Love Object Research Articles

The Politics of Living Death in Nuruddin Farah's Sweet and Sour Milk

Abstract This article examines Nuruddin Farah's 1979 novel Sweet and Sour Milk, asking how we read representations of postcolonial mourning and living death in the context of global authoritarianism. The first novel in Farah's influential dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk introduces us to “the General,” a fictionalized version of Siyad Barre, who ruled Somalia from 1969 to 1991. Like Barre's, the General's power exemplifies what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” or “the contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death.” The General's necropower manifests, peculiarly, as a politics of substitution—that is, when he takes a life, he leaves something in its place. Rebels do not simply disappear; they are killed and then given sycophantic zombie afterlives in the General's propaganda. In response to this politics of substitution, Farah explores a politics of mourning, which insists upon the irreplaceability of lost love objects and thereby broadly reveals what truly can and cannot be substituted. The General insists on the uniqueness of his power, for example, but Farah reveals it to be a cliché, easily substituted by that of other dictators throughout history. Cliché becomes revolutionary in this way, suggesting that dictators share a common fate: they will be deposed or, eventually, die of old age. However, like a horde of the living dead, others like them will return. The article concludes with analysis of the apparent pessimism of this point and the global implications of Farah's ideas about both necropolitics and the limits of the novel form in the face of authoritarian power.

Self Psychology in a Pluralistic World: A Position Paper

ABSTRACT In this article the author outlines his understanding of self-psychology as an independent psychoanalytic treatment paradigm created by the late Heinz Kohut and initially geared toward the psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic disorders. Since then, self-psychology theory and practice have been enriched by new theoretical and clinical considerations and have been introduced into other forms of psychotherapy, counseling, and education, for example. One important conceptual contribution to developmental theory was Heinz Kohut’s differentiation of separate narcissistic and “object love” related developmental tasks. Today, new paradigms as i.e. relational analysis stress the value of human relationships and of the value of mutual recognition. This warrants a revisiting of the clinical value of the self-psychological understanding of narcissism. According to the author it lies in the nature of unattended narcissistic needs that when unattended they take primacy over relational aspects and demand adequate attention in order to open up the space for mutuality, reciprocity et cetera.

Aesthetic Categories “Love”, “Joy” and “Fear” in the Professional Activity of a Teacher

Different approaches to defining the essence and content of the concepts of “love”, “joy” and “fear”, their interaction in terms of teaching are analyzed in the article. It is emphasized that the main thing in love is its spiritualization. Only the spirit, the spiritual power, reveals to a man the true, worthy object of love. Love is creativity, openness of the human soul, it is an organic, aesthetic need of a man. This approach is especially important in the system of relations “teacher – student; teacher – student”. It is proved that the teacher's love for the student must be effective, it is based on trust, mutual assistance, without love pedagogical activity loses its value. An important manifestation of love is the joy of common achievements. Love and joy are related concepts. Joyful hobbies that guide cognition, enter the noosphere of a man, contribute to mental and spiritual growth. Instead, the category of “fear” is defined as an emotion that arises in a situation of threat to the biological or social existence of the individual and is aimed at the source of real or imagined danger. In the article, the concept of “fear” is considered on a Christian basis, and therefore, analyzed as the fear of God and human fear. The need to train specialists in the field of professional and pedagogical activities in the context of solving the outlined problems is emphasized.

What Is That To You?

What Is That To You?

Answers

Abstract The answers below touch on three different meanings of world cinema. First, world cinema is the acknowledgement of an existing cinema originated in the diversity of geographical and cultural contexts from all over the globe and expresses the rise of multiple local cinemas on a common international scene. Second, world cinema denotes to the films that proved to be recognizable as artistically valuable through these channels (festivals, critics, niche distributors) and conveys the idea that only certain types of films would be accepted on the international scene. And third, world cinema relates to a more specific type of films, that are not so many but gives a particular visibility to an immensely vast phenomenon with films that are either “without borders”, or mixing various origins and references. By keeping these in mind, the research on world cinema should be issue based, acknowledging de vast rainbow of various ways to make cinema, related with socio-economical and cultural contexts, political environment, inscription in various aspects of history of cinema aesthetics and other artistic and cultural means of expressions, local, regional and global. The films of world cinema are, or at least should be objects of research, objects of thinking, but also if not primarily objects of love.

