Intimacy and its violation: on the experience of illness in contemporary women's poetry

This article discusses selected aspects of the problem of self-perception by a sick individual, specific to the poetry of Polish women of the last few decades. The aim of the analysis is to show that the body is central to the illness experience and that a new type of intimacy appears in connection with its ailment. This is a „clinical intimacy”, the specificity of which is defined by a confrontation with suffering, the proliferation of the feeling of isolation, the intensity of emotions related to making the body public, its discovery and exposure in a hospital setting. The issue of „gender expropriation” in a marginal situation is also important, as is the scar, wound, physical violation of the body boundary, read as the „punctum” of the patient's body. The interpretation emphasises the individualization of artistic representations of the aforementioned aspects of „clinical intimacy”. The anthropological research perspective adopted in the sketch allows for the diagnosis of the subject matter in the context of the process of shaping subjective identity.

Subjective Identity Concealability and the Consequences of Fearing Identity-Based Judgment

In intergroup contexts, people may fear being judged negatively because of an identity they hold. For some, the prospect of concealment offers an opportunity to attenuate this fear. Therefore, believing an identity is concealable may minimize people’s fears of identity-based judgment. Here, we explore the construct of subjective identity concealability: the belief that an identity one holds is concealable from others. Across four pre-registered studies and a set of internal meta-analyses, we develop and validate a scale to measure individual differences in subjective identity concealability and provide evidence that it is associated with lower levels of the psychological costs of fearing judgment in intergroup contexts. Open materials, data, and code for all studies, pre-registrations for Studies 1–4, and online supplementary materials can be found at the following link: https://osf.io/pzcf9/ .

A Critical Analysis of the Eurocentric Dimensions of Ghose's Aesthetic Views

The present article has attempted to discuss the essential Eurocentrism of the Anglophone Pakistani writer Zulfikar Ghose that has shaped his subjective identity as well as literary outlook. The argument has used Frantz Fanon's theorization about the colonized intellectual whose exposure to foreign culture engenders anxiety and eventually becomes a precondition for his cognitive maturation. However, reading Ghose's prose, we find no traces of any such conflict in his subjective and artistic expression as he chooses to call himself a native-alien with an ambivalence which, turns many times, into an alienation, even outright rejection of his native identity as an Indian-Pakistani. The article concludes that instead of coming to terms with his native subjectivity, Ghose's voice remains Eurocentric as it is predominantly based on an explicit admiration and identification with the dominant English culture and his simultaneous distance from his native culture and its historical memory.

Creation of author’s lexical and semantic dictionary in the dramaturgical practice of Oleksandr Irvanеts

The subject of the research is the lexical and semantic features of the carnival-ironic dramatic writing by Oleksandr Irvanets. The object of the research is the dramas “A Little Play about Betrayal for an Actress”, “Electric Train for Easter”, “Recording”, “Live Broadcast” and “Liar from Lithuanian Square”. The purpose of the article is to analyze the writer’s dramas through the prism of keywords, author’s semantic constructions, neologisms and other features of artistic language. Lexical-semantic and stylistic analyzes are an effective method for achieving this goal. As a result of the research it was found that in his dramas O. Irvanets exposes Soviet myths to aesthetic destruction and formulates a number of artistically camouflaged questions related to the civilizational choice of post-totalitarian Ukraine and addressed to readers / listeners / viewers of his works. Issues of totalitarian traumatic experience of Ukrainians and its postcolonial experience, simulated reality and its aesthetic representations, subjectivity / non-subjectivity of Ukrainians at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, return of Ukrainians to their own language and mental values become important for the writer in his dramatic work. He does not declare these issues directly, but resolves them at the levels of global conceptual metaphors, symbolic field, authorial word formation, anti-utopian modes, associations and allusions, combination of multilingual and multidisciplinary fragments and remarks, ardent discussions, including internal ones. This whole register of means is designed to encourage Ukrainians, both in the first post-Soviet decade and in subsequent years, to self-awareness, civilizational self-determination, and the search for their own subjective identity. The novelty of the study lies in the interpretation of texts on the basis of identified lexical and semantic features. The perspective of the research is to consider its results in the context of all the works of O. Irvanets, as well as with the lexical and semantic features of the works of other playwrights-postmodernists.

