Trajectories of desire in Genet and Wittig

At their most extreme Jean Genet and Monique Wittig stage revolutionary desire through their practice of language as material, embodied productivity in scenographies that decentre the ‘human' through a volatile mix of semiotic violence and iconoclastic eroticism. In fact, both writers strategically universalise homoerotic desire, plotting its trajectories to disrupt, deconstruct, or explode in parodic hilarity the cultural practices subtending patriarchal imperialism. This paper will be looking at the ceaseless productivity of desire in their texts as it moves through abjection and animal-becoming and finds serial ignition throughout its metonymic relay, arousing obstruction itself as its medium. Evidently these tropes and the concept of desire as productive come from Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze & Gauttari 2008a; 2008b). While these subversive poetics are inseparable from the project to storm and overthrow what Timothy Mathews (Mathews 2000) calls the ‘image-fortresses' of patriarchal imperialism, they are less about utopian arrival than about the endlessly renewed performance of desire as metamorphic.

The Chi complex and ambiguities of meeting

In his article "The Chi Complex and Ambiguities of Meeting" Paul Carter develops a discussion of interpersonal encounters by mobilizing an apparatus of references, ranging from Jean Genet to Lévinas, Derrida, Bachmann, Merleau-Ponty, and Arendt. The hypothesis is that meeting another person entails and subsumes a non-meeting; a resistance and a refusal. The article pursues the ambiguity at the heart of encountering the other through an investigation of the urban spaces that are allegedly designed to invite and facilitate meetings. The argument put forward is that these spaces are paradoxically designed to avert encounters. This is especially true in the context of a "new social, economic, and institutional life that seems to call into question the very existence of the collectivities referred to as 'community' or 'society'." The unfolding of this proposition describes a space and a topography that are open, supple, and capable of "mutual transformations." The Greek letter Chi, both in its meaning of chaos and Chora ("a process of cleavage in its double meaning"), is employed as a theoretical example of a place that defies rigidity and closeness and that invites us to linger and pause in order to allow the other to meet and be met.

Poetic revolutionaries: intertextuality and subversion

Poetic Revolutionaries is an exploration of the relationship between radical textual practice, social critique and subversion. From an introduction considering recent debates regarding the cultural politics of intertextuality allied to avant-garde practice, the study proceeds to an exploration of texts by a range of writers for whom formal and poetic experimentation is allied to a subversive politics: Jean Genet, Monique Wittig, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, Kathleen Mary Fallon, Kim Scott and Brian Castro. Drawing on theories of avant-garde practice, intertextuality, parody, representation, and performance such as those of Mikhaïl Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Gérard Genette, Margaret A. Rose, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Ross Chambers and Judith Butler, these readings explore how a confluence of writing strategies – covering the structural, narratological, stylistic and scenographic – can work to boost a text’s subversive power.

Between Genet’s Bordello and holy communion : Lacan on comedy in seminar V

This article aalytically reconstructs Lacan's scattered remarks on comedy in Seminar V, turning around his reading of Genet's play the Bordello and Aristophanes' ancient comedies.

Snap

‘Snap’ deploys the queer cliché of becoming-sailor as a trope for recognition in the amorous encounter and literalises the ‘copycat’ as its catalyst. As Girard argues (1973), the human is foremost mimetic: this story makes its claim for originality and authenticity of connection through the playful recycling of cliché.‘Snap’ eschews the relative affectlessness of some metafiction by staging an amorous approach under the shadow of mortality. It exploits the liminal moment of modernist short fiction to summon the ‘manifold’ of experience. Here, love opens a space of intertextual esonance (Costello 2007), including motifs of Genet (masquerade), Duras (haunting) and Maurice Blanchot (the infinite approach), by writing the threshold of encounter as the intensive silence of wond

Association between apolipoprotein E polymorphisms and age-related macular degeneration: a HuGE review and meta-analysis

A possible association between apolipoprotein E polymorphisms and age-related macular degeneration has been investigated numerous times, with conflicting results. A previous analysis pooling results from four studies (Schmidt et al., Ophthalmic Genet 2002;23:209-23) suggested an association, but those investigators did not document allele frequencies, the magnitude of the association, or the possible genetic mode of action. Thus, the authors searched MEDLINE from 1966 to December 2005 for any English-language studies reporting genetic associations. Data and study quality were assessed in duplicate. Pooling was performed while checking for heterogeneity and publication bias. Frequencies of the E2 and E4 alleles in Caucasians were approximately 8% and 15%, respectively. Allele- and genotype-based tests of association indicated a risk effect of up to 20% for E2 and a protective effect of up to 40% for E4. E2 appeared to act in a recessive mode and E4 in a dominant mode. There appears to be a differential effect of the E2 and E4 alleles on the risk of age-related macular degeneration, although the possibility of survivor bias needs to be ruled out more definitively.