Abject Research Articles

“Resiliency Humanitarianism”: Responsibilizing Refugees through Humanitarian Emergency Governance in the Camp

Scholarly interest in the camp has grown over recent years, inspired in part by Giorgio Agamben's (1995; Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life ) work. Scholarship in this area has built on Agamben's view of the camp as an abject space of exception and bare life but also, in reaction to this view, has theorized the camp as a political and social space which constitutes refugees and displaced persons as political subjects, active in demanding rights and social justice. Building on existing scholarship, this article draws attention to another important trend in the camp which has emerged alongside the growing activism of refugee populations, dissatisfied with their lack of rights and abject conditions. This is the trend of engaging refugees to become self-governing in the management of the camp, to think of the camp in terms of community development, with camp life providing the experiences through which refugees are to refashion themselves as resilient, entrepreneurial subjects. Our analysis examines this trend through the issue of humanitarian emergency governance of refugees and IDPs and within the context of reforms undertaken by the United Nations—specifically, through what we term “resiliency humanitarianism.” We use this term to suggest a particular rationale of care, camp coordination, and management which emerges within neoliberal government and which focuses on assisting refugees and IDPs to adapt to, and survive, crisis with the aim of responsibilizing them.

An Apocalyptic yet Abject “Jubilee” Narrative in George Robert Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee: Mobility, Restoration, and Materiality

An Apocalyptic yet Abject “Jubilee” Narrative in George Robert Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee: Mobility, Restoration, and Materiality

THE ABJECT HETEROTOPIA:LE CITTÀ INVISIBILIAND ‘JUNKSPACE’

This article explores and compares the spaces of abjection in Italo Calvino's Le citta invisibili and the ‘Junkspace’ of contemporary cities, as theorized by the architect Rem Koolhaas. Depicted as being simultaneously devastating and scatological as well as exhilarating and aesthetic, abject space is revealed to be paradoxical and disturbing, a formlessness that puts place and identity into suspense. Here, Foucault's notion of heterotopia serves as a perspective from which the nature of this abject space can be better understood. The characteristics of heterotopia – such as heterogeneity, disorientation, fragmentation – are reflected in both the fictional space of Le citta invisibili and the concretely lived space of Koolhaasian architecture. But in addition, the abject heterotopias in Calvino and Koolhaas rethink and challenge the Foucauldian heterotopia, for they break down Foucault's oppositions between heterotopia and utopia, offering greater critical potentiality and even utopian implications.

‘Humblewise’: Deference and Complaint in the Court of Requests

When servants, laborers, and apprentices sued their masters for back wages or mistreatment in the Court of Requests they took advantage of the court’s doctrine of equity. Since these plaintiffs often lacked the strict written proofs required by common law, or were bound by unfair written contracts, they badly needed an equitable jurisdiction where fairness, extenuating circumstances, and broad social mores could overrule the letter of the law. The formal tropes of their Complaints negotiate the tension between these two conceptions of justice and reveal how that tension relates to early seventeenth century economic culture, where customary ideas about patronage and hierarchical obligations coexisted with emerging notions of self-interest and contractual equality. In appealing to the court with older but still vibrant discourses of social justice and mutual obligation, plaintiffs modulated their Complaints with expressions of deference and helplessness. Their pleadings therefore take the sophisticated rhetorical form of self-assertion articulated as abject submission. The documents are highly mediated by lawyers and institutional constraints, but nevertheless reveal subordinates tactically using expressions of weakness to elicit pathos and use the ideology of paternalism against their masters.

The Repression of the Return: Tennyson’s In Memoriam and the Art of the Unheard Echo

