines the WASP cultural norm which is simultaneously valorized and contested. The third trope, which comprises a strategy of idealization of American identity, purifies American self-narration of its contestable aspects and represses cultural insecurities. The article draws mainly on American responses to the film, in order to understand how cinematic narratives are debated by the audience. It will be argued that the film reproduces a dilemma central to American cultural self-narration. This dilemma is concerned with American self-recognition as 'pure', European, ethnic and multiform, all at the same time.