Impersonal Life Research Articles

Ironies of accomplishment: negative aspiration, economic resentment and the myth of the middle class on Nairobi’s new urban outskirts

AbstractExploring the ‘hollow’ character of middle-class status in contemporary Kenya, this article shows how upwardly mobile young Kenyans struggle to cope with the expectations for distribution that their displays of achievement create. Focusing on the urbanizing peripheries of Nairobi, it shows how accusations of envy (wivu) made about poorer friends and relatives reflect their anxieties about failing to act as the providers they are expected to be. Anticipation of the disappointment and resentment of their would-be dependants encourages them to withdraw from friendships and kinship relations in their home neighbourhoods, and seek instead an impersonal life in new urban enclaves closer to Nairobi. The avoidance of obligation is justified through discourses of individual effort and achievement, while poorer peers and relations are criticized for looking to rely on others. The article shows how such tensions over obligation and desires for withdrawal illuminate the fragility of Kenya’s emerging middle class and the ‘ironies of accomplishment’ – that their very precarity denies these Kenyans the respect and status they desire in their neighbourhood homes.

The eroticization of biopower: Masochistic relationality and resistance in Deleuze and Agamben

This article examines Gilles Deleuze’s and Giorgio Agamben’s thoughts on the immanent creativity emergent from formal, impersonal life as a pathway for resistance to biopolitics. In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze explores masochism as the inversion of the sadistic, biopolitical use of the body which can bring forth genuinely new expressions. Agamben dismisses masochistic creativity because it leaves the dialectical ontology of biopower intact to conceptualize his form-of-life as a space of indiscernibility between ontological essence and legal-political actualization. For Agamben, the form-of-life escapes biopolitical capture because it is absolutely detached from its relations. This article argues that the radicalness of this detachment calls into question the political capacity offered by the form-of-life to actively change the relations of biopower. Against this background, Deleuze’s masochistic eroticization of power offers an alternative conceptualization of relationality as external to its terms and productive of expressions which are both thoroughly immanent and genuinely creative.

Approaching Impersonal Life with Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector’s concern with writing life beyond the limits of identity and representation leads her to posit the univocity of being in a series of surprising corporeal and linguistic gestures to reveal a fundamental shift in time. I explore the convergence between this project in Lispector and both major and minor terms in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (from “encounter” and “immanence” to “savage” and “birth”), shedding light on some fundamental aspects of the latter’s transcendental empiricism. Furthermore, focusing especially on the 1973 fiction Água Viva, I show that Lispector’s work insists on impersonal life’s relational condition, which extends to the creation of an original reader-writer relationship, through a mode of receptivity beyond meaning in which feminine and natal approaches are crucial.

Life events, social support, coping strategies, and quality of life in attempted suicide: A case‑control study

Background:Though deliberate self-harm encompasses a wide variety of medical and social disciplines some of the important psychosocial variable such as life events, social support, coping strategies, and quality of life have not yet been explored in depth in India.Aims:The aim was to analyze and compare the type and severity of life events, coping strategies, social support, and quality of life of suicide attempters versus matched normal controls, and to identify the risk factors leading to suicide.Materials and Methods:A total of 50 consecutive suicide attempters were compared with same number of age, sex, and martial status matched healthy controls using Presumptive Stressful Life Events Scale, Social Support Questionnaire, AECOM Coping Style Scale, and WHO QOL-Bref.Results:Attempters experienced significantly more life events especially untoward events whereas the control group experienced more desirable and impersonal life events. Social support, positive coping, and of QOL were significantly lower in attempters. Among all risk factors desirable life events, good education, and good social support were protective against suicide.Conclusion:Suicide attempters were differentiated from healthy controls based on more stressful life events, lower social support, less healthy coping, and poor QOL. Positive life events, good education, and good social support were protective factors against suicide. However, it is difficult to pinpoint a single factor responsible for suicidal behavior. It is the complex interplay of various interrelated factors and the resultant buffering effect, which is protecting the individual against deliberate self-harm.

New Bachelards?: Reveries, Elements and Twenty-First Century Materialisms

Recent years have seen an infusion of new ideas into material philosophy through the work of the so-called ‘new materialists’. Poignant examples appear within two recent books: the first, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010), sets out to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us” (2010: 4). The second, Elemental Philosophy by David Macauley (2010), advocates an anamnesis or recollection of the elements as imaginatively dynamic matter. Within his essays on the imagination of matter, Gaston Bachelard outlined an archetypal vision of the elements predicated upon the material imagination. He explored the manner in which the imagination inhabits the world, is triggered by the stimulus of material dynamism, and is formed from a co-constitution of subject and object. This article proposes that recent trends in materialist philosophy – as exemplified by the monographs of Bennett and Macauley – reinforce the ideas of Bachelard and take them in new directions. Bachelard provides us with a compelling argument for the rediscovery of material imagination, whereas New Materialism portrays a vision of matter filled with autonomous dynamism that lends itself to entering into a relationship with this imagination. Consequently, this article proposes that Gaston Bachelard has gained a new relevance as a result of contemporary trends in material philosophy, has taken on new possibilities through recent scholarship, and remains a force within the twenty-first century discursive landscape.

