Absent Presence Research Articles

“What’s in a Name?”

Published in the same year, 1999, Edward Said’s Out of Place and Mahmoud Darwish’s “Mural” amplify eulogical voices of the dying self. Despite the sombre theme dominating both works as swansongs, Darwish and Said manage to subvert it to transform their works into ghostly texts. In this essay we examine the aesthetics of the proper name and diasporic identities as represented in the aforementioned works, employing Derrida’s theory of the ghostliness of the proper name. We argue the names of Darwish and Said are ghostly presences of the absence of their bearers. Both authors, regardless of the overwhelming theme of decay in their works, conjure the apparition of the name to revive their absent presence. While Darwish’s use of his name is philosophical, Said’s use of his name addresses the social and psychological impact of heterogeneous identity. Thus, in addition to Derrida’s doctrine on the aesthetics of proper names, we employ a dialogical model of acculturation developed in cross-cultural psychology to scrutinize the psychological intricacies involved in Said’s hyphenated identity, the conflicting voices of Edward and Said and his fluctuating movement between contradictory voices and “I” positions of feeling assimilated, separated and marginalized.

An Absent Presence: Intertextual Appropriation in Michael K by Nthikeng Mohlele

Summary Taking as point of departure Frenkel’s notion of contemporary, post-transitional South African writing as palimpsestic, and Genette’s theory of inter-/hypertextuality in terms of palimpsest, the article examines Nthikeng Mohlele’s novel Michael K as an inter- textual appropriation of Coetzee’s Life & Time of Michael K. Employing theories of intertextuality from Kristeva to Genette, Riffaterre, Frow and Hutcheon, it shows how Coetzee’s novel, which is inscribed, in turn, as hypertext over earlier source texts, or hypotexts, by Kafka and Kleist, presents the problem of textual inscrutability and resistance to authority in the intractable figure of K Mohlele addresses this textual conundrum by appropriating K and giving him two afterlives in his own novel: first as fictional character, and secondly as metafictional subject. Mohlele’s reader is left with the final image of his eponymous Michael K as a figure who, like his fictional precursor(s), resists appropriation, escapes from authority, and whose presence is paradoxically predicated on absence.

Nostalgia, Adaptation, and (Textual) Identity: Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Desire Trilogy’

AbstractThis essay focuses on the ‘desire trilogy’ by Italian director Luca Guadagnino to reveal how it embodies nostalgic longing in its discursive structure. The essay examines how the films address matters of nostalgia and adaptation, how they trace an ‘absent presence’ and refer to one another, how they configure the hypertextual, intertextual, and architextual dialogue with other texts and media and use multimodal strategies that engage in ‘nostalgic desire’ for the cultural past. The analysis pays special attention to the mediation modes of intertextual references, reconfiguring the concepts of Gérard Genette within the framework of Lars Elleström’s concept of intermediality as intermodality, based on the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. The study proposes an intermodal approach to the issue of intertextuality and intermediality, exposing the ways in which the engagement of modal strategies in a transtextual dialogue is (or can be) related to the construction of (archi)textual ‘self’.

“The old cause is never dead”: hauntology and Brendan Behan’s “The Hostage”

ABSTRACTBrendan Behan’s “The Hostage” poses a deep critique of extreme nationalism within an Irish context. The present article interrogates notions of identity and history through the theoretical lens of hauntology, first presented by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx. The probing of the spectral, absent presences within the text show history to repeat itself in the present through the workings of the Derridean spectre. The villainous nature of the IRA members and supporters, and also the victimisation of the same characters, enables the root of their actions throughout the play to be questioned and seen to be influenced by spectral voices of the past. The characters within the play are neither unitarily villains or victims, but instead are villainous victims who cannot escape past ideologies and are doomed to constantly repeat the past.

The Trouble with Race in Forensic Identification

The capacity of contemporary forensic genetics has rendered “race” into an interesting tool to produce clues about the identity of an unknown suspect. Whereas the conventional use of DNA profiling was primarily aimed at the individual suspect, more recently a shift of interest in forensic genetics has taken place, in which the population and the family to whom an unknown suspect allegedly belongs, has moved center stage. Making inferences about the phenotype or the family relations of this unknown suspect produces suspect populations and families. We discuss the criminal investigation following the Marianne Vaatstra murder case in the Netherlands and the use of forensic (genetic) technologies therein. It is in many ways an interesting case, but in this paper, we focus on how race surfaced in science and society. We show that race materializes neither in the technologies used nor in the bodies at stake. Rather, race emerges through a material semiotic relation that surfaces in the translation that occurs as humans and things move across sites. We argue that race is enacted, firstly, in the context of legislation as biology reduced to bodily characteristics; secondly, in the forensic analyses as patterns of absent presence; and, thirdly, in society as a process of phenotypic othering.