Humanity and the future: replies to Tina Rulli and Jay Wallace

ABSTRACT This article is a response to contributions by Tina Rulli and Jay Wallace to a symposium on my book Why Worry about Future Generations? I respond to questions Rulli raises about my ‘Value Dependence Thesis' and about the status of ‘meliorative projects’. I respond to questions Wallace raises about the nature of humanity as an object of love and attachment. I also address points he makes about the relation between reasons of beneficence and the attachment-independent reasons provided by the value of humanity.

Бог и отдельные личности

The atheistic Hiddenness Argument contains a controversial premise that a perfectly loving God would love every single person. J. L. Schellenberg, the author of the Argument, claims that this premise is necessarily true. However, many ancient theologians would disagree with the truth of this premise. In this paper, I provide evidence of the variety of alternative theological views from antiquity concerning the proper object of perfect divine love. The list of alternatives includes 1) the whole humanity as a collective subject, 2) humanity as a universal, 3) divine image reflected in human beings, 4) the community of the faithful, 5) a chosen people. Based on the disagreement between Schellenberg and the ancient theologians concerning the proper object of perfect divine love, I argue that the aforementioned premise of the hiddenness argument, even if true, is not necessarily true. Therefore, the key premise of the hiddenness argument turns out to be without support, and the Argument turns out to be unsound.

Aquinas on Contrition and the Love of God

St. Thomas Aquinas treats penance as both a sacrament and a virtue. In either form, penance’s principal human act is contrition—a willed sorrow for one’s sins and an intention to avoid future sins. A look at Aquinas’s understanding of penitential contrition reveals a complex interplay of the different objects of love, the gift of fear, and finally friendship with God. This article offers an analysis of Aquinas’s accounts of penance and contrition with respect to these key elements. I argue that contrition performs a fundamental role in countering, restoring, and safeguarding a proper ordering of love and attainment of the ultimate good of union with God. In short, contrition is the act that directly counters the interior disorder wrought by sin and provides an ongoing counter to the threat of additional disorder. Sin’s disorder is the aversion to God and conversion to self, while contrition involves the aversion to self and a conversion to God.

