The art of dissent from the rhetoric of silence: the terror and promise of Dao and Khora

This thesis reworks the idea of Chineseness as a translational point in its exploration of the intricate knot of nothingness, a sublimity which makes Chinese culture irreducible to the postcolonial, postmodern or poststructuralist movements because what the West arrogates from Eastern philosophy or contrariwise is simultaneously an interrogative advancement and a detour to selfsameness. Derrida's deconstructive absence in Chinese writing may be surprising to those acquainted with his eloquence on phonetic writing and the Egyptian hieroglyphs. By (dis)locating the commentaries revolving around Derrida's reticence on Chinese inscriptions, I shall launch the argument from what most have put down merely as a "lack" of knowledge, inverted here to expose the always already missing link between the articulator and reality. Derrida's cryptic remark about Chinese writing as "the testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside of all logocentrism" can be read as a suggestion of a certain parallelism between deconstruction and Eastern philosophy, accidentally encountering in this paper. The signifying dissemination within writing is most advantageous to the reading of dao and khora as synonymous sites and only meeting with a supplementary inversion, an ironic twist, at the divide between the East and the West. This Lacanian knot, a result of the encore of centres, is reconciled provisionally with a deus ex machina, the "parallax view" of Slavoj Zizek, the interpretative (l)ink. As part of the many chiasmic encounters, it is the assertion here that Derrida's rewriting of the Heideggerean Dasein, "There is nothing outside the text", signals the revolutionary aestheticisation of the ontological contours which gives to a replete subjectivity, political or otherwise. Inversely, the ontological disclosure in and through aesthetics provides impetus to epistemology. And the circular relations between aesthetics and existential ethics are that which provides the possibility of reconciliation with alterity, the trace that inevitably keeps reading open. Given that we can relate the ethical only to the contextual, the contingency underlying its very definition discloses an indeterminacy that ensures openness to the future, and, coupled with the readiness to respond to the call of the other, prompts a re-reading as reading irresponsibly. In other words, the semiotic coming-to-be reciprocates the coming-to-be of the human entity. Derrida's silence about Chinese writing may be a gesture to the signifying reticence at the heart of discourse, simultaneously the poetic place and moment, which enables this critical traversal, a wayfaring entailing the bearing of the past so that alterity can be imag(in)ed, the "supernumerary" of both dao and khora, with the disablement of a fixed discursive trajectory

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Consequences of concentration on the CAP for European integration

This sub-thesis deals with the concentration of the European Community (EC) on the Common Agricultural Policy or CAP as its main policy to date, and the consequences of this for the process of integration. This process of integration is considered to be both economic and political, with both the economic welfare and the influence in international affairs of the integrated whole, the European Community, being greater than the sum of these from the individual parts, in this case the member states

Epic Black: Poetics in Protest in the Time of Black Lives Matter

This dissertation examines certain book-length poetic works released between 2014 to 2016, corresponding to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement formed in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2013. I argue that these works emerge from the same political and poetic urgency that demanded a movement like BLM. Using Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016) as an entrance, I focus on a genre/strategy that Farah Jasmine Griffin calls Epic Black, a poetics that uses the hypervisibility of Black bodies, the inescapable place that Black expression has in popular American culture, and the scale and scope of the Western epic as a liberatory artistic strategy. Epic Black uses the cultural weight of institutions against those institutions, subverting or re-appropriating the dominant systems that would seek to appropriate Blackness.Popular culture is a political battleground like any other, and the most contested zones are the places where Whiteness encounters the limits of its power in the encounter with the Black body. This place, where the dominant language encounters its limit, I call noirporia. It marks the borderland or frontiers of Whiteness, where it is most open to the possibilities of fugitivity or marronage. Each of the Epic Black works I discuss claim territory out of this contested ground, taking up space in the cultural imaginary through the medium of the poetry book as cultural object, which has dimensions both physical and discursive. After discussing Lemonade as one of the most visible examples of Epic Blackness, I turn to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and nominee in both poetry and criticism; Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, winner of the 2015 National Book Award. Each of these book-length works is a performance of Epic Black: hypervisible as a cultural object, capacious in breadth and scope, and self-conscious in formal difficulty. I conclude with a brief look at Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M Archive: After the End of the World as a new phase of Epic Black, suggesting that epic strategies must change with the centers of cultural power

The Fifteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting

The three volumes of the proceedings of MG15 give a broad view of all aspects of gravitational physics and astrophysics, from mathematical issues to recent observations and experiments. The scientific program of the meeting included 40 morning plenary talks over 6 days, 5 evening popular talks and nearly 100 parallel sessions on 71 topics spread over 4 afternoons. These proceedings are a representative sample of the very many oral and poster presentations made at the meeting.Part A contains plenary and review articles and the contributions from some parallel sessions, while Parts B and C consist of those from the remaining parallel sessions. The contents range from the mathematical foundations of classical and quantum gravitational theories including recent developments in string theory, to precision tests of general relativity including progress towards the detection of gravitational waves, and from supernova cosmology to relativistic astrophysics, including topics such as gamma ray bursts, black hole physics both in our galaxy and in active galactic nuclei in other galaxies, and neutron star, pulsar and white dwarf astrophysics. Parallel sessions touch on dark matter, neutrinos, X-ray sources, astrophysical black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, binary systems, radiative transfer, accretion disks, quasars, gamma ray bursts, supernovas, alternative gravitational theories, perturbations of collapsed objects, analog models, black hole thermodynamics, numerical relativity, gravitational lensing, large scale structure, observational cosmology, early universe models and cosmic microwave background anisotropies, inhomogeneous cosmology, inflation, global structure, singularities, chaos, Einstein-Maxwell systems, wormholes, exact solutions of Einstein's equations, gravitational waves, gravitational wave detectors and data analysis, precision gravitational measurements, quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, strings and branes, self-gravitating systems, gamma ray astronomy, cosmic rays and the history of general relativity

