Erschöpfte Literatur. Über das Neue bei Samuel Beckett

Exhausted Literature. The Emergence of the New in Samuel Beckett's Novels and Plays. The article investigates literary subjectivity in some texts by Samuel Beckett. The article proceeds by relating the ways of how narration and speech acts constitute literary subjectivity to the problems of subjectivity that scientific investigations deal with. While successful self‐regulation of the organism nourishes the roots of subjectivity, i. e. the habits, subjectivity decomposes in states of exhaustion, when self‐regulation breaks down. As soon as a certain threshold is transgressed, fatigue sets in, alters the personality and eventually leads to exhaustion – a state, which psychiatrists compare to mental illness. Notwithstanding the different explanations given, scientists agreed about the effects of exhaustion. According to their investigations, the decomposition of personality by exhaustion generally does not involve apathy, withdrawal from activity or termination of movements, but rather mere action. Similarly, in Beckett's novels and plays exhaustion is much more than tiredness, as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze observed. For Beckett, exhaustion is rather the model for both literary innovation and a new concept of subjectivity, which he explores on the basis of a detailed knowledge of physiology, psychology, and psychiatry, but using his own literary means. The exhausted subject is beyond any calculus of activity. It will perform an activity even if he or she makes mistakes or loses control, and will thus act in an unpredictable way. This unpredictable action is not an exception in the continuation of the habits, but rather points to the moment when a new subjectivity emerges. Such new subjectivity surfaces in Beckett's novels and plays in forms of literary innovation.     

Still Under the Act? Subjectivity and the State in Aboriginal North Queensland

ABSTRACT Both the colonial encapsulation and post‐colonial recognition of North Queensland's Aboriginal population have been achieved through legislative demarcation. This paper explores the way such demarcation has extended the influence of the state within local Aboriginal life‐worlds, focusing on the State of Queensland's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from Central Cape York Peninsula, and recent anthropological theorization of the state, I argue that anthropologists need to seriously consider Aboriginal claims about what Michel‐Rolph Trouillot calls ‘state effects’. But careful examination of these claims suggests that the state no longer simply imposes its projects on fundamentally distinct Aboriginal life‐worlds. Not only is the state now deeply engaged within these life‐worlds, it is also deeply interwoven into post‐colonial Aboriginal subjectivities.     

The Politics of Subjectivity in Vangelis Raptopoulos’s Urban Stories

In this article I offer a critical analysis of the spatial cultures of modern Athens through the urban portraits presented in three fictive stories by Vangelis Raptopoulos—“At the Bottom of the Sea” (Sto Vytho), “One-Way Street” (Monodromos), and “Long-Distance Call” (Yperastiko)—from his 1995 collection “In Pieces” (Kommatakia). I argue that by constructing first-person fictive narratives, written in confessional prose, Raptopoulos problematizes the notion of subjectivity in its varying relationships to modern urban and spatial cultures. My main focus is on the practice of subjective recitations of urban space in view of the narrator’s experiences of imaginative and physical spatial appropriation. I argue that these experiences and the fragmentary style, through which they are conveyed in the stories, are an incisive critique of the official planning practices of urban public space and prescribed practices of spatial mobility. By drawing on the critical-philosophical and critical-historical literature, with particular reference to Benjamin, Foucault, Lefebvre, and de Certeau, this article contributes to the broader critique of the politics of subjectivity in modern Europe.     

Precarious Debt: Microfinance Subjects and Intergenerational Dependency in Cambodia

This paper tells a story of debt within a rural Cambodian family in order to understand how microfinance produces more‐than‐individual financial subjects that are entangled in changing social relations of dependency. We draw upon 20 months of joint ethnographic research in Cambodia, where the microfinance industry is one of the largest per capita in the world. Informed by Judith Butler's notions of precariousness and precarity, we argue that even in the context of deepening financialisation, people's lives remain dependent upon others, especially within families. We analyse how these family relations of dependency are reworked along generational lines and spatially stretched due to precarious economic conditions of indebtedness, household migration, and distant labour markets. We conclude that reframing financial subjectivity in terms of precariousness helps us to analyse the relationship between households and financial markets, as well as inform a critical politics of finance.     