“One that Returns”: Home, Hantu, and Spectre in Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé (2000)

SummaryThe Eurasian writer, Simone Lazaroo, has lived most of her life in Australia. Her fiction seeks to reconnect with a cultural heritage to re-establish a sense of home and belonging, a move that is both a return – in that Lazaroo situates her narratives in the Asian contexts of her birth in Singapore and her paternal connection with Malaysia – and an origin because it “begins” by “coming back” (Derrida 1994: 10). In Spectres of Marx, Derrida writes that just “as Marx had his ghosts, we [too] have ours, but memories no longer recognise such borders; by definition, they pass through walls, these revenants, day and night, they trick consciousness and skip generations” (1994: 36). I explore this site of penetrable boundaries, between the “ghost” that haunts in the West – accountable in philosophical and psychoanalytical terms – and the seemingly unaccountable “hantu” in the Singaporean context. Instead, I work with Derrida’s idea of the “absent presence” or the “visible invisible” to raise questions about the female body, both spectral and Eurasian. I also explore spectrality in the motif of the photograph.

Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945 by Françoise Meltzer

Reviewed by: Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945 by Françoise Meltzer Susan A. Crane Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945. By Françoise Meltzer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. 256. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0226625638. An esteemed scholar of religious studies and comparative literature, Françoise Meltzer is also the daughter of an American father and a French mother who lived in postwar Germany from 1945–1956, initially in Berlin. Meltzer was born and raised in a trilingual household: a nanny taught her German, and Meltzer became her mother's translator at a very young age. The introduction to her book, Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945, offers striking insights into Meltzer's childhood experiences as a foreigner in a defeated land, but this all too brief section then gives way to the [End Page 424] primary purpose of the book: the exploration of a set of ruin photographs taken by her mother, Jeanne Dumilieu, in 1945. Meltzer was so used to playgrounds surrounded by ruins that, on arriving in New York in 1956, she asked her mother, "where are the ruins?" (5) Her mother is not named again; she becomes "the photographer." Meltzer remarks that her mother's generation was famously "tight-lipped" about their wartime experiences (Dumilieu's participation in the Resistance, and disdain for those who merely claimed to have done so, is briefly noted); the author feels it is appropriate to do the same (2–5). The scholar takes over from the daughter as Meltzer seeks the appropriate lens through which to view her mother's images. The book is elegantly written and cogently argued. Chapter 1 compares contemporary witnesses' accounts of the destruction caused by Allied bombing in major German cities and life amid the ruins, including Hannah Arendt, W.G. Sebald, Marie Vassilichikov, Irmgard Hunt, Friedrich Reck, Margaret Bourke-White, Stig Dagerman, and Gertrude Stein. Meltzer distinguishes autobiographical writing from reportage, but it's not clear why she chose these examples over others, when only one is a photographer and other rich sources (Alexander Kluge, Hans Erich Nossack) are only briefly discussed. She is interested in the role of atrocity description, seeing it as an abstract protagonist in each of the narratives, serving the fictive role of allowing the reader a sense of "being there." Throughout the book, Meltzer considers the Romantic gaze at ruins and the experience of the sublime. She is concerned about the viewer who might be attracted to the photographs' eerie beauty without taking responsibility for the presence and absence of victims and perpetrators. Meltzer believes that the Holocaust is an absent presence in the photographs and worries that viewers might miss this; she also cannot know how "the photographer" felt about this. In chapter 2 her discussion of ruin paintings by Anselm Kiefer and Karl Hofer focuses on the relationship between representation and description, how to make the unbearable real and visible. She shifts her gaze to photography in chapter 3, with a longer discussion of a few of the photographs (all beautifully reproduced), to consider the ethics of revenge and forgiveness; then in chapter 4 she turns to suffering and victimization. Meltzer glosses the Romantic fascination with ruins as a given, but seems not to have considered, as they did, how those same ruins (for instance, the Gothic) were damaged in warfare; or how the sublime experience always required temporal distancing, a delay, before efforts to preserve its ephemerality in words or images. Meltzer is more familiar with French scholars on the war and the Holocaust than with the English-language scholarship. She doesn't read Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Anne Fuchs, Rudy Koshar, David Crew, or Michael Meng, to name a few, who have written about living with postwar ruins or consideration of that photography. The [End Page 425] perspective of an outsider to the field, as with Inge Clendinnen's Reading the Holocaust (1998), can bring valuable fresh insights, but as Clendinnen knew, it's an uphill slog, and Meltzer's overarching concern is moral, rather than historical: she wants to consider how it is that anyone can ever look at atrocity photography, with ruin photographs often harboring invisible human remains. What does this do to...

