Disciplining the Dasi: Cintamani and the Politics of a New Sexual Economy

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sundar Kaali
Keyword(s):  
The Real ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Cultural Margins

This article analyzes the representation of the figure of the dasi in early Tamil film. Against the backdrop of the abolition of the devadasi system in the Madras Presidency and the reformist activity associated with it, the article attempts to look at how the figure of the dasi underwent a strong repression in the cinematic discourses of the 1930s and 1940s. This was part of nationalist modernity, a project that sought to secure a new sexual economy in which the dasi was eventually narrativized out of Tamil film and pushed to the cultural margins of Tamil society. The article focuses on one film, Cintamani or Bilvamangal (1937) and shows how in this text the repression of the figure of the dasi was accompanied by an irruption of the real, the “uncanny.” It argues that there existed a nexus between sexuality and vision in early Tamil film, and that cinema itself acted as a safeguard against the trouble of the excessive sexuality embodied in the dasi.

The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin’s The Miracle (2009)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlad Strukov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Temporal Perspective ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The World ◽  
Ontological Sense ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Lost Object

The Miracle documents the introduction of the symbolic into the real by means of sensing the lack, or in Lacan’s terms, the lack-of-being. The lost object—whether voice, memory or senses—is the ultimate horror because it reveals the uncanny voids in the discourse. Being is conceived simultaneously in the ontological sense of openness within which ideas emerge, and being in the noumenal sense of the world, or of entities separated in the world from the temporal perspective—the vibrations of time and culture. The symbolic is the ontological horizon of Being whereas its anterior is the lack-of-being, that is, the there-of-Being (Dasein) lacks its place in the order of reality. The symbolic mode is characterised by the minimal gap between its elements and places they occupy: as Lacan noted, in order for the gap between elements to occur, something has to be fundamentally excluded. What happens in psychosis—and in The Miracle—is precisely the inclusion of this lacking object into the frame of ‘reality’. It appears within the constructed world as the hallucinated, or imagined, or mystified object: the voice, which in this case equals the gaze, haunts the cultural discourse as paranoiac.

scholarly journals From Wunderkammern to Kinect - The Creation of Shadow Worlds

Leonardo ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 330-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chara Lewis ◽  
Kristin Mojsiewicz ◽  
Anneké Pettican ◽  
Keyword(s):  
White Light ◽  
3D Scanning ◽  
The Self ◽  
Still Life ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Creation

This paper focuses on two projects, Still Life No. 1 and Shadow Worlds | Writers' Rooms [Brontë Parsonage], to reveal the creative approaches the authors take to site, technology, and the self in their production of shadow worlds as sites of wonder. Informed by the uncanny (re-animation and the double) and an interest in the limen (thresholds in the real and virtual realms), the projects explore white light and infrared digital 3D scanning technologies as tools for capture and transformation. The authors will discuss how they suture the past with the present and ways that light slips secretly between us, revealing other realms.

Chopin Dreams: The Mazurka in C# Minor, Op. 30, No. 4

2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 238-260
Author(s):  
Michael Klein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
The Real ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Subject

Abstract This article views Chopin's Mazurka in C# Minor, op. 30, no. 4, as akin to a dream that is open to analysis from a Lacanian perspective. After a discussion of Jacques Lacan's famous orders of subjectivity (the imaginary, the symbolic order, and the Real), the article turns to his idea that a symptom is a message from the Real that demands interpretation. As such, strange moments in Chopin's Mazurka are like symptoms that require multiple interpretations in order to approach their hidden and overlapping meanings. The article proceeds to view Chopin's Mazurka through nineteenth-century notions of Orientalism (alterity), nationalism (nostalgia), coming to life (the automaton), tuberculosis (the boundary of life and death), and the uncanny (fragmentation of the body/mind). But just as Lacan argued that we can never reach a final meaning for a symptom, the article concludes that there can be no transcendental signified for the various symptomatic moments in Chopin's Mazurka. In the end, the Mazurka becomes what Lacan calls a sinthome, a form of subjectivity that is made up of the very symptoms that the subject strives to understand.

scholarly journals Ophelia’s Ghost

2012 ◽  
pp. 151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Wynne-Davies
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Female Character ◽  
The Real ◽  
Female Suicide ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Death By Drowning

