scholarly journals The times and spaces of transplantation: queercrip histories as futurities

2021 ◽  
pp. medhum-2021-012199
Author(s):  
Donna McCormack

With a focus on Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu, this article explores how transplantation is part of the ongoing transformation of being in a body that is of the world. That is, it examines how we may require other ways of thinking bodies as constituted by histories, spaces and times that may be ignored in the biomedical arena. The Tiger Flu, I argue, calls for an intra- and inter-connected way of thinking how we treat bodies, and thereby ways of working with bodies affected by environmental disasters (both acute and ongoing capitalist and colonial projects), multiple selves and time as more than linear. I turn to queercrip as a way of defying a curative imaginary that dominates transplantation and in so doing examine the colonial, capitalist violence of present day living. I move through Eve Hayward’s and Karen Barad’s work to examine how the cut of transplantation is a transformation, as integral to the ongoing experience of having a body in the world and yet potentially unique in its force of bringing inter- and intra-relatedness to the fore of one’s existence. Rather than sick or cured, I argue that transplantation is a transformation that captures our bodily changes, how the environment constitutes the self, how parts may feel integral to the self or easily disposed of, how viscera may tie us to others, and how the future may only be forged through a re-turn to the past (of the donor and a pre-transplant self). Transplantation is not about loss of self or gaining of an other, but rather about rendering apparent our multispecies, multiworld ties, and thus how we are bound by the histories we forge and the futures we re-member.

2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-104
Author(s):  
Mario Lopez

Kyoto UniversityOver the past 20 years, computer games have become a very integral part of consumptive practices, acting as a guide to mediate multiple selves. This sets the context for this paper, a philosophical inquiry into the creation and mediation of ‘selves’ through the consumption of Japanese computer games, taking a detailed look at some of the symbolic and semiotic structures that permeate game structures. Games placed in the realm of human creativity and normative freedoms are as argued in this paper, a subtle form of the Deleuzian concept of assemblage.This paper argues that the ‘self’ as seen through computer games manifest multiple ‘selves’ that highlight the fluidity of identities which are being fabricated, disseminated and transmitted from Japan. Through an analysis of a number of Japanese games popular in Japan and actively consumed abroad, this paper examines an underlying grammar that transcribes the self and how social relations are reworked through technological enquiry. This paper further highlights how computer-dominated social practices that have heavily flowed from Japan have introduced very specific ontological ways of seeing the world to a whole generation of games players residing in other geographical spheres.


Author(s):  
Suzanne Raitt

For Sinclair, the past was a wound. She feared being unable to escape it, and she feared in turn her own persistence in a form that she could not control. Mystic ecstasy – what she called the “new mysticism” – was a way of entering a timeless realm in which there was no longer any past to damage her. But she was also fascinated by what could never be left behind – hence her interest in heredity, the unconscious, and the supernatural. However, the immanence of the future can also emancipate us from the past, in Sinclair’s view, and this is the key to why mystical experience was so immensely appealing to her. Mystical experience could take the self out of the body and thus out of past traumas and into the future. False dying – like that which creates ghosts – traps the psyche in its own pain and forces it to re-experience the suffering of its life; real dying – mystical dying – involves forgetting the self and the world.


Philosophies ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Giovanbattista Tusa

In this essay, I suggest that we are currently witnessing a mutation, which disrupts the mythical imaginary that had confined viruses, climate change, and atmospheric turbulences to an immutable background in the all-too-human narrative of the struggle against nature. I argue that the incapacity of translating this mutation in cultural and social terms, and the repression of this traumatic experience, are the cause of the perturbation that haunts our time. Disorientation pervades philosophy when the entire imaginary to which it had anchored its power to change the world seems to dissolve in the air, when what was silent and distant turns out to be vibrant, more familiar to us than any known proximity. Precisely for this reason, philosophy must rediscover its ability to inhabit times and spaces different from those oriented by the hegemony of capitalist progress, with its correlate of regular catastrophic emergencies and calculated risk. In this essay, I aim to present a perspective in which, instead of coming back straightforwardly ‘down to earth’, philosophy accepts inhabiting the fluctuating disorientation of its own time, itself populated by intermittent and uncertain opportunities of experiencing differently the past and the future—to encounter different relationships with the times that change.


The Eye ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (128) ◽  
pp. 19-22
Author(s):  
Gregory DeNaeyer

The world-wide use of scleral contact lenses has dramatically increased over the past 10 year and has changed the way that we manage patients with corneal irregularity. Successfully fitting them can be challenging especially for eyes that have significant asymmetries of the cornea or sclera. The future of scleral lens fitting is utilizing corneo-scleral topography to accurately measure the anterior ocular surface and then using software to design lenses that identically match the scleral surface and evenly vault the cornea. This process allows the practitioner to efficiently fit a customized scleral lens that successfully provides the patient with comfortable wear and improved vision.