The Repression of the Return: Tennyson’s In Memoriam and the Art of the Unheard Echo Kiera Allison (bio) Form and psychology share a longstanding relationship within Tennyson studies. This fact was notoriously exemplified by W. H. Auden, when he elided his formal appreciations (Tennyson “had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet”) into a psychological appraisal: “he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia that he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.”1 T. S. Eliot had gone the same route: “Tennyson is the great master of metric as well as of melancholia; I do not think any poet in English has ever had a finer ear for vowel sound, as well as a subtler feeling for some moods of anguish.”2 These men were likely (Auden most certainly) responding to Lyric LIV from In Memoriam: So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry. (ll. 17–20; emphasis added)3 Prosody does seem to reinforce a certain melancholic fixation. The terminal “cry” echoes the midline “crying” of the inner couplet. And that thrice-iterated “cry” extends a much older line of repeats—a lament that began with Hallam’s death in 1833 and persisted through all 133 lyrics and seventeen compositional years of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. It is possible that Hallam’s death re-invoked still earlier memories of morbidity and mortality: the passing of Tennyson’s father (1831), the madness of his brother Edward (institutionalized in 1833), the melancholic derangement of his brothers Charles and Septimus (Tennyson feared he was next in line), not to mention the terrors of Tennyson’s youth—his Aunt Bourne’s “violent” Calvinism or his father’s violent alcoholism.4 But W. H. Auden suspected something even deeper—some unwritten, unprocessed trauma packed into the infantine “cry” of Lyric LIV. “Emotions of early childhood are hard to express,” he writes, “because the original events associated with them are not remembered” [End Page 41] (p. xvi). Hallam’s death gave occasion and vent to these earlier shocks and tremors, but really Tennyson’s grief issues straight from the nursery (p. xvi). This, for readers like Auden, is the regressive essence of Tennyson’s verbal repeats. A local stammer of I’s and cries reinforces the stanza’s eternal ABBA, the poem’s inbuilt incapacity to get on with it, part and parcel of the elegy’s broader rhythms of melancholic recurrence: the anniversaries of a life now deceased, the Christmases that mark his absence, the memories of Cambridge, and, beneath it all, the recalcitrant half-memories of infancy and youth. In a word, Tennysonian repetition takes us beyond—well beyond—the pleasure principle. Of course “beyond the pleasure principle” is also beyond conscious volition. It’s a tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis that repetition happens just south of consciousness (the patient is obliged to repeat what he cannot or will not properly remember),5 and Tennyson’s readers tend likewise to find that a verbal repeat suggests some deeper, preverbal burden—such as the poet himself conveys in Lyric IV: Something it is which thou hast lost, Some pleasure from thine early years. . . . Such clouds of nameless trouble . . . (ll. 9–10, 13) But critics have taken even the most localized repetitions (rhymes, alliterations) as so many symptoms of this central, “nameless trouble” (Peter Sacks has no difficulty calling it unconscious trouble).6 Thus have Tennyson’s words come to signal precisely that “abject space beyond words,” to quote from Aidan Day; and likewise his assonantal patterns register a psychological “grotesque” that “lies not at the verbal surface . . . but in areas subliminally intimated which exceed artistic patterning.”7 A similar (though finer) logic undergirds Seamus Perry’s reading of the above-quoted Lyric LIV: the “pervasive ‘i’ rhyme,” the echoing “cry,” bespeaks an “unshiftably forlorn . . . ‘I,’” even whispers of some “violence / A long way back,” to borrow a phrase which Perry quotes from Philip Larkin.8 He notes the Laureate’s unhappy, and quite possibly abused, childhood years: psychobiographical fodder which Perry treats cautiously but which nonetheless...

Devouring Desire: Fear of the Abject in Marvell’s Daphnis and Chloe

Devouring Desire: Fear of the Abject in Marvell’s Daphnis and Chloe

The Ethics of Lévinas’sTemimutand Kristeva’s Abjection inTo the End of the Landby David Grossman

The Ethics of Lévinas’s<i>Temimut</i>and Kristeva’s Abjection in<i>To the End of the Land</i>by David Grossman

Translation is blind: reflections on narcissus and the possibility of a queer echo

Jacques Derrida invites a reconsideration of the myth of Echo and Narcissus. Echo’s voice translates and remediates Narcissus’s beauty. In this “histoire d’amour,” it is the blind repeating of someone else’s words which constitutes her voice. And this translating voice is hers, not merely a borrowing from Narcissus. Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) and the medium of film itself equally promise the power to mirror/echo the human, to translate sound and motion to the flat reflective surface of projection and to preserve voices in a sound track. At least two queer texts from the turn of the nineteenth century anticipate this Derridean “blind echo,” Oscar Wilde’s prose poem “The Disciple” (1894) and Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Narzis” (1913). Lou Andreas-Salome, in “Der Mensch als Wieb” (1899), moreover, sees a double directionality of narcissism. All three insist that the surface on which Narcissus views his reflection and Echo’s repetition are not an abject predication but rather the initiation of a relationship. Translation does not elide the difference between original and translation. Instead, it asks us to consider closely the surface which ensures that such difference will always be present.