Spaces of care in the city: the place of a community drop-in centre

This paper explores the ways in which drop-in centres may at times function as spaces of care in the city. Drawing on participant observation research within a particular centre in Bristol, a city in south-west England, it focuses upon social relations within the drop-in space and the various subjectivities that were observed to emerge in this relational environment. Through a consideration of individuals who appeared to be positively assisted by their involvement in the drop-in, a sense is developed of the different ways in which such agencies may function as spaces of care. Use is made of Carl Rogers' notion of the core conditions for successful therapeutic encounter, as developed within the person-centred school of humanistic psychotherapy, to explicate these positive experiences. At the same time it was clear that some individuals found the drop-in to be a less than comfortable or even exclusionary environment. The paper concludes by reflecting on the broader significance of drop-in centres as caring environments and on the value of humanistic conceptions of therapeutic relation for interpreting organizational spacings of subjectivity.     

Milton,the passions,and the knowing body

ABSTRACT

This paper challenges the notion that Galenic humouralism stripped the early modern body of agency and argues that some accounts of early modern materialism were connected to epistemology. It evidences how Milton’s passions are inscribed with the shocking language of agency and moral responsibility to overturn the assumption of “passive”, unconscious passions. It explores two pictures of passions in connection with knowledge: passions as obstacles to knowledge, and passions as sources as knowledge. Both images recast the material body as a knowing agent, but do so with complications. Agency-ridden passions complicate a straightforward notion of agency, and seem to leave early moderns with the option of blaming their passions instead of themselves for deception. Frequent references to internal passions in political discourses also suggests an unsettling degree of comfort with subjectivity in making knowledge-statements, but it is a version of subjectivity that seems far more public than private.     

What can María Zambrano contribute to mediation and to the philosophy of mediation?

ABSTRACT

From a specific point of view, mediation is the process whereby a third party helps to change their attitude from an adversarial one to a collaborative one which allows them to work together in finding and creating solutions to their conflict. Mediation deals with conflict from its own perspective and it has its own status as a dispute resolution process in the systems of justice, where it is recognized. The Philosophy of Mediation has been developing as a discipline, which analyses the status of mediation as knowledge. It studies its nature, its constituent elements, its ontological foundations and its connection with other disciplines. This article argues that it is possible to include certain basic principles of the philosophy of María Zambrano in the Philosophy of Mediation framework. Those elements are essential for understanding the world of human conflict since they provide a new perspective from which to see dispute resolution methodologies. They can be summed up in the idea of including the hidden as the substrate of the visible, revealing the underlying forces of human existence. Within the context of the mediation, the understanding of these forces could help to resolve conflicts.     

Keeping cool: practicing domestic refrigeration and environmental responsibility

Domestic refrigerators have become symbols of climate change in energy efficiency campaigns; they are equipment that both permits and prohibits the performance of environmental citizenship. However, little is known about how subjectivities and practices interact, particularly with regard to questions about refrigeration and domestic energy. What might those of us interested in household sustainability learn from the relationships among refrigerators, energy, subjectivities, and practices, and from what these may reveal about environmental responsibility? We draw on data from mixed‐method qualitative research conducted with 28 households in Wollongong, Australia, and frame the analysis in terms of social practice theory, with additional attention to subjectivity. This framing helps us develop thinking about how refrigeration is done and consider whether and how things become waste by paying closer attention to the spatial imperatives underpinning these practices. It also assists us in considering how the ongoing relationships of social and material aspects of refrigeration co‐constitute a range of subjectivities. Further, our analysis advances discussions on how household practices and identities relate to public campaigns about environmental responsibility, particularly as the latter is constructed in terms of ‘energy efficiency’.     

The Personal is Political: Developing new subjectivities through participatory action research

Participatory action research (PAR) is gaining critical attention from scholars across the social sciences, and in the field of geography more specifically, as it promises a viable alternative for researchers concerned with social justice. If most of the benefits of PAR are identified in terms of its potential as a vehicle for social change and action, PAR's role in personal change is less understood. This paper considers the development of new subjectivities in a PAR process from a post-structural perspective. My objective is to reframe and connect the social justice orientation of PAR to a feminist post-structural project which emphasizes the fluidity and multiplicity of subject positions as the basis for personal (and social) transformation. Analysis draws upon collaborative research conducted with six young women in New York City and their project Makes Me Mad: Stereotypes of young urban womyn of color. Discussion addresses the role of critical reflection, dialogue, emotion, and narrative in the participatory research process. Building upon critical educator/theorist Paolo Freire's contributions to PAR, I address issues of power, scale, and the politics of location in order to contribute to understandings of spatial praxis.