Desired Ground Zeroes: Nuclear Imagination and the Death Drive

A wide variety of cultural artefacts related to nuclear warfare are examined to highlight continuity in the sublime's mix of horror and fascination. Schemes to use nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes embody the godlike structural positions of the Bomb for Americans in the early Cold War. Efforts to mediate the Real of the Bomb include nuclear simulations used in wargames and their civilian offshoots in videogames and other media. Control over absence is examined through the spatial distribution of populations that would be sacrificed in a nuclear war and appeals to overarching rationality to justify urban inequality. Control over presence manifests in survivalism, from Cold War shelter construction to contemporary "doomsday prepping" and survivalist novels. The longstanding cultural ambivalence towards nuclear war, coupled with the manifest desire to experience the Real, has implications for nuclear activist strategies that rely on democratically-engaged publics to resist nuclear violence once the "truth" is made clear. This dissertation uses examples drawn from imaginations of nuclear warfare and its aftermath to explore how the desire for unmediated experience and its attendant mix of horror and fascination constitutes a death drive that should be a problematic for communication studies. The unprecedented power of the Bomb witnessed first at the Trinity test provided new urgency for ultimate questions about human existence and the failure of language. Discourse surrounding the Bomb is an effort to reestablish a sense of predictability and order threatened by the disruption of the Bomb while still maintaining the sense of contact with its overwhelming power. I relate this operation of the death drive to the tradition of the sublime in rhetoric, an effort to recapture what lies beyond mediation. Instead of a discrete style, the sublime is the aspect of a signifier that permits an affective connection as it stands in for the Real, as also evident in other forms of mediation besides language. The capacity to enjoy control over the conditions of presence and absence is central to this process.Doctor of Philosoph

Proust and Ruskin: a study in influence

The following thesis is a comparative study of Ruskin and Proust. The six years which Proust spent studying the Englishman's works have prompted several full-length studies and many articles devoted to tracing the nature and extent of Ruskin's influence on the creation of A la recherche du temps perdu. In the first three chapters I suggest that the very proliferation of such studies indicates that a different emphasis is required; one which pays full attention to Ruskin's qualities as a writer and is even prepared to consider the paradox of Proust's influence on Ruskin. Where previous scholars in this field have over-emphasised the dubious notion of influence, unquestioningly adopting Proust's version of an idealist aesthetic and presenting it as a nimble adaptation of Ruskin's clumsy prototype, my study defers questions of influence and affinity and contrasts the two writers under the terms of écrivain and écrivant (chapters 2 and 3). In noting the extent to which the self-regulating theory embedded in Proust's novel has informed, and indeed controlled subsequent critical debate, I indicate how the true nature and import of Ruskin's work has been obscured, and examine incorporations of the 'marginal' discourses of art criticism and autobiography into the mainstream genre of the novel. A chapter on the evaluative connotations of 'influence' is followed by an extended comparison of Praeterita and Fors Clavigera with A la recherche au temps perdu as examples of the creation and re-creation of the self through the act of writing (chapters 5 and 6). The question of sources is only tangentially addressed, my main aim being to allow two radically different yet representative writers to confront each other, rather than to consolidate any questionable theory of succession

This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury

When Congress created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958, it charged NASA with the responsibility "to contribute materially to . . . the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space" and "provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof." NASA wisely interpreted this mandate to include responsibility for documenting the epochal progress of which it is the focus. The result has been the development of a historical program by NASA as unprecedented as the task of extending man's mobility beyond his planet. This volume is not only NASA's accounting of its obligation to disseminate information to our current generation of Americans. It also fulfills, as do all of NASA's future-oriented scientific-technological activities, the further obligation to document the present as the heritage of the future. The wide-ranging NASA history program includes chronicles of day-to-day space activities; specialized studies of particular fields within space science and technology; accounts of NASA's efforts in organization and management, where its innovations, while less known to the public than its more spectacular space shots, have also been of great significance; narratives of the growth and expansion of the space centers throughout the country, which represent in microcosm many aspects of NASA's total effort; program histories, tracing the successes- and failures- of the various projects that mark man's progress into the Space Age; and a history of NASA itself, incorporating in general terms the major problems and challenges, and the responses thereto, of our entire civilian space effort. The volume presented here is a program history, the first in a series telling of NASA's pioneering steps into the Space Age. It deals with the first American manned-spaceflight program: Project Mercury. Although some academicians might protest that this is "official" history, it is official only in the fact that it has been prepared and published with the support and cooperation of NASA. It is not "official" history in the sense of presenting a point of view supposedly that of NASA officialdom-if anyone could determine what the "point of view" of such a complex organism might be. Certainly, the authors were allowed to pursue their task with the fullest freedom and in accordance with the highest scholarly standards of the history profession

A locale of the cosmos : an epic of the Wimmera : exegesis and text

"This project has, for its central component, an epic poem, 'A locale of the cosmos'. The accompanying exegesis examines epic as an ancient, but continually evolving form. It argues that, as a contemporary example of the genre and, as a sustained poetic rumination on landscape and memory, 'A locale of the cosmos' represents a significant development within the modern tradition of autobiographical epic. In broader terms, 'A locale of the cosmos' privileges the landscape and history of a region of Australia, the Wimmera region of north-western Victoria and, in doing so, explores the cumulative effects of the physical environment as a site for sustained poetic treatment. The poem is, therefore, an epic of both historical narrative and philosophical reflection, giving meaning to and interpreting ideas of space, place and