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging by Rebecca Wanzo

Reviewed by: The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging by Rebecca Wanzo Maite Urcaregui (bio) Wanzo, Rebecca. The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging. New York University Press, 2020. 256 pp, $89.00 HC/ $29.00 PB Click for larger view View full resolution In The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, Rebecca Wanzo explores how African American cartoonists reappropriate stereotypical caricatures of Blackness to question and reveal normative ideals of US citizenship. Taking up a long history of caricature in African American comic and cartoon art, the book provocatively asks, "Can the racist caricature be used in aesthetic practices of freedom?"1 By way of answering this question, Wanzo examines how African American artists formally exploit caricature's racial inheritance to point to the injury of racist images and the structures that produce them. Through their artistic reframing, they invite diverse and divergent affective responses to caricature that open alternative attachments to citizenship. The book explicates how comics, like other forms of popular media, create and uphold narratives of "good" and "bad" citizens. Comic narratives participate in these discourses of belonging through what Wanzo identifies as "citizenship genres": "often masculine categories of representation that the state's subjects are interpellated to inhabit."2 Each chapter interrogates a citizenship genre within comics and the subjects they herald—the revolutionary leader, the soldier, the child, and the countercultural subject. After identifying the normative ideals these genres uphold, Wanzo goes on to examine how African American artists, recognizing the "racialized ideological work of these typologies," strategically play with the formal affordances and limitations of the genre to highlight the grotesque realities of racism and articulate resistant representations of Black identity and national belonging. Chapter One lays the foundation for understanding "broad ranging articulations" of how comics artists utilize caricature across form and genre—including examples from [End Page 119] George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Sam Milai's Pittsburgh Courier editorial cartoons, and contemporary works, such as Jeremy Love's Bayou and Valentin De Landro's Bitch Planet—to critique and negotiate "how African Americans are marked by noncitizenship status."3 Chapter Two "explores the lasting legacy of black subjection in archetypes of heroism in the white popular imaginary" and looks to two graphic biographies, Kyle Baker's Nat Turner and Ho Che Anderson's King, that challenge the image of the frozen-in-time supplicating Black subject. Chapter Three takes up the superhero genre, putting Baker's Truth: Red, White, & Black in conversation with Jay Jackson's World War II editorial cartoons, to argue that Isaiah Bradley, the Black Captain America, simultaneously represents a desire for full citizenship and a recognition of that impoverished promise. Building on Anne Anlin Cheng's "racial melancholia," which explores the psychoanalytic consequences of racialization,4 Wanzo theorizes "melancholic patriotism" to describe African Americans' attachments to full citizenship "as a lost love object that both never was and is continually chased."5 In a powerful reading of Isaiah—who at the end of the arc has survived the war but has lost both his friends and his mind as a result of state-sanctioned medical violence, a fictional evocation of the Tuskegee experiments—in what is left of the Captain America uniform he was incarcerated for wearing, Wanzo says, "Truth constructs an African American love object, a black Captain America whose ambivalent figure represents a threadbare version of the American Dream to which not only African Americans but other Americans cling."6 Chapter Four engages with discourses of infantile citizenship and the aesthetics of cuteness to investigate how the nation pins its democratic hopes on the figure of the innocent White child and their futurity. In contrast, analyzing examples from Ollie Harrington's editorial cartoon Dark Laughter to Jennifer Cruté's life narrative Jennifer's Journal, Wanzo argues that African American cartoonists' use of "the black infantile citizen disrupts this representational regime" by challenging viewers to remember the nation's abuses and failures, "as opposed to the improbable white child ideals that encourage the nation to forget."7 The final chapter explores perhaps the most excessive or grotesque example of racist caricature...

POETICS OF DESIRE IN D.H. LAWRENCE’S SHORTER FICTION

Desire is a specific subject of research in many areas, including literary studies and text analysis. The representation of desire in fiction is an inseparable part of the sub-genre of psychological prose; its interpretation by readers and scholars requires an interdisciplinary approach and relies on psychoanalytic theories and terminology for elucidation. Shorter psychological fiction – novellas and short stories – depend on the authors’ mastery of language use, while the formal textual length is limited. Therefore, the study of desire encoded in a short fictional piece is both difficult due to laconism and suggestiveness, and fruitful as a revelation of most subtle nuances of human nature through the examination of artistic discourse. D.H. Lawrence’s novellas and short stories articulate desire as the unconscious wish to obtain the object of love. It is the merit of the writer’s art to employ various artistic means that may serve as the manifest content. Interpreting imagery and symbolism, bodily consciousness and characters’ “syncopated” dialogues, opens up such aspects of a textual embodiment of desire as its elusiveness, impossibility to verbalize and often its “forbidden” nature. Instead, the Ragachewskaya Marina writer resorts to heavy suggestiveness, gaps and silences to be filled with the reader’s intuitive or professional knowledge, meaning-charged adjectives, metaphors and analytical intrusions. Examples from a selection of D.H. Lawrence’s short fictional works reveal defense mechanisms that balance the fulfilment of desire. The mastery of D.H. Lawrence’s shorter fiction rests on the skill to reveal the unnamable, to show the inner conflict working through desire fulfilment, to bring to consciousness the shame, guilt and pleasure irrespective of moral judgment.

