scholarly journals New Gorgons, Still Lives

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Mazzola

Death assumes many faces in Macbeth, but the variety of corpses and ghosts which tyrannise the play’s protagonist signals problems larger than one man’s ruthlessness or paranoia. Contemporary ballads often feature similar ontological confusion about where and how life ends, sometimes imagining the dead with the same sense of their vital non-being, moral authority, cunning magic, and important place in the community. Like Macbeth, these ballads also powerfully theorise the way offical power reconfigures social space, reconstructing neighborhoods as places of surveillance and households as sites of neglect, streets as settings where poverty spreads, and families as traps where new life gets put out. In fastening their gaze upon dead bodies which subvert rot and defy decay, Macbeth and contemporary ballads picture the collective social body as something that sprawls and suffers and moves but does not grow, something that the state keeps alive but also near death.

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-101
Author(s):  
Daniella Kuzmanovic

Dead bodies are symbolically effective in the context of politics, and enjoy a particular connection with affect. The mass-mediated mobilizations around Hrant Dink and the dead body of Dink suggest that there is indeed something about Katherine Verdery’s insight. Dink was a Turkish citizen of Armenian descent, editor, civic activist and a controversial public figure in Turkey. He was assassinated in 2007. Rather than focusing on the Armenian aspect in context of Turkish nationalism in order to grasp the efficacy of Dink and of his dead body, this article dwells on the intertwinement between his dead body and experiences of state subjects in Turkey. I argue that the efficacy of Dink, the semantic and affective density generated by way of the dead body, is produced in a conjuncture where neither meanings around the body and the person it embodied, nor of the state will stabilize.


Author(s):  
Orlando Coutinho ◽  
◽  

The way in which an unknown virus has moved from a local to a global case, taking on a pandemic outline, has caused significant changes in the lives of all human beings. Firstly, for that reason, it is unknown, then because behind the ignorance comes mistrust and fear. Nowadays, these ingredients are - in the political-social space - substance for the biggest factors of action and decision of the actors of the power. Have we been in a war context, as some have said? Was confinement, global and so prolonged, really necessary? Was decreeing a state of emergency essential? Were the exception measures proportional? And are they reversible? This article aims, in the way of the ideas of several authors that thinking about the political philosophical role of health contexts, of exception state, and of political control of the State, in face of public health issues and not only, understand the “state of the art” in the way of governing western democracies, in the firstly, but flying over other geographies and systems as the virus has assumed global contours. And, by means of the concrete measures, politically adopted, by the different political actors, what real impacts they had on the life and the institutions working, and on the psychology of the persons individually or socially considered.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-318
Author(s):  
Reine-Marie Bérard ◽  
Dominique Castex

The high number of dead bodies to deal with in time of mortality crises (events marked by an unusually high number of dead in a limited amount of time) often leads to modifications in the traditional funerary practices of a society. This contribution questions the way Ancient Greeks, from the 8th till the 3rd century BC, handled such mortality crises, focusing on mass burials. In a first methodological part, we discuss the means to identify funerary sites related to mortality crises, using the methods of archaeothanatology. By confronting archaeological features (taphonomic processes, position of the remains, grave type, offerings, etc.) and bioanthropological data (number of dead, sex, age, pathologies, etc.), we will first define the main characteristics of mass burials. We will then question how to discriminate between mass burials linked to war, epidemics, massacres and famine, underlining the major importance of historical sources in this process. The second part is dedicated to the study of various cases from Athens, Paros, Chaeronea, Tanagra and Greek Sicily and their interpretation. We will argue that epidemic mass burials are the most difficult to identify, since they may present innumerable variations in terms of osteoprofiles and archaeological features. Finally, we will question our abilities, as archaeoanthropologists, to evaluate the impact of epidemics on the funerary treatment of the dead in the Ancient world.


2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Truscott

Considerable reason exists to view the mind, and language within it, as modular, and this view has an important place in research and theory in second language acquisition (SLA) and beyond. But it has had very little impact on the study of working memory and its role in SLA. This article considers the need for modular study of working memory, looking at the state of common approaches to the subject and the evidence for modularity, and then considering what working memory should look like in a modular mind. It then sketches a research program to explore working memory within a modular mind and particularly its role in SLA. This is followed by a brief look at the way that the Modular Online Growth and Use of Language (MOGUL) approach can serve as a framework for such a program.