Exposing the Falsehood of War and Violence: Power of the Abject in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined

Exposing the Falsehood of War and Violence: Power of the Abject in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined

Effects of over the lower edge of the tarsal joint continuous suture fixation combined with orbital entire complex on eyelid epicanthus

Objective To investigate the continuous suture through the lower edge of the tarsal joint fixation orbital reconstructive eyelid superfluous skin treatment efficacy.Methods 50 cases of abject epicanthus clinical data were retrospectively analyzed from June 2009 to June 2013 in our hospital by the hospital ethics committee approved,which had a total of 100 eyes.According to the numbering method,they were randomly divided into control group and observation group,each 50 cases.Control group was given through the lower edge of the tarsal continuous suture fixation,while the observation group was treated on the basis of control group combined with joint orbital entire complex treatment.Therapeutic effects were compared,pain,treatment before and after each measurement indicators and lower eyelid skin complications and so on.Results After treatment,the control group redundant lower eyelid skin correction,eyelash contact with the cornea and corneal epithelial healing of eye damage were respectively 39 (78.00％),10 (20.00％) and 43 (86.00％),while the observation group were 49 (98.00％),1 (2.00％) and 50 (100.00％),the above parameters were statistically significant differences (x2 =5.559,16.839,3.840,P ＜ 0.05,P ＜ 0.01) ; According to VAS pain score,VAS scores before and after treatment were statistically significant (t =5.271,12.593,P ＜0.05,P ＜ 0.01),and the observation group after treatment VAS scores after treatment compared with the control group,the difference was statistically significant(t =4.399,P ＜ 0.05) ; Before and after treatment from the eyelid folds distance,flat as the lower eyelid away from the eye position,head lower eyelid skin flap in eyelid,head tilt eyelashes,inner canthal angle,outer canthal angle,inner canthal folds,palpebral fissure height,head of small tears on the pitch,orbicularis muscle eyelid width,eyelid orbicularis muscle thickness and orbital orbicularis muscle thickness differences were statistically significant,and the observation group after treatment with these indicators compared to the control group after treatment,the differences were statistically significant (t =4.292,5.828,4.135,5.099,4.723,5.002,6.717,8.092,7.038,8.056,3.129,7.043,P ＜ 0.05) ; the course of treatment in both groups would be lower eyelid retraction,ectropion and eyelid scar concurrent disease control group complication rate was 20.00％,which was significantly higher than that of the observation group(6.00％),the difference was significant statistical significance(x2 =13.283,P ＜ 0.01).Conclusion Over the lower edge of the tarsal joint continuous suture fixation treatment of orbital reconstructive eyelid superfluous skin effect is significant,with low complication rate,which is worth to be promoted in clinical and applied. Key words: Over the lower edge of the tarsus; Continuous suture; Orbital entire complex; Eyelid epicanthus

A NEW PROMISING TECHNIQUE USING PLANT EXTRACTS FOR PURIFICATION OF POLLUTED WATER IN RAJKOT

Research studies on the purification of groundwater have mainly been carried out in developed countries and have focused on water purification systems using aluminium sulphate (a coagulant) and chlorine (a disinfectant). Such systems are expensive and not viable for rural communities due to abject poverty. There has been very little scientific research work into the use of plant extracts to purify groundwater. Findings from a preliminary lab-scale study show strong potentials of phytodisinfectants as a low-cost, appropriate and ecological alternative technology in purifying water in rural areas of Gujarat. Shallow well water, which is commonly available throughout Gujarat, is often grossly contaminated and usually consumed untreated. This research was aimed at examining natural plant extracts in order to develop inexpensive ways for rural communities to purify their groundwater. The study involved creating an inventory of plant extracts that have been used for water and waste water purification. A prioritization system was derived to select the most suitable extracts, which took into account criteria such as availability, purification potential, yield and cost of extraction. Laboratory trials were undertaken on the most promising plant extracts, namely: Moringa concanensis (Seed), Annona sqamosa (Leaf) and Ficus racemosa (Leaf). The trials consisted of jar tests to assess the coagulation potential and the resulting effect on physico-chemical parameters (Yongabi et al , 2011 ) . The pH of the water samples decreased with dosage, but remained within acceptable levels for drinking water for all the extracts. Overall, M. concanensis powder produced superior results, followed by Ficus racemosa and lastly Annona sqamosa . There is a need to carry out further more detailed tests, which include toxicity to guarantee the safety of using plant extracts as a coagulant in the purification of drinking water for human consumption.

The Masculine and the Abject: Defiance of the Stereotypical Orient in M. Butterfly

The Masculine and the Abject: Defiance of the Stereotypical Orient in M. Butterfly

Abjection, Remembering and the Still-Performing Document

In the same way that Kristeva describes how abject substances gesture towards the dissolution of the subject and, thereby, towards death, it will be my contention that the still-performing documents created during the performances of Mendieta and Antoni embody abjection – at least in part – by aestheticizing the replacement of the departed subject with the objects that once surrounded it.