Shameful Kisses: A History of the Reception – and Rejection – of Homoeroticism in Catullus

AbstractThe history of Catullus’ reception has been one of exclusion as much as inclusion. Since the seventeenth century, many Anglophone writers have used Catullus as inspiration for their translations, poetic adaptations, and novels. A great deal of these works occluded the role that male homoeroticism played in the Latin poems, especially by omitting Catullus’ male love object, Juventius. Writers have employed various techniques to deal with Catullus’ ‘problematic’ pagan mores: choosing to ignore the suite of poems associated with homoeroticism (for example, Wilder 1948); bowdlerising homoerotic language (such as Nott 1795, Cranstoun 1867, and Macnaghten 1899); and performing ‘gender swaps’ to portray male-male relationships as male-female (a technique employed to memorable effect by de La Chapelle in 1680, and later by Lamb in 1821). Excision of whole poems or bowdlerisation of obscene terms was also often used to deal with Catullus’ depictions of male-on-male sexual violence, a topic regularly entwined with the gentler homoerotic content. This article surveys, analyses, and explains this aspect of Catullus’ reception in English from 1659–1915.

‘My beloved leader’: Tracing the leader-centred perspective in the Turkish Grand National Assembly, 1961–2002

ABSTRACT Political leaders are the key actors in Turkish politics. Historically, they have been considered much more crucial than political institutions. They are the objects of love, hate, hope and fear in Turkish political life. Drawing upon semi-structured interviews with 37 former Members of Parliament (MPs), this study attempts to make sense of the leader-centred perspective in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA). To achieve this goal, the study demonstrates the reflections of this perspective in the narratives of the former MPs during the period between 1961 and 2002.

Can groups have human rights

Some groups have legal rights. But can any group have a human right? Can any group possess a right to existence and self-determination that is equivalent in meaning and force to an individual's right to life and liberty? I present a basic objection to the idea that groups can have human rights and show how this objection can be answered. The objection is embodied in what I call the Substitution Argument. If the justification for a group human right must make reference to values that the group is supposed to achieve, and if it is always possible for another group to achieve the same values, it follows that no group can have a human right. I compare this argument to the problem of replaceability that troubles philosophical literature about love and explain how reasons for insisting that objects of love or friendship are irreplaceable can be used as a strategy for defeating the Substitution Argument. I apply my defence of group rights to the case of Kiribati, an island nation that is about to be swamped by the effects of climate change. The people of Kiribati, I argue, have a right to maintain the existence of their nation and those responsible for their predicament have a duty to provide it with a new home. Language: en

On the Birth of the Keatsian Ode: In-scribing the Other

Cette étude cherche à mettre en lumière les motivations qui poussèrent Keats à créer son ode telle qu’elle prit forme au sommet de son art lyrique, en mai 1819. Reconsidérant, au départ, l’écriture lyrique de Keats dans la forme qui lui est essentiellement associée jusqu’en avril 1819, celle du sonnet, et lisant ces textes comme, au fond, des « fragments d’un discours amoureux », on observe un trait étrange qui est l’absence du signifiant, la seconde personne, qui capterait le « toi » aimé dans l’énoncé : achoppement, lacune au cœur d’un discours amoureux qui assigne ainsi à l’objet le statut étranger, interdit, de l’Autre au sens lacanien du terme. On peut donc voir l’élaboration de l’ode comme l’effet d’un besoin fondamental, celui d’in-scrire enfin l’Autre dans l’espace de l’énonciation. L’ode keatsienne n’est donc pas seulement une nouvelle forme métrique, mais plus fondamentalement un nouveau langage : la mise en place d’une nouvelle grammaire poétique qui se donne à voir dans l’ode inaugurale, l’« Ode à Psyché ». L’« Ode à Psyché » est à lire comme un rituel qui établit un lien organique entre manque (l’Autre interdit) et création : le poème lui-même , qui instaure un « Toi » agrammatical (parce que désignant l’absent, la non-personne) dont l’absence nourrit le « chant ». L’écriture keatsienne rejoue ainsi le drame orphique tout en inversant sa signification : transformant l’échec d’Orphée (à retrouver l’Autre) en triomphe, celui de son chant. Ce que découvre l’Orphée keatsien, dans l’« Ode sur la Mélancolie », au bout de son voyage au royaume des morts, n’est pas l’Autre à retrouver, mais un[e] Autre à créer par la force de la « langue » : « Mélancolie voilée », figure fascinante qui devient le nouvel objet d’amour. Déplacement du désir, sublimation de l’amour inhérents à la poétique des odes, en lesquels Keats trouva sans doute, dans sa vie, son propre salut.