In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen by Alix Beeston

Reviewed by: In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen by Alix Beeston Stephen Pasqualina In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen. Alix Beeston. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 280. $78.00 (cloth); $74.10 (eBook). Was modernism "cinematic"? Over the past twenty years, a wide range of scholars have argued for reappraising literary modernism through its relations with early cinema and photography. Alix Beeston's probing, artful, and original In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen extends and redirects this dialogue between modernist literature and visual media, offering a valuable contribution to a body of scholarship that includes such influential titles as Susan McCabe's Cinematic Modernism (2005), Michael North's Camera Works (2005), Sara Blair's Harlem Crossroads (2007), Stuart Burrows's A Familiar Strangeness (2008), and Mark Goble's Beautiful Circuits (2010), as well as more recent works such as Louise Hornby's Still Modernism (2017) and Jonathan Foltz's The Novel After Film (2017). Beeston at once challenges and deepens our understanding of literary modernism's relationship to visual media by unsettling assumptions about modernism's affinities with cinematic speed, wholeness, and narrative continuity on the one hand, and photographic stasis, rupture, and fragmentation on the other. She convincingly argues, instead, for a rereading of US modernist literature through the "intervallic" form, and feminist politics, of a field of visual culture situated between photography and film—what Beeston and other visual studies scholars have termed the "still-moving" field, a field devoted to examining the "interactions and relays between the photographic and the cinematographic" in composite and serial photography (12). Considering the book's avowed commitments to feminism and anti-racism, In and Out of Sight's introduction opens with an unlikely case study: Francis Galton's eugenicist, composite, photographic portraits. Beeston's contrapuntal reading of these troubling images locates in Galton's search for a racial science "processes of repetition and accumulation" whose gaps and seams destabilize the taxonomies of social Darwinism (4). This exchange between form and politics serves as both a model and a foil for Beeston's readings of a wide range of literary and visual texts. Her methodology is both deep and wide: she combines thorough and sensitive close readings with creative and historically grounded analogies across a diverse photographic archive. Conversing with the work of still-moving photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey alongside theories of photography and the moving image, ethnic studies, and feminist and queer literary criticism, Beeston reads the formal gaps and fissures of composite and serial photography as a model for a "new theory of literary textuality in modernism—a theory that occasions a feminist reappraisal of its ethical possibilities" (4). [End Page 629] Beeston adopts a reading methodology designed to dismantle the gendered and racialized exclusions that have traditionally structured modernist studies. Whereas scholars such as Susan Stanford Friedman, Jessica Berman, Matthew Hart, and Jahan Ramazani have challenged longstanding accounts of modernism by expanding the field's temporal and geographic boundaries, Beeston looks deeply within a body of long-canonized US literature to voice the latent political possibilities that lay dormant within modernism's formal gaps. The authors of these works, rather than embodying emancipatory politics, "show marked tendencies toward essentialist thought, racialist, nativist, gendered, or otherwise" (7). Beeston thus seeks to unearth what one might call, to adapt a phrase from Walter Benjamin, the "optical unconscious" of literary modernism: the absent presence of the composite, layered, and sutured women whose disarticulations have helped sustain a distorted and dated, yet stubbornly persistent, image of modernism as exclusively white, masculinist, and triumphalist.1 In search of modernism's "woman-in-series," its "recalcitrant, running-off female figures," Beeston examines an alternative archive of visual analogues to those typically deployed in readings of modernist literature (In and Out of Sight, 187). While scholars have often understood Gertrude Stein's writing in relation to Cubist painting, for instance, Beeston establishes in chapter one an analogy between the serialized, composite women characters of Three Lives (1909) and documentary and surrealist photography. Stein's first readers, Beeston demonstrates, encountered Three Lives as a "series...