Passion and Reason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Irigarayan Feminine Divine

This paper examines Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece Jane Eyre (1848) through Irigaray’s notion of feminine divine in order to argue how Charlotte Brontë’s main characters achieve their autonomous gendered identity by expressing their erotic desire. It discusses the resistance of Charlotte Brontë’s female protagonist, Jane Eyre, to the dichotomies of active subject/passive object, self/other, body/mind, passion/intellect, and the domination/submission through her ethical and intersubjective relationship with Rochester, her counterpart, rather than being an object of his desire. It is argued how Jane challenges these dualities of patriarchal society and the logic of the same by expressing her erotic nature. Where the patriarchal society tries to confine women in the patriarchal culture, Brontë develops Jane within and against those confines and allows her to experience her female desire by exploring the internal and external nature. Jane’s liberation from the dualities can be read through the lens of Irigaray’s feminine divine which focuses on women’s autonomous gendered identity and creates a balance between their passion and reason. Charlotte Brontë indicates how women are able to achieve individuality, social standing, and subjective identity by expressing their female desire.

Mindset as a value-related and conceptual factor of economic development of post-colonial states

The authors substantiate connection between the mindset and the state of social and economic development of post-colonial states which allowed to elucidate some of still underinvestigated cause and effect relations between the spiritual world of a nation and economic and industrial relations objectified within the social processes. By the example of 20 post-colonial states, it has been proven that economic prosperity became possible in the societies mentally oriented towards individualism. Mindset is a dynamically alterable value-related and conceptual «core» of the nation. Depending on how far the society is prepared to undergo changes and consciously assert its own subjective identity, will it ensure whether the colonial past would become its death «sentence» or a «launch platform» for its subsequent economic upturn.

Ali Smith’s There But For The: Identity, Hospitality and Transcendence in the Age of Surveillance

The aim of this essay is to prove that, throughout Ali Smith’s There But For The (2011), the “narrative” subjective identity (Alphen 83) accessed via the face-to-face relation (Levinas and Hand 42), as well as through storytelling itself, is liable to be turned into archivable information under the pressures of a surveillance state in which its citizens are complicit. I will use this archival/narrative identity dyad as articulated by theorist Ernst van Alphen in order to investigate at length the novel’s staging of hospitality as corrupted by surveillance. I will oppose the notion of identity as information against Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of the face-to-face relation (Levinas and Hand 42), whereby true hospitality depends upon the mutual respect one person has for the absolute singularity of the other, which involves personal information and the right to privacy. As it will become apparent, these identities lose or gain agency according to the engagement of the self with a newly arrived foreign alterity. Thus, the arrival of strangers throughout Smith’s novel thematizes the scenario of hospitality in tension with the stranger as surveyor or as surveyed. The doubling of language, the self-editing of one’s discourse and the risky openness towards the Other are modes of resistance that eschew the artificial categorizations upon which the archival identity is contingent. However, the bridge from interiority to exteriority is mediation. Smith therefore develops a conception of secularized Grace that works by exploring the revolutionary potential of this very mediation and can disrupt the logic of tyrannical surveillance. Part of this approach to history and language is informed by the witnessing of the traces left on the bodies of martyrized dissidents by unjust systems at their apex. There But For The is narrated by four characters in the mediatic aftermath of a bourgeois dinner party in an affluent suburb of London that witnessed the sudden and unexplainable reclusion of Miles Garth into the spare room of his stunned hosts. The event, as well as those leading up to and following it, is recounted by a grieving nature photographer in his sixties named Mark; May, a rebellious old woman suffering from dementia; an unemployed, middle-aged Anna; and Brooke, a ten-year old girl and voracious reader. The essay will approach these characters’ meditations upon the nature of identity as split between its narrative and archival forms.

Intentional Suffering

This chapter, along with the next, provides a comprehensive analysis of Jihadi-Salafi jurisprudence on the question of martyrdom-seeking operations (al-amaliyyat al-istishhadiyya), often referred to as suicide bombings in the West. Central to this analysis is an application of the theories of renunciation and subjectivity underlying the Jihadi-Salafi creed and methodology. For Jihadi-Salafi jurists, what separates suicidal ideation from a martyr’s intention (niyya) is a question of one’s individual subjective identity. A martyr must not have concern for the world (dunyā) or possess any improper desire for material wealth or comfort. Instead, a martyrdom seeker must undertake the act intending it for God alone. The legal texts defending martyrdom operations, the chapter concludes, reveal that Jihadi-Salafis appropriate as their ideal precedents for these operations the actions of the Salaf as well as the actions of early Muslim renunciants such as ʿAbd Allah ibn al-Mubarak (d. 181/797), author of the earliest known work on jihad.

War? Another possible relation between Yugoslavia and its football

This article aims to indicate another possible comprehension of war and its relations in the Yugoslavian region. Focused on the construction of national identity, this paper uses the post-structuralist theoretical argumentative movement to invert the common logic of interpretation – to which Foucault and Deleuze are used as reference. Knowing this, the problem is how war, interpreted in another way, can build not only national integration, but also a subjective identity through Football.