The Karma of Love

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-76
Author(s):  
Cuong T. Mai
Keyword(s):  
The Uncanny ◽  
Moral Metaphysics

This essay examines Vietnamese tales of marvels [kỳ] and the uncanny [quái] composed in Literary Sinitic and offers close readings of four narratives through focusing on the theme of predestined love [duyên]. The essay shows that the discourse of duyên was embedded in both Confucian and Daoist voices and that this reflected a common cultural repertoire in which the discourse of social karma was a part of a shared moral metaphysics. The essay offers a theory and methodology for examining tales of marvels and the uncanny, arguing that heretofore scholars have read around the depictions of religious phenomena, rather than by means of them.

Reading and Interpreting Variants inCome and Go,Va-et-vientandKommen und Gehen

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-86
Author(s):  
Pascale Sardin
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
French Translation ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Famous Paper ◽  
Textual Variants ◽  
Insight Into

This paper focuses on textual variants in Come and Go, Va-et-vient and Kommen und Gehen and considers these variants as thresholds (Genette, 1997) into these works. This paper aims to show how Beckett's self-translating process, which was prolonged and complicated in the case of his plays when he directed them himself, produces a number of possible textual confusions, but also how these complications constitute insight into the Beckettian text. Indeed variants and rewritings point to moments in the writing and rewriting process when Beckett met ‘resistant vitalities’ mentioned by George Steiner in After Babel (1975). To illustrate this, I study Beckett's first ‘dramaticule’, Come and Go, by examining its pre-texts, the French translation, and Beckett's production notebooks for Kommen und Gehen. In these texts, I explore the motifs of death and ocular anxiety, as studied by Freud in his famous paper on ‘The Uncanny.’ I show how the Freudian uncanny actually reveals the parodic archaism of Beckett's drama, as a parallel is drawn between the structure of Beckett's play and Greek tragedy. Beckett's sometimes ‘messy’ rewritings in Come and Go, Va-et-vient and Kommen und Gehen served the performing intuitive perception in us of death, an issue explored here through the trope of femininity. Furthermore, comparing Beckett's Come and Go and Va-et-vient makes it easier to see Beckett progressing towards what Deleuze called a ‘theatre of metamorphoses and permutations’ in Difference and Repetition – a monograph published in France the very year Come and Go was first produced (1966).

‘Behind the Poetic Fiction’: Freud, Schnitzler and Feminine Subjectivity

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-223
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Goodstein
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Arthur Schnitzler ◽  
Feminine Subjectivity ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Poetic Fiction ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theories

In 1922 Sigmund Freud wrote to fellow Viennese author and dramatist Arthur Schnitzler: ‘I believe I have avoided you out of a sort of fear of my double’. Through a series of reflections on this imagined doubling and its reception, this paper demonstrates that the ambivalent desire for his literary other attested by Freud's confession goes to the heart of both theoretical and historical questions regarding the nature of psychoanalysis. Bringing Schnitzler's resistance to Freud into conversation with attempts by psychoanalytically oriented literary scholars to affirm the Doppengängertum of the two men, it argues that not only psychoanalytic theories and modernist literature but also the tendency to identify the two must be treated as historical phenomena. Furthermore, the paper contends, Schnitzler's work stands in a more critical relationship to its Viennese milieu than Freud's: his examination of the vicissitudes of feminine desire in ‘Fräulein Else’ underlines the importance of what lies outside the oedipal narrative through which the case study of ‘Dora’ comes to be centered on the uncanny nexus of identification with and anxious flight from the other.

Trading faces: Complete AI face doubles avoid the uncanny valley

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Welker ◽  
David France ◽  
Alice Henty ◽  
Thalia Wheatley
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Uncanny Valley ◽  
Torture Survivors ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Full Face ◽  
The Impact

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) enable the creation of videos in which a person appears to say or do things they did not. The impact of these so-called “deepfakes” hinges on their perceived realness. Here we tested different versions of deepfake faces for Welcome to Chechnya, a documentary that used face swaps to protect the privacy of Chechen torture survivors who were persecuted because of their sexual orientation. AI face swaps that replace an entire face with another were perceived as more human-like and less unsettling compared to partial face swaps that left the survivors’ original eyes unaltered. The full-face swap was deemed the least unsettling even in comparison to the original (unaltered) face. When rendered in full, AI face swaps can appear human and avoid aversive responses in the viewer associated with the uncanny valley.

The Uncanny Valley

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessy Rose Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Uncanny Valley ◽  
The Uncanny

“Fairy of Light”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penny Farfan
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
New Women ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
The Uncanny

This chapter focuses on Loie Fuller’s Fire Dance to exemplify the interplay between performer and character as a central aspect of queer modernist performance that was foregrounded through the uncanny qualities of Fuller’s work. Charting Fire Dance from its origins in Fuller’s 1895 version of Salome through to its reworking as a solo and its reappearance in her autobiography, the chapter traces a queer genealogy of uncanny doubles that included Oscar Wilde, Salome, heretical witches, and new women in an incremental layering of queer and feminist resonances that flickered into view through Fuller’s experiment in illuminated dance. The uncanny in Fuller’s work thus emanated from an integral and coproductive relationship between modernist aesthetics and sexual queerness that intersected through her performing body in an intensification of the interplay between character and role, onstage and offstage, and representation and presence that was a crucial facet of queer modernist performance.

Digital Uncanny

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
Keyword(s):  
Feedback Loop ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Repressed Memories ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Data Flows ◽  
Human Gestures ◽  
New Type

We are confronted with a new type of uncanny experience, an uncanny evoked by parallel processing, aggregate data, and cloud-computing. The digital uncanny does not erase the uncanny feeling we experience as déjà vu or when confronted with robots that are too lifelike. Today’s uncanny refers to how nonhuman devices (surveillance technologies, algorithms, feedback, and data flows) anticipate human gestures, emotions, actions, and interactions, intimating we are machines and our behavior is predicable because we are machinic. It adds another dimension to those feelings we get when we question whether our responses are subjective or automated—automated as in reducing one’s subjectivity to patterns of data and using those patterns to present objects or ideas that would then elicit one’s genuinely subjective—yet effectively preset—response. This anticipation of our responses is a feedback loop we have produced by designing software that studies our traces, inputs, and moves. Digital Uncanny explores how digital technologies, particularly software systems working through massive amounts of data, are transforming the meaning of the uncanny that Freud tied to a return of repressed memories, desires, and experiences to their anticipation. Through a close reading of interactive and experimental art works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bill Viola, Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley, and Garth Paine, this book is designed to explore how the digital uncanny unsettles and estranges concepts of “self,” “affect,” “feedback,” and “aesthetic experience,” forcing us to reflect on our relationship with computational media and our relationship to others and our experience of the world.

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