Affirming an Impersonal Life: A Different Register for Disability Studies

A fundamental tenet of the disability movement continues to be the validation of one's own identity and politics based on various disabilities: sensory, psychiatric, developmental, environmental, and physical (or any combination of the aforementioned). Underlying this politics of identity is the self-reflexive individual. Giorgio Agamben has argued that Gilles Deleuze moves the discussion to a different register, that of the impersonal life (without a self ). The article asserts that the field of Disability Studies should embrace this different register, thereby affirming the vitalism of an impersonal life.

To Perform the Layered Body

The aim of this article is to focus on the body as instrument or means in performance-art. Since the body is no monolithic given, the body is approached in terms of its constitutive layers, and this may enable us to conceive of the mechanisms that make performances possible and operational, i.e. those bodily mechanisms that are implicitly or explicitly controlled or manipulated in performance. Of course, the exploitation of these bodily layers is not solely responsible for the generation of meaning in performance. Yet, it is that what fundamentally /enables/ the generation of sense and signification in performance-art. To approach the body in terms of its layers, from body image and body schema to in-depth body, may partly answer the complexity at work in art performances, since these concepts enable us to consider, on a theoretical level, the body as represented object, as subject, as motor means for being-in-the-world, as origin of subjectivity and emotions, as hidden but most intimate place of impersonal life processes, as possibly distant image, as sensitive, fragile and plastic entity, as something we own and are owned by, as our most personal and yet extremely strange body.

Film Technique and Micropolitics

Film Technique and Micropolitics William E. Connolly (bio) I This death is not simply the end of life, but the immersion into the eternally returning pulsation of life itself, symbolized by the sea waves; in her death, Aels is transfigured into the cosmic impersonal life substance. (Zizek, p. 5) There it is. Lacanian theory brought to interpretation of a romantic film by a Nazi Director. In this approach symbolic interpretation receives priority over engagement with technique; Lacanian interpretation is granted authority over other narratives; and film directors are construed either as masters who already grasp Lacanian theory (e. g., Hitchcock) or carriers who get caught in its logic. Words such as “symbolize”, “structure”, “paradox”, “fantasy”, “precisely,” and “of course” grease the analysis. The story is the thing. Its paradoxical structure could almost as easily be drawn from a novel, a Bible, a play or a philosophical text as a film. I exaggerate, of course. I do so because I am interested in an approach to the nexus between film and politics that is inflected differently. Here interpretation becomes shallower and more modest about itself because the interpreter doubts that the world possesses a structure amenable to deep, authoritative interpretation, whether that depth is conveyed through a logic of coherence or one of paradox. As the hegemony of narrative interpretation is relaxed, attention to technique is accentuated. Film techniques mix sound, image, words and rhythm together to work on the visceral register of human sensibility. It is the intersection between techniques and story which is critical. Attention to such intersections discloses how immersed we are in the sea of micropolitics. By micropolitics I mean, for starters, organized combinations of sound, gesture, word, movement and posture through which affectively imbued dispositions, desires and judgments become synthesized. Micropolitics saturates cultural life, helping to set the stage for macropolitical action. Do you seek to include gays in the military? End capital punishment? Reorganize subliminal orientations to poverty by people in the middle class? Micropolitics in and around the dinner table, the church, the movie theater, the union hall, the TV sitcom and talk show, the film, the classroom, and the local meeting set the table for macro-policy initiatives in these domains by rendering large segments of the public receptive or unreceptive to them. II The intriguing thing about film is that it both participates in micropolitics and teaches us how this ubiquitous dimension of politics operates. So why is the technical dimension of film often subordinated to the task of narrative interpretation? Since much of contemporary film theory views movies through a psychoanalytic lens, part of the answer may reside in Freud’s own hesitancy about technique. Freud, who was at odds with Kant on other issues, reinforced Kant and neo-Kantians in their resistance to technique. Kantians are reserved because they participate in a two-world metaphysic that depreciates the embodied character of human being. Freud does not accept this metaphysic. But he shares that reserve. One reason, doubtless, is those intensive “memory traces” that reach back to primordial times. They do not possess a form appropriate to intellectual concatenation. Freud’s critique of the hubris of intellectualism is well taken, in my judgment. But, on his reading, memory traces are also extremely resistant to modification by tactical means. You can at best try to control them. Which is why Freud, by the time of Moses and Monotheism, at least, thinks of ethics on the model of intensive instinctual renunciation and skimpy sublimation. According to him ethics at its highest rises above crude instruments such as image, rhythm, ritual, trance, hypnosis, magic and the like, some of which form the very material of film. Moses, “the great stranger” introduced a more spiritual God to the Jewish people, “one as all loving as he was all-powerful, who, averse to all ceremonial and magic, set humanity as its highest aim a life of truth and justice.” [1] This means, first, that the intellect is engaged to control the lower instincts and, second, that corporeal tactics or gymnastics such as ceremony, ritual, hypnosis, image and magic are avoided or minimized. What Freud admires most about the effect of the Mosaic faith upon Jews is...