Psychoanalyse des Stinkens. Freuds Erzählung von Genese und Funktion des Ekels

The evolution of the upright walk is widely considered to be of decisive significance for the evolution of the human being. Freuds gives a highly original reading of this key feature. He emphasizes the distancing of the nose from the organs of sexual secretions and excrement and understands the defensive mechanism of disgust as the organon of turning the archaic pleasures related to the olfactory secretions into unpleasurable sensations. As an antidote to the evolution of morals – which subscribes to the elevation of the nose and pushes the human being in the direction of ‘higher’ values – Freud stresses the inescapability of the abject pleasures and ascribes to art a highly specific capacity to pleasurably address what is otherwise rejected as disgusting.

A Study on the Relationship between the Na Hyesuk’s writings and the ‘status of women’ - The writings as the expression of ‘bordered’ and ‘abject’ experience -

A Study on the Relationship between the Na Hyesuk’s writings and the ‘status of women’ - The writings as the expression of ‘bordered’ and ‘abject’ experience -

Art &amp; Psychoanalysisby WalshMaria. London, I.B. Tauris, 2013, 176 pp., $25.00.

Art &amp; Psychoanalysisby WalshMaria. London, I.B. Tauris, 2013, 176 pp., $25.00.

Stitching (for) His Life: Morris William Larkin's Prisoner of War Sampler

Of the 143,374 Americans in the armed forces who were taken as prisoners of war (POWs) during the Second World War, Sergeant Morris William Larkin (1919–2009) was one. This essay tells the story of his capture and time as a POW, a story that is central to and embedded in the sampler he meticulously stitched while imprisoned. Sergeant Larkin's sampler acts as a synecdoche, a commemoration of the Second World War, a commemoration of the POW experience, and a personal commemoration of the time and experiences of Larkin and those who served in the Second World War with him. This article demonstrates how handcrafts play complex roles beyond the aesthetic—commemorating and memorializing experiences, acting as a form of discourse in abject spaces, railing against political forces, crafting identities, and working through trauma.

Care aesthetics unlocked : photographs of nursing inside correctional unit #1

Background: Photography as a medium of signification has the ability to create images that move beyond what is simply captured by the camera. Rather than being “found”, a photograph is “made”, often in inherently personal and prejudiced ways. Photographs of nurses are no different. Viewing images of nurses through a critical lens is essential to developing a nuanced nursing identity. Purpose: Our aim is to critically examine James Nachtwey’s series of photos depicting nurses in a Siberian prison experiencing a tuberculosis outbreak in 2008. Methods: We apply Chinn and Kramer’s elements of aesthetic criticism, including: historical integration; comparative description; interpretations of meaning; and future possibility. Findings: Nachtwey’s Siberian series is in keeping with his raw style of presenting abject subject matter. The black and white images of masked nurses administering medications through prison bars and preparing injections in bleak, tiled rooms disturb notions of caring central to the profession’s efforts at self-promotion. The series promotes reflection on the complexity of building therapeutic relationships in highly controlled institutional settings and the visibility of caring in one’s own practice. Learning Objectives: 1) To introduce aesthetics as an entry point to reflection on nursing practice; 2) to reinforce the importance of context in interpretation of nursing images and discussions of practice.

How Do the ‘Abject’ Bodies Reply? －Dispersing the Ethnological Gaze of the Empire－

How Do the ‘Abject’ Bodies Reply? －Dispersing the Ethnological Gaze of the Empire－

The Prophetic-Liberating Schillebeeckx: Reclaiming a Western Voice for the Third World

Schillebeeckx's prophetic-liberating voice in systematic theology has been, for the most part, neglected for more than four decades. A robust recovery of the liberative stream of his later theology can aid pastoral leaders, educators, and students from East and West as they read the signs of the times in our day and offer them a critical and hopeful dialogue partner in their work. N ot too long ago, I chanced upon a CNN news feature on the impact of the U.S. economic recession on cash-strapped citizens. American consumers, CNN reports, have found themselves making the difficult choice of giving up pricey steak and buying much more affordable chicken instead. Without trivializing the struggles of the poorest people in the United States who are directly affected by the aftermath of the economic meltdown, it is relativizing to remember that a reces- sion in the First World could mean starvation in the Third. For many in the Third World, there are hardly any choices. The 2005 U.N. Human Development Report notes that a billion people in the world live on less than $1 a day. In stark contrast, a fifth of humanity who live in affluent countries will think nothing of spending $4 a day on a cup of cappuccino. Extreme global inequality continues to thrive notwithstanding the utopian promise of global integration; the Third World as a description of a quality of life characterized by abject poverty and structural oppression is still very much in existence.