The ‘Choice’ between Illusory Life and Acceptance of the Death of One’s Love Object

The ability to remain alive psychically often requires that we let go of a lost love object. When separation is unbearable, a form of adjustment may develop in which the patient’s attachment to their lost love object may staunch the desire to live his or her own life. In such instances, the patient may prefer to deaden major aspects of mental and emotional life in the effort not to leave the beloved object. Reality is then experienced as being at odds with the patient’s survival, so they may fight, vigorously to avoid the apprehension of external reality. The author presents an analysis of a young woman who lost her mother at the young age of seven.

Melancholy either children of Polish Saturn

The article has a double task, considering the content of Mira Marcinуw’s book, which is important in two controversial topics: madness and its conditions on Poland and its societal psyche, in particular the specifics of Polish melancholy. The author’s views on the status of melancholy in culture and its unique position in public life are presented. The question is: does the melancholic doubt his life? A fairly justified hypothesis would be that the melancholic sees himself as a dead rather than a living body. The significance of the quoted book is that it raises troubling questions but doesn’t give easy answers. First of all, it becomes obvious an unclear – how to develop the epistemological history of melancholy, which is understood as a scientific idea that seeks coherence and adequacy of the medicine language while the political history of melancholy is interpreted as a symptom of this sociocultural context, in this case in relation to Poland. Science in this case creates or selects concepts, although it always systematizes them in a certain place and time. Secondly, it is not clear today how to distinguish the language of melancholy itself, which is the language element of the emergency state, from the language of medicine, which is a means of describing a certain medical disorder. Medicine to a greater extent than we might think refers to normality than to the problematic concept of health. Medicine, while managing human life, adopts a normative attitude, which does not amount to providing advice on how to live wisely, but allows to influence the physical and moral relations of citizens that connect them with society. Thirdly, it is argued that the very concept of melancholy remains dynamic and changeable. The proposed “erotic constellation of melancholy” shows that the subject of melancholy loses the ability to find new objects of love. This incapacity simultaneously leads a person to open nihilism, which is not only the “nothingness of the will” and the usual “will of nothingness”, but also the discovery of the nothingness of knowledge and the futility of the cognition process. The inability to find items worth loving is due to the difficulty of finding items worth the effort to know. Thus, the causes of melancholy go beyond the trivial case of loss and cover all resentments, rejections, failures, disappointments, including despair in the process of cognition. Melancholy brings the subject to ruin, so it is the limit of all medical knowledge, stating that there is no secret of «disorder» in clinical cognition, that there is no secret of madness, and that there is nothing but the study of madness itself. It turns out that madness is recognition of nothingness of the world.

Introduction

Responding to doubts expressed by contributors to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, this introduction to the seventh and final installment seeks to explain the critics’ methodological concerns in a case study of strong affect in the Babylonian Talmud. Examining the story of Rav Rehumi and his wife in Ketubot 62b, the author inquires whether differences of culture and the passage of time make it impossible for us to determine whether love is the affect involved. The case is especially difficult to resolve, given that, while there may be two lovers in this narrative, there may be three objects of love: the rabbi, his wife, and the Torah. In the story, Rav Rehumi is so ravished by Torah that he forgets his wife. Since the narrative does not predicate that he chose not to visit her but, rather, that he was swept away, the author proposes that “studying Torah is sex, not like sex, but sex itself.” The story describes not sublimation of libido but its desublimation. If so, the story confronts us with an unnamed affect in ancient Jewish culture that “encompasses both the joy of sex and the joy of text.” It is not that, dourly, the Talmudic Rabbis cannot imagine, or that they ignore, corporeal pleasure; it is rather that the erotic experience of Torah is the same pleasure but, at least for them, even stronger. This piece concludes, therefore, that a term like xenophilia, which incorporates the word love (philia), is not universally applicable across cultures and epistemai. The concept of love is too various.