Author(s):  
Donald C. Williams

This chapter is the first of this book to deal specifically with the metaphysics of time. This chapter defends the pure manifold theory of time. On this view, time is just another dimension of extent like the three dimensions of space, the past, present, and future are equally real, and the world is at bottom tenseless. What is true is eternally true. For example, it is now true that there will be a sea fight tomorrow or that there will not be a sea fight tomorrow. It is argued that the pure manifold theory does not entail fatalism and that contingent statements about the future do not imply that only the past and present exist.


Author(s):  
Mahesh K. Joshi ◽  
J.R. Klein

The world of work has been impacted by technology. Work is different than it was in the past due to digital innovation. Labor market opportunities are becoming polarized between high-end and low-end skilled jobs. Migration and its effects on employment have become a sensitive political issue. From Buffalo to Beijing public debates are raging about the future of work. Developments like artificial intelligence and machine intelligence are contributing to productivity, efficiency, safety, and convenience but are also having an impact on jobs, skills, wages, and the nature of work. The “undiscovered country” of the workplace today is the combination of the changing landscape of work itself and the availability of ill-fitting tools, platforms, and knowledge to train for the requirements, skills, and structure of this new age.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-248
Author(s):  
Engin Yilmaz ◽  
Yakut Akyön ◽  
Muhittin Serdar

AbstractCOVID-19 is the third spread of animal coronavirus over the past two decades, resulting in a major epidemic in humans after SARS and MERS. COVID-19 is responsible of the biggest biological earthquake in the world. In the global fight against COVID-19 some serious mistakes have been done like, the countries’ misguided attempts to protect their economies, lack of international co-operation. These mistakes that the people had done in previous deadly outbreaks. The result has been a greater economic devastation and the collapse of national and international trust for all. In this constantly changing environment, if we have a better understanding of the host-virus interactions than we can be more prepared to the future deadly outbreaks. When encountered with a disease which the causative is unknown, the reaction time and the precautions that should be taken matters a great deal. In this review we aimed to reveal the molecular footprints of COVID-19 scientifically and to get an understanding of the pandemia. This review might be a highlight to the possible outbreaks.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Rachel Wagner

Here I build upon Robert Orsi’s work by arguing that we can see presence—and the longing for it—at work beyond the obvious spaces of religious practice. Presence, I propose, is alive and well in mediated apocalypticism, in the intense imagination of the future that preoccupies those who consume its narratives in film, games, and role plays. Presence is a way of bringing worlds beyond into tangible form, of touching them and letting them touch you. It is, in this sense, that Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward observe the “re-emergence” of religion with a “new visibility” that is much more than “simple re-emergence of something that has been in decline in the past but is now manifesting itself once more.” I propose that the “new awareness of religion” they posit includes the mediated worlds that enchant and empower us via deeply immersive fandoms. Whereas religious institutions today may be suspicious of presence, it lives on in the thick of media fandoms and their material manifestations, especially those forms that make ultimate promises about the world to come.


2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Judith Middleton-Stewart

There were many ways in which the late medieval testator could acknowledge time. Behind each testator lay a lifetime of memories and experiences on which he or she drew, recalling the names of those ‘they had fared the better for’, those they wished to remember and by whom they wished to be remembered. Their present time was of limited duration, for at will making they had to assemble their thoughts and their intentions, make decisions and appoint stewards, as they prepared for their time ahead; but as they spent present time arranging the past, so they spent present time laying plans for the future. Some testators had more to bequeath, more time to spare: others had less to leave, less time to plan. Were they aware of time? How did they control the future? In an intriguing essay, A. G. Rigg asserts that ‘one of the greatest revolutions in man’s perception of the world around him was caused by the invention, sometime in the late thirteenth century, of the mechanical weight-driven clock.’ It is the intention of this paper to see how men’s (and women’s) perception of time in the late Middle Ages was reflected in their wills, the most personal papers left by ordinary men and women of the period.


2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-685 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Drayton

The contemporary historian, as she or he speaks to the public about the origins and meanings of the present, has important ethical responsibilities. ‘Imperial’ historians, in particular, shape how politicians and the public imagine the future of the world. This article examines how British imperial history, as it emerged as an academic subject since about 1900, often lent ideological support to imperialism, while more generally it suppressed or avoided the role of violence and terror in the making and keeping of the Empire. It suggests that after 2001, and during the Iraq War, in particular, a new Whig historiography sought to retail a flattering narrative of the British Empire’s past, and concludes with a call for a post-patriotic imperial history which is sceptical of power and speaks for those on the underside of global processes.


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