Works Of Love Research Articles

The Describer's Nightmare: Touching Form in Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days

Abstract The form and formlessness of histories, regions, races, ballads, fictions, lists, characters, and mountains are among the topics of concern in Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days, and they pose a real challenge to conveying what this novel is like. Caroline Levine's Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network advocates considering forms in terms of their affordances, “the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs” (6). This depends, however, on the reliable identification of forms in a particular text, activity, or material; and the critical response to John Henry Days gives us evidence that, while we can analyze forms the novel deploys and contains, it remains a challenge to identify the novel's form as a whole. In a different vein, Heather Love's work on description is explicitly concerned with “forms of analysis,” but not with the analysis of form per se. The present examination of John Henry Days attempts to bridge such valuable conversations about form and description. This article argues that as John Henry Days grapples with describing forms that constantly remake themselves, it takes a position akin to science and technology studies scholar Michael Lynch's theoretical agnosticism with respect to capital-O Ontology. Refusing anything like a full-blown theory of form, John Henry Days both practices and advocates provisional taxonomy—touching and moving on—as a way of knowing its ever-changing material. This article's analysis of the describer's nightmare is thus a case study for Lynch's claim that “particular descriptions—including descriptions of ontologies—can make sense, apparently even to others who do not share our grand theories.”

Mourning Diary: love's work

The day after his mother's death in 25 October 1977, Barthes began fragments of what would become for readers, as his translator Richard Howard describes, ‘a diary only in a rather desperate sense’. As a recording of his intense grief at the passing of his mother, Mourning Diary represents Barthes' last and perhaps his greatest work of love. Reading Barthes' mourning fragments next to his other works written around this time – Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse and Camera Lucida – and his final essay ‘Deliberations', this paper eschews a reading of Mourning Diary as being about depth and self-disclosure, such as the one offered by Jeremy Berman, whose chapter on Barthes is perhaps one of the earliest, and most sustained, engagements with Barthes' book. I suggest instead that Mourning Diary exemplifies the instance of a writing subject being fully immersed in the signifier. Drawing especially on the figure of the lover in A Lover's Discourse, I argue that Mourning Diary is a simulation of a mourner's discourse, in which the mourning subject stages an utterance that evinces mourning as performative, and the mourner himself a subject always in the process of finding his place in this discourse.

Det kristne næstekærlighedsbud som etisk anti-etik

The twofold aim of this article is to demonstrate (1) that a moreconstructive and mutually productive relationship is possible betweentheology and psychoanalysis, and doing this arguing (2) that psychoanalysis can assist theology understand the injunction of neighbour love as a form of ethical anti-ethics while theology can assist psychoanalysis maintain the ethical insight that there is something about human existence that is beyond the pleasure principle, something that cannot be reduced to a matter of pure survival and life sustainment, and that this constitutes a challenge for ethics. The article’s first three sections can be divided into two main parts. The first part (section 2) accounts for the criticism of the Christian variation of the injunction of neighbour lovethat Freud presents in Civilization and Its Discontents, and examines thebackground for this critique. The second part (section 3-4) encirclesthe concept of the neighbour as the hub of a form of ethical anti-ethicsthrough a reading of some key passages from Jacques Lacan’s famousSeminar VII on psychoanalytic ethics and Søren Kierkegaard’s Worksof Love. The article last section (section 5) provides a brief concludingsummary.

Working Through The Four Discourses

This article applies Jacques Lacan's four discourses to two memoirs, Love's Work and Paradiso, written by the British philosopher Gillian Rose during her treatment for cancer. It shows how Rose's evaluation and use of the different discourses parallels the trajectory of the psychoanalytic process as described by Lacan. First, Rose examines the discourses of the university and master and describes how they have positioned her in society. She then adopts the discourse of the hysteric in order to critique and demystify these positions. The analyst's discourse emerges in the action of writing the memoir itself. The empty page or screen veils and therefore evokes the object a, the cause of desire, instigating her revision of her own story. The analyst's discourse is particularly prevalent in the memoir form and provides a supplement to the novelistic “plot,” a supplement that emerges in the form of the creation of new master signifiers. Thus, in Rose's case, the product of the four discourses is the strategy of “love's work,” which prioritizes the effort of desire over perfect peace. The work of desire, which by definition addresses a flaw or lack, reconnects Rose to both her diseased body and the kernel of her desire that resists assimilation into the dominant discourse.

Southern Africa in World Politics: Local Aspirations and Global Entanglements (review)