U-7 Utilization of the Thoughts of Chishti Sufis in Monastic System

The ancient path of Chishti Sufi as it is known in the Indo-Pak, is the inward dimension of Islam, essentially Islamic mysticism. Chishti order practitioners seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of the Beloved. The teaching of Chishti order is the way to God via spirituality rather than through reason, and it celebrates the intimate relationship of the seeker with Allah. The Chishti order teachings and practices of the Sufis have great relevance for seekers today, and can help you to deepen your spiritual practice . The Chishti Sufis say that the reason of the whole creation is that the perfect Being wished to know Himself, and did so by awakening the love of His nature and creating out of it His object of love. The Chishti Sufi responds with loving-kindness and harmony towards those who harm them, for they see everything in themselves and themselves in everything, and because of this it is said that the highest form of human love is ‘God love’. The Chishti Sufi traditions have a well-developed philosophical psychology, which includes dream interpretation. Chishti Sufi’s stand above all of us in their deeds and actions. Chishtisufis spent their whole life span in loving almighty and sharing their love with us.For restoring peace,harmony,love and brotherhood across the universe and religions, we all must follow Chishti Sufi ways unquestionably.

Poe, insanity, and containing the feminine monstrous

In fiction, unlike his life, Poe was able to contain his women. He derived many features from the European Gothic tradition, and utilized motifs such as incarceration, premature burial, and the pathetic fallacy, or the use of external landscape to express or reflect psychological turmoil. Poe’s psychologically intense tales feature narrators whose mental fabric disintegrates before the reader’s eyes. This essay will concentrate upon three such tales: ‘Berenice’ (1835), ‘Ligeia’ (1838), and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839). Each of these stories are narratives of obsession and monomania featuring female incarceration and objectification, and the threat of the feminine monstrous. Berenice, Ligiea and Madeline Usher each embody the feminine monstrous in varying ways, a masculine projection of womanhood unrestrained, unsuccessfully repressed by their male counterparts, and thus returning in an act of unheimliche consummation. Berenice symbolizes the vagina dentata whose threat must be removed through dental extraction; Ligeia is an incubus who perverts the Eucharist in order to achieve an act of monstrous metempsychosis; and Madeline acts as both monstrare and monere: as both the warning and the source of impending destruction. The perceived female abandonment and thus betrayal which had become a pattern of Poe’s life was through his fiction able to be halted and contained. The inextricable link between Eros and Thanatos undergirds these stories in which, in a mirror of Poe’s own life, each love object wastes away during the prime of her beauty. This essay discusses the context of male–female relations in Poe’s life and how they impact upon his fiction. Unlike reality, in his tales Poe was able to resurrect the objects of his obsessions, and thus the female figures comprising the monstrous loves of his male protagonists. However, this essay also questions the extent to which such resurrections and containment are successful within each narrative, and how far Poe’s delineations of the feminine monstrous and unheimlich sexuality can be read as interrogations of compromised masculinity.

‘Die eigentlich humane Leidenschaft’? Adorno’s Conception of Love in Dialektik der Aufklärung and Minima Moralia

The term ‘Liebe’ and its variants occur over 120 times in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung and Adorno’s Minima Moralia. The article will examine the function of the concept of ‘love’ in Adorno’s thought, especially in relation to the positioning of the subject and object of love and its relation to Adorno’s critique of (masculine) subjectivity. It will furthermore claim that the ideal-typical relationship between lovers serves as a critique of the capitalist ‘Tauschprinzip’ and thus mirrors the relationship between art object and beholder in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, proceeding from the same dialectical ground as Adorno’s conception of the work of art.