The Black Heroine in the Mirror: crossing the threshold of the specular image, the esoteric journey and the encounter with the annihilating I in Jordan Peele’s Us

Using the conceptual framework of the mirror-stage established by Lacan to describe the initial anchoring of the subject, this paper seeks to interrogate the mirror as the locus of a secondary elaboration of the hero’s journey which follows its traditional articulation adumbrated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. If the goal of the classic hero as Campbell suggests is to exit the nursery which represents the subject’s entrapment in Oedipal triangulation, this study posits that the successful selfrelease of the hero from the nursery simply sees him entering another nursery where the hero’s world is conceived of as a series of infinitely nested nurseries without exit. The mirror and its binding capture become the exemplary point of departure for the secondary elaboration of the journey for which, it turns out, the black heroine is the ideal adventurer. It is no wonder then that Jordan Peele’s Us is replete with mirrors functioning as cinematic signifiers for the portals effecting the subject’s displacement not towards an outer world of aggressive fathers and unobtainable ideal mothers; but, rather into a proximate encounter with the self, one precipitated by the mirror where the goal of the journey –the one that can only be revealed by the black heroine– is the apprehension of the “cipher of [her] moral destiny” and the unfathomable cartography of her true exit.

Spectrality as Decolonial Narrative Device for Colonial Experience in António Lobo Antunes’s O Esplendor de Portugal

This chapter explores how O Esplendor de Portugal by António Lobo Antunes deploys spectrality as a consistent and developed narrative device – an aesthetic mode of narrating colonial experience and subjectivities ensnared within imperial discourses. The novel’s narration is, for instance, constantly interrupted by voices from the past that participated in the colonist experience, incessantly interrupting the process of writing and the production of meaning. O Esplendor de Portugal demands that we engage with spectrality at both the level of writing and historicization – producing meaning in relation to particular events, as well as at the level of identity-formation. In this regard, the novel offers profound reflections as to the externality by which identity and subjectivity is formed within Empire. This leads the chapter toward a theoretical exploration of the relationship between specters and the Freudian/Lacanian specular image or ideal ego through which an individual becomes a subject within ideology. From here, the novel also guides this chapter toward yet another rethinking of Empire’s different layers of meaning and power.

Computational model for human 3D shape perception from a single specular image

In natural conditions the human visual system can estimate the 3D shape of specular objects even from a single image. Although previous studies suggested that the orientation field plays a key role for 3D shape perception from specular reflections, its computational plausibility and possible mechanisms have not been investigated. In this study, to complement the orientation field information, we first add prior knowledge that objects are illuminated from above and utilize the vertical polarity of the intensity gradient. Then we construct an algorithm that incorporates these two image cues to estimate 3D shapes from a single specular image. We evaluated the algorithm with glossy and mirrored surfaces and found that 3D shapes can be recovered with a high correlation coefficient of around 0.8 with true surface shapes. Moreover, under a specific condition, the algorithm’s errors resembled those made by human observers. These findings show that the combination of the orientation field and the vertical polarity of the intensity gradient is computationally sufficient and probably reproduces essential representations used in human shape perception from specular reflections.

Corrupting Politics

The chapter explores the relationship between culturalism and liberalism in modern Arabic. It argues that internal contradictions from within Arabic thought haunt the attempt to define the Arabs as an organicist community. These contradictions within particular identity are expressed in the pervasive anxiety about habits and language. Anxiety emerges when there is a crisis in imaginary identification, it is generated as a remainder of acknowledging the self in a specular image: the mirror of language, the Arab’s moustache. It emerges from a process of misrecognition, when uncanny elements within identity itself become overwhelming. Rather than read the discourse on habits as a desire for Western modernity the chapter argues against a non-dialectical pitting of culture (Arab, non-West) against liberalism (West), which forecloses the real loss that is generated from this modern antinomy: the retreat and scarcity of politics in both liberalism and culturalism.

Greek Literature

As Aeschines famously said, phēmē (‘fame’) can't be trusted: that's why ‘famously’ so often prefaces a mistaken report. Karen ní Mheallaigh knows that in Gorgias B23 it is the sophisticated audience which is deceived, and she understands the ‘contractual’ relationship that Gorgias posits between audience and author (e.g. 30, 32, 78). But, making the fatal mistake of calling it ‘Gorgias’ famous dictum’, she hallucinates a reference to madness and says that ‘what is at stake…is the confusion between reality and representation, which is a measure either of the audience's lack of sophistication, or of the artist's supreme skill’ (29). Her invitation to ‘read with imagination, and with pleasure’ (xi) succeeds admirably. Reading her exploration of the self-conscious, extremely sophisticated, and persistently playful fictionality of Lucian (Toxaris, Philopseudes, True Stories) and others (Antonius Diogenes, Dictys and Dares, Ptolemy Chennus) was, for me, an intensely stimulating and pleasurable experience. But the Gorgias aberration was not the only thing that also often made it annoying. ‘The irony that pervades Lucian's work…is not a symptom of exhaustion but of exuberance’ (37): doesn't that state the obvious? ‘Having read Toxaris, it is difficult to read Chaereas and Callirhoe without feeling its improbable storyishness’ (49): is that any less difficult for those who haven't read Toxaris? ‘Is Toxaris a dialogue about friendship, or about fiction?’ (67): the headline answer (‘both: for the theme of friendship is itself entwined with the dynamics of fiction in the dialogue’) is undercut by what follows, which reductively treats the friendship theme as a pretext and pretence (‘in Lucian's work, fiction is almost invariably enjoyed under the pretext of doing or talking about something else, and Toxaris is no exception: it is a dialogue about novelistic narrative, masquerading as a dialogue about friendship’; my emphasis). A fictional speaker's oath ‘compels the reader into acquiescence that the story he is listening to is true’ (68, original emphasis): how is that possible when (given the existence of perjury) even non-fictional oaths don't have that power? Is it true that a ‘constant oscillation between the poles of belief and disbelief…takes place in the reader's mind when (s)he reads fiction’ (70)? The internal audience may be waveringly doubtful about the status of what they are hearing, but sophisticated external audiences of fiction are capable of maintaining a complex attitude free of oscillation. ‘The reader must wonder whether (s)he is him or herself contained within that remote specular image on the Moon, a minute mirror image of a reader and a book, within the very book (s)he is now holding’ (226): that's not the ‘must’ of necessity, since I don't wonder that at all. Am I violating some ‘must’ of obligation? But why should anyone be obliged to wonder anything so daft? I was not disturbed by ‘the disturbing idea that every reality may be a narrative construct, another diegesis in which we are the characters, being surveyed by some remote and unseen reader, perhaps right now’ (225; compare 207), nor unsettled by ‘the unsettling possibility that the real world outside Lucian's text could be just as fictional, if not more so, than the world inside the book’ (230; compare 8). If you are of a nervous disposition, do not read this book: thirty-six occurrences of ‘anxiety’ and ‘anxious’ might make you jittery. Otherwise, read it, enjoy it, and (from time to time) shout at it in frustration.