This essay takes as its starting point the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet directed by Greg Doran in order to explore the ways in which Ophelia’s death and burial might be used to disturb dominant cultural codes. As such, it focuses upon the regulatory discourses framing three female subjects: the legal and religious rules governing suicide, in particular the inquest’s record of the death by drowning of Katherine Hamlet in 1579; the account of Ophelia’s death and her “maimed rites” in the Gravedigger’s scene; and the performance of Mariah Gale in the “mad scene.” In each case the female body is perceived to breach expected boundaries: the way in which the real girl’s death presents a series of questions about temporal and spiritual laws; the engagement of the play with those legal and religious discourses by locating the female character as a disturbing absence; and the use of the actress’s body in order to reiterate in performance the sense of threat encountered in the text. In so doing it employs the theories of the abject and the uncanny as discussed by Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva in order to locate where the text’s distorted repetitions uncover the tenuousness of the cultural codes used to regulate the Early Modern understanding of female suicide.

scholarly journals The Virtual World of Pynchon’s Fabulation: Against the Day Lit World

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 769
Author(s):  
Razieh Rahmani
Keyword(s):  
Virtual World ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modus Operandi ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Alternative Systems ◽  
The World

Adapting Deleuze’s conceptualization of the virtual, this study shows that Against the Day intends to undermine our narrow conception of reality by surpassing the actualities of the known world. In the darkness of the novel, “the virtual” lurks; the novel is a travel against the day, against the actual world to an actual-virtual world, toward “the nights” which “will be dark enough for whatever visions must transpire across them, no longer to be broken into by light” (Pynchon, 2006, 1083).   Indeed, the presence of mysterious, paranormal, and magical events (such as the uncanny tales of ghosts, séances, visions, hallucinations, and other-dimensional interventions) along with actual events functions as a defiant modus operandi against the actual-oriented, secular Western Philosophy. That is, through virtual occurrences, lines of flight are created (from the real/actual) offering alternative systems of looking at the world.

Reality is Just a Dream: The Significance of the Uncanny in Christopher Nolan’s Inception

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Vyskocil
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Perceived Reality ◽  
Open Window ◽  
Psychoanalytic Interpretation

In this research essay, the author argues a psychoanalytic interpretation of Christopher Nolan's film Inception: that it is impossible to know the real world.  Furthermore, that uncanny experiences serve as reminder of the real world, but that we need to forget the real world and accept our perceived reality in order to continue functioning.  The train, the open window, Mal and even the children are presented as elements of the uncanny.

‘The Times in Which We Live’: Freud's The Uncanny, World War I, and the Trauma of Contagion

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-190
Author(s):  
John Zilcosky
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
World War ◽  
Atmospheric Effect ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Times ◽  
Personal Trauma

The effect of World War I on Freud is well known, yet its relation to The Uncanny (1919) remains mysterious. Although scholars have mentioned the war's atmospheric effect, I ask: What if the connection to The Uncanny is more essential and profound, as exemplified by the essay's many implicit references to the war: its recalling of the return of the fallen and of burial alive in the trenches; of a 1917 British story about trauma in colonial New Guinea; and, through ‘The Sandman,’ of E.T.A. Hoffmann's own experiences of shock during the Napoleonic Wars? The fact that Freud does not connect these traumas directly to ‘uncanniness’ speaks to the problem they pose – for him and for psychoanalytic theory in general. This silence creates an uncanny effect within the essay itself: The Uncanny stages the same ‘return of the repressed’ that it diagnoses. I aim, first, to delineate this staging and, later, propose its conceptual relevance. The shadow of the war forces us to understand the ‘uncanny’ differently: not just as a personal trauma but as a social symptom of the repression of this suffering. The real horror of the uncanny, Freud's essay teaches us, is not our own but the other's trauma – as embodied in wartime Europe by the ‘war neurotic’ and his apparently contagious affliction.

Scanning electron microscopy of human iliac bone by a simple preparation method

1990 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 226-227
Author(s):  
Toshihiko Takita ◽  
Tomonori Naguro ◽  
Toshio Kameie ◽  
Akihiro Iino ◽  
Kichizo Yamamoto
Keyword(s):  
Electron Microscopy ◽  
Scanning Electron Microscopy ◽  
Preparation Method ◽  
Specimen Preparation ◽  
Real Surface ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Preparation Methods ◽  
The Real ◽  
Simple Preparation ◽  
Scanning Electron

Recently with the increase in advanced age population, the osteoporosis becomes the object of public attention in the field of orthopedics. The surface topography of the bone by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) is one of the most useful means to study the bone metabolism, that is considered to make clear the mechanism of the osteoporosis. Until today many specimen preparation methods for SEM have been reported. They are roughly classified into two; the anorganic preparation and the simple preparation. The former is suitable for observing mineralization, but has the demerit that the real surface of the bone can not be observed and, moreover, the samples prepared by this method are extremely fragile especially in the case of osteoporosis. On the other hand, the latter has the merit that the real information of the bone surface can be obtained, though it is difficult to recognize the functional situation of the bone.

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