Thinking Intimate Geopolitics Creatively: Choreographing Spaces of Performance, Testimony, and Law

Testimony has featured as a defining framework for post-Apartheid South Africa in traditional courts of law and under the guise of Truth and Reconciliation. Yet South Africa’s effort to transition to postviolence must be read as partial, with rates of gender-based violence amongst some of the highest in the world. The article traces the convergence between performance and testimony. It examines creative efforts to respond to South Africa’s cult of masculinity, which positions women as “fair game,” and judicial ambivalence to perpetrators of violence. I turn to the testimonial-come-documentary dance Slavery to examine the critical and creative possibilities of dance performance to testify to the absent presence of this national crisis, rhetorically probe dancers, and audiences alike to find opportunities for its contestation, whilst questioning how and even if the arts are best placed to respond to judicial failings. The article introduces three distinct dance spatialities—esthetic, ethical and political space—through which offstage enactments of gender-based violence are upstaged and contested. Nonetheless, these are presented as deeply contentious spaces, in which new silences and violences of the body can be enabled, and where performance risks operating as a “third assailant.” The article calls for greater critical conceptual attention to thinking intimate geopolitics through creative performance.

The ‘Missing Women’ in Data Protection Reporting

Virtually everything we do these days is recorded digitally and stored as data. In the midst of all this data, it can come as a surprise to know there are gaps. A case in point is data on women, or rather, the absence of data about women. Decisions about what gets measured, variables chosen, and the interpretation of results has seen “the female-shaped ‘absent presence’ – the gender data gap” (Criado-Perez, 2018). While research has shown the right to privacy is accorded and experienced differently by gender, there is little, if any, exploration of whether this effect is reflected in interactions with data protection regulation. This question was examined by reviewing the public documents of the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners (ICDPPC) and the most recent annual reports of the 122 accredited Data Protection Authority members of the ICDPPC. The findings revealed a gender gap in privacy data. This is examined in terms of the right to privacy and gender, and the confidence citizenry can have that data protection regulation and policy making in the 21st Century is reflective of larger societal and contemporary trends. These findings are examined against earlier observations and recommendations concerning the need to strengthen the evidence base available for privacy policy making.

Class at the nexus of psychoanalysis and sociology: Disjunction and connection

I argue that some of the issues involved in the interrelationship of psychoanalysis and sociology can be fruitfully explored in relation to class, and especially class in the clinic. Class is a much neglected subject, an absent presence, within psychoanalysis. I suggest how psychoanalytic practice where class is an issue could be enhanced by drawing on some sociological understandings. Using aspects of Pierre Bourdieu’s writings, some clinical vignettes and Didier Eribon’s memoir, I explore some of the vicissitudes of social mobility at this psychoanalytic/social conjunction.

Making the ambiguities, absent presences and contradictions of racialisation analytically legible: reflections on a critical intellectual imperative

Making the ambiguities, absent presences and contradictions of racialisation analytically legible: reflections on a critical intellectual imperative

In vivo protection of the marjoram (Origanum majorana Linn.) essential oil in the cutaneous sporotrichosis by Sporothrix brasiliensis

Thirty Wistar rats subcutaneously infected by an itraconazole-resistant Sporothrix brasiliensis received the oral daily treatment (n = 10, each) of control (CTL, saline solution), itraconazole (ITZ, 10 mg/kg) and marjoram essential oil (MRJ, 80 mg/kg) for 30 days. Weekly, the clinical evaluation and euthanasia for histopathology and fungal burden were performed. Only animals from MRJ evolved to the remission of the cutaneous lesion with a mild to absent presence of yeasts in footpad, besides decreased the fungal burden in the systemic organs compared to CTL and ITZ (p < 0.05), preventing the fungal spread, mainly in the liver and spleen. The antifungal activity may have been attributed to the majority composition of terpinen-4-ol (34.09%), γ-terpinene (14.28%) and α-terpinene (9.6%), which the mode of action was at the level of ergosterol complexation. These findings highlighted the antifungal and the systemic protective effects of MRJ, supporting the promising use in the treatment of cutaneous sporotrichosis.

The social life of self-injury: exploring the communicative dimension of a very personal practice.

This article makes the case for a sociological focus on the communicative, relational and interactional dimensions of nonsuicidal self‐injury. While current research tends to be dominated by highly individual and intrapsychic models, it is increasingly observed that such models leave a social dimension to the practice unexplained. A burgeoning sociological literature has begun to address this paradox of the social in self‐injury; however, we argue that the role of the social must be considered beyond the issues of aetiology, social learning and social construal/construction that are typically covered in this literature. Specifically, we argue that, since the lived meanings of self‐injury directly implicate the interactional along with the intrapsychic, a more systematic focus on the role of social relations and social communication is vital. To illustrate this conceptual argument and embed it in the lived experiences of self‐injury, we draw on two case studies taken from pilot research conducted by the authors. The more thoroughly sociological approach to self‐injury that we present here offers an important compliment to the existing evidence base by reframing the absent presence of social communication contained within it, and suggesting important future directions for research.

