Paradoxical Stress Research Articles

The lamp of paradox

The transferable image of a hanging lamp suspended from an arch appears across several media in the Islamic world from the medieval period. Lamps and lamp-shaped objects also survive in significant numbers. While the relationship of the lamp image to the Qur’anic Light Verse (24:35) and its medieval exegeses has long been recognized, this article questions both the a priori assumption of textual primacy over images and objects, and the ascription of univocal symbolism to a highly complex polyvalent phenomenon. The image of the radiant lamp, in both the Qur’anic text and its subsequent mental and material envisionings, represents a symbiotic engagement between the visual and verbal realms, at the core of which lies a seemingly paradoxical stress on the materiality of the lamp itself as metonym for light. This study addresses the use of the lamp image in medieval Islam by considering the implications and outcomes of a representational model that hypostatizes light as matter and mental image as external form. Textual sources, and their relationships to both internal and external forms of vision, are first discussed. Following this, an examination of individual objects scrutinizes an increasingly dense materiality of the lamp image as the Word is embodied in glass, ceramic, metal, and wool. The visual–verbal–material nexus of radiance, as formulated within the Qur’anic text, reaches its most complete incarnation, paradoxically, in fully opaque votive “lamps” that replace optical illumination with a web of connotative signification.

Soul and Culture

This programmatic statement of a lecture series presented by intellectuals close to Georg Lukács in 1917 concerns the paradoxical stress, influentially expounded by Georg Simmel, between the subjective culture of the self and its growing alienation from the overwhelming mass of the objectified culture that surrounds it. The theme is the reflection and analytic grasp of that division and of the insights it yields into the nature of culture.

Proteomic analysis of the renal effects of simulated occupational jet fuel exposure.

We analyzed protein expression in the cytosolic fraction prepared from whole kidneys in male Swiss-Webster mice exposed 1 h/day for five days to aerosolized JP-8 jet fuel at a concentration of 1000 mg/m3, simulating military occupational exposure. Kidney cytosol samples were solubilized and separated via large-scale, high-resolution two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) and gel patterns scanned, digitized and processed for statistical analysis. Significant changes in soluble kidney proteins resulted from jet fuel exposure. Several of the altered proteins were identified by peptide mass finger-printing and related to ultrastructural abnormalities, altered protein processing, metabolic effects, and paradoxical stress protein/detoxification system responses. These results demonstrate a significant but comparatively moderate JP-8 effect on protein expression in the kidney and provide novel molecular evidence of JP-8 nephrotoxicity. Human risk is suggested by these data but conclusive assessment awaits a noninvasive search for biomarkers in JP-8 exposed humans.