Reviewed by: Southern Africa in World Politics: Local Aspirations and Global Entanglements Allan D. Cooper Love, Janice . 2005. Southern Africa in World Politics: Local Aspirations and Global Entanglements. Boulder: Westview Press. 235 pp. $24.00 (paper). Janice Love's analysis of southern African politics is the latest in a series of studies that focus on the challenges and promises of this region of the world. Beginning with Potholm and Dale's edited essays on southern Africa (1974), following with Carter and O'Meara's 1982 study, and then Saul's insightful examination of neocolonial influences in southern Africa (1993), we now have with Love the first general text that explores southern Africa in the aftermath of apartheid and colonial rule. Love's work emerges at the same time that Gretchen Bauer, another leading scholar of southern Africa, has published a summary analysis of the region (in collaboration with Scott D. Taylor). Love's book differs from others in that it avoids the case-study approach of describing a region country by country, and instead creates a narrative examination of the region as a whole. Although her attempt to explain why southern Africa constitutes a distinctive region is short on specifics, her study should serve as a well-organized and innovative review of the political history of the region, one that will be valuable to any student wishing a comprehensive introduction to southern Africa. Love summarizes the historical context, accounting for why Europeans settled in the region, how Africans resisted these colonial endeavors, why the United States and the Soviet Union came to compete against each other for influence in the region, how African political elites came to power, and how southern Africa fits into the global world economy. She discusses the economic dilemmas facing the region, and the threat posed by the AIDS pandemic. Love's overview of the region works best when she is describing macro-level interactions between southern Africa and external nodes of power. She offers a thorough explanation of how transnational economic forces have shaped the political development of southern Africa, and how global patterns of financial exchange affect policy options facing current leaders in the region. When Love attempts to explain the more minute details of microlevel phenomena, the facts frequently get distorted and confusing. For instance, she claims that during the colonial era, "most economic exchange occurred between imperial nations and their colonies" (p. 13). This assertion is not accompanied by evidence, and is contrary to many scholarly studies on the subject of the economics of empire. Also, in a discussion of racist ideology as a type of cultural globalization, Love states that in southern Africa, Africans and whites have only rarely socialized with each other (p. 43). This statement follows a well-developed explanation of how mestizos and the "Coloured" population arose in Portuguese colonies and South Africa respectively (pp. 27–32), and is followed by a description of how Portuguese men intermarried with African women and supported these families during colonial rule (p. 46). [End Page 129] Although Love does an admirable job of describing the major events that are shaping the history of southern Africa, she does so at the near exclusion of any analysis of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho. Her references to Namibia include several inaccuracies and confounding arguments. For instance, she states that the League of Nations assigned South Africa to hold Namibia as a mandate territory (p. 40); in reality, the League of Nations offered this mandate to Britain, which in turn assigned the administration of its South African dominion. A misspelling appears for Namibian leader Toivo ja Toivo (p. 73) on a chart on which Love argues that North Korea was a primary ally of Namibia during the struggle for independence, overlooking the key role played by Cuba. Love suggests that SWAPO never quite succeeded in its goal of broadening its base beyond the majority Ovambo population, but offers no evidence to support this suggestion. Namibia has already had two prime ministers from the Damara community, a vice president from the Nama ethnic group, and several Hereros in other high positions of government. SWAPO has won considerable votes from all regions of the country in...

Book Review: Love's Work

Book Review: Love's Work

Constructing contradiction: the power and powerlessness of women in the giving and taking of evidence in the Bryce Commission, 18951

1The underlying theoretical framework for this paper owes its genesis to three sources; first a late night street conversation after a WEA class several years ago with an unidentified woman who had won a scholarship from an elementary school to a girls’ high school. She commented to my surprise at the time, ‘Of course, Miss X never wanted us scholarship girls at the school’. Her words returned to me when reading the Bryce Commission. Second, it owes something to a loose appropriation of Foucault's notions of power/knowledge and ‘power producing’. Within this framework, the state is viewed as ‘a complex network of discursive practice . which achieves its regulatory effects . through dispersed, multiple and often contradictory and competing discourses’. J. Kenway (1992) Identity and Diversity, Gender and the Experience of Education, ed. M. Blair et al. (Multilingual Matters, 1995), 137, 134. See also B. Smart, Foucault, Marxism and Critique (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 8‐4. For the difficulties of employing Foucault to analyse the situation of ‘woman’ see C. Ramazanoglu, Up Against Foucault, Explorations of Some Tensions between Feminism and Foucault, ed. C. Ramazanoglu (Routledge, 1993), 21, and L. McNay, Foucault and Feminism (Polity, 1992). Third it is influenced by Gillian Rose's comment that feminism has failed to explain the power of women as well as their powerlessness. G. Rose, Love's Work (Chatto and Windus, 1995), 131. Note, however, Rose's critique of Foucault and of the notion of discourse. G. Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society (Blackwell, 1992), xii; G. Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post‐structuralism and the Law (Blackwell, 1984).

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:Love's Work by G RoseDubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy by K LukerEthical Intersections: Health research, methods and researcher responsibility edited by j Daly

Book Review: Love's Work

Book Review: Love's Work

Gillian Rose (28 September, 1947–9 December, 1995)Love's work(London: Chatto and Windus, 1995)

Gillian Rose (28 September, 1947–9 December, 1995)<i>Love's work</i>(London: Chatto and Windus, 1995)

Works ofLove and the Structure of Interpretation: The Likefor-Like of Neighbour and Metaphor

A central problem posed by Kierkegaard's works, by his edifying or acknowledged no less than by his pseudonymous works, is their universal applicability. The problem of universality is the issue posed by all texts, by the hermeneutical problem of self and other, of unique and universal. But, following Spinoza, Kant and Hegel who demonstrate that reason is the universally ethical practice of mutually acknowledging the authority of the golden rule — spirit recognizing spirit, in the language of The Phenomenology of Spirit — Kierkegaard raises the problem of interpretation to a new pitch. He both invests Christianity and its central figure, the God-man, with the truth — in opposition to what he calls the system, Christendom, paganism along with its archetypal figure Socrates, and also Judaism (the Old Testament) — and insists at the same time on the incommensurability of the single individual, the truth of subjectivity, the leap of faith. Kierkegaard not only identifies Christianity, truth and the individual- the individual is the truth of Christianity, Christianity is the individual truth, truth is the individual Christian and so on — but he also demonstrates, with unrelenting if infinitely subtle rigor, that Christianity, truth and the individual are historical. All three must come into existence historically in order to be Christian, true and individual. History and Christianity are identified, history and truth are identified, history and the individual are identified. Kierkegaard ultimately identifies existence itself with history, Christianity and the individual.