Hughie

Hughie

The quest for Holocaust memory in Polish films, 2012–2016

ABSTRACT Fantasies of Jews returning to Poland after the Holocaust have become a staple of post-Communist Polish cultural expression. Recent Polish films, Aftermath (2012), Ida (2013), and Demon (2015) represent Polish Holocaust memory through Expressionist cinematic techniques, including spectral figures and non-realistic lighting and camera angles. This essay examines how Jewish ghosts excavate suppressed Holocaust knowledge and the resurgence of anti-Semitism, forming a post-Holocaust Polish critical exegesis. These films defy redemptive resolutions to questions about Polish-Jewish historical and ethical relationships during the Holocaust, Polish Holocaust memory, second and third generation Polish survivors, and the absent presence of Poland's slaughtered Jews.

Blue Screen Biosphere: The Absent Presence of Biodiversity in International Law

AbstractFrom the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke to the United Nations Charter, the sovereign state has formed the fulcrum of political order and law. Yet in the Anthropocene, this humanist political containment fails to grapple with humanity's dangerous enmeshment with the ecological systems of planet Earth. This article addresses one aspect of this dilemma by focusing on the international law and governance of biodiversity, which presents a “blue screen” biosphere: a material simulation that enables a double disappearance of biodiversity from the text of international law and from the actuality of the world. Through a critique of the figure of the “natural resource,” the article finds that the founding texts of international environmental law entrench a twofold humanism-as-statism that simultaneously supports the geopower of the state to facilitate the capitalist appropriation of the nonhuman and imports the modern metaphysics of the human domination of nature into international customary law. Such legal-political ontologies block a path to a more hopeful system of global ecological law and governance based on the “rights of nature” that might be able to honor the intrinsic value of the biosphere as a rich, agentic, and communicative whole, fundamental to the Earth's survival.

Ghosted (I went looking for a haunting)

ABSTRACTI went looking for a haunting in a spectral scene woven through a book and a bench: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and the Toni Morrison Society’s Bench By the Road in Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. This essay is about the ghosts I did not see when I sat on the bench and sought their absent presence. I went looking for a haunting, but the ghost didn’t come until later, when I stopped looking and went home to write. I seek (futilely) to recapture the moment of the ghost’s arrival, before grappling with what it means to perform hauntological memory beyond any attempt to write the ghost.

Tilly Losch: tracing histories through interiors and film

Tilly Losch is commemorated as an absent presence through two 1930s interiors commissioned by her then husband the art collector Edward James: Paul Nash’s design for a bathroom in James’s London town house and a patterned stair carpet ostensibly based on Losch’s wet footprints on leaving her bath. The Nash bathroom, no longer extant, has been recreated for exhibition purposes and the footprint carpet is now housed in West Dean College. Alongside accounts of these interior designs, where Losch appears elusively as the traces of her corporeal form, this essay juxtaposes histories of dance as a means of retrieving Losch’s persona as a professional performer. Well-known in her native Vienna (and subsequently internationally) as a ballet and contemporary dancer, during the 1930s Losch collaborated with the American designer Norman Bel Geddes on a short silent film of her ‘Dance of Hands’. As an aspect of Losch’s dance practice, this film is indicative of ways in which women performers of the period actively participated in the artistic avant-garde, deploying the iconography of body parts as a demonstration of feminine agency. For historians of visual culture, tracking traces of Tilly Losch across interiors and film prompts questions more broadly concerning the significance of different disciplinary historiographies with regard to both modernism and gender.

Recovering the Absent Presence and the Unseen: Henri Gaden's Photographic Encounters in West Africa, 1894–1907

This article explores invisibility and the unseen, as well as presence and visibility, in relation to a French colonial photographic archive left by Henri Gaden. This archive comprises numerous collections of images and documents; it is heterogeneous and multivocal in nature, a feature that is theorized. Part of this article focuses on a case study of Henri Gaden and the development of his photographic methods. However, a broader argument is made about the way the French colonial regime, often contradictory in its goals, facilitated photographic invisibility through cropping images. There is a strategic invisibility in the construction of this archive, manufactured invisibilities that point to contradictions and uncertainties, which reveal anxieties and desires of colonial authorities. The article highlights another form of the unseen: epistemic invisibility of modernist photographic methods—that is, in the framing of an image, especially the absent presence of the photographer, as well as the unseen social relationships that constitute a photographic encounter. By attending to Gaden's voluminous correspondence, analytical strategies are developed to recover these forms of the unseen. Reading across varied archival sources not only highlights their contradictory nature, but also makes visible those aspects of the photographic encounter that would otherwise be left invisible.