Muzealnictwo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 0-0
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Marta Głąb

Pancasila refers to the five rules which constitute the philosophical basis for the functioning of the “imagined nation” of Indonesia, announced on 1 June 1945 by Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia. From the very beginning, Pancasila aroused great emotions and was subjected to various interpretations. The ways in which it was understood as the fundaments of the state also varied many times from 1945. One thing beyond any doubt is that Pancasila has shaped Indonesian society, even though it has repeatedly been redefined and its significance questioned. The Pancasila Sakti Museum holds a particularly important place in the history of Indonesia and the memory of the inhabitants of this multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multilingual archipelago. It is the best-known museum complex from the rule of General Suharto (1965–1998) for whom the state’s identity, culture, tradition and art became one of the most important elements of politics. For him the museum became the ideological foundation of the Orde Baru or New Order, as the time of his reign is referred to. To this day, it is a place of commemoration in the meaning of a lieu de mémoire. It is also a traumatic place marked by the martyrs’ death of seven generals in 1965. In the way it is constructed, it resembles a sanctuary where the deceased generals are “victims” as understood by Durkheim, who appear as instances sanctifying torment and fighting purposes. The article reveals the circumstances of the museum’s founding, the history of its development, and above all its significance in establishing the state’s identity for the Indonesian people.


2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
JESSICA AUCHTER

AbstractImmigrant deaths have increased in recent years due to changes in border enforcement practices, yet less attention has been paid to the memorialisation of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border. This article explores the ordering mechanisms of statecraft through an examination of how the dead bodies of undocumented migrants pose a resistance to these mechanisms. I first lay out my conception of statecraft and the bordering practices involved in this specific context, then address the memorialisation of undocumented immigrants who lost their lives crossing the border. The article embarks on a journey through anonymous desert gravesites and small desert cemeteries haunted by the spectres of immigration. It explores the contestation surrounding memorialisation of death through the monument, the narratives of anonymity surrounding the memorialisation of undocumented immigrants, and the counter-memory discourses that emerge in an effort to rewrite the meaning of these migrant deaths. These counter-memorial discourses, I argue, posit desert border monuments as a threat to statecraft because they cannot be situated within the (b)ordering mechanisms of the state.


PhaenEx ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 195
Author(s):  
DARREN HUTCHINSON

This essay investigates the way in which dying and dead bodies resist poetic incorporation and the way in which such bodies can be fugitively attested to through fictive prose. It examines Heidegger's treatment of dead and dying bodies from Being and Time to his later work on poetry and language, and it offers as a counterpoint another mode of addressing these bodies found in the fiction of Poe. It also shows how even the poetry of Trakl, heralded by Heidegger as an exemplar of poetic address, can be fruitfully understood in prosaic terms, terms which more faithfully reveal both the content of his poetry itself as well as the true nature of the wounds of dying life.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Akihiko Shimizu

This essay explores the discourse of law that constitutes the controversial apprehension of Cicero's issuing of the ultimate decree of the Senate (senatus consultum ultimum) in Catiline. The play juxtaposes the struggle of Cicero, whose moral character and legitimacy are at stake in regards to the extra-legal uses of espionage, with the supposedly mischievous Catilinarians who appear to observe legal procedures more carefully throughout their plot. To mitigate this ambivalence, the play defends Cicero's actions by depicting the way in which Cicero establishes the rhetoric of public counsel to convince the citizens of his legitimacy in his unprecedented dealing with Catiline. To understand the contemporaneousness of Catiline, I will explore the way the play integrates the early modern discourses of counsel and the legal maxim of ‘better to suffer an inconvenience than mischief,’ suggesting Jonson's subtle sensibility towards King James's legal reformation which aimed to establish and deploy monarchical authority in the state of emergency (such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). The play's climactic trial scene highlights the display of the collected evidence, such as hand-written letters and the testimonies obtained through Cicero's spies, the Allbroges, as proof of Catiline's mischievous character. I argue that the tactical negotiating skills of the virtuous and vicious characters rely heavily on the effective use of rhetoric exemplified by both the political discourse of classical Rome and the legal discourse of Tudor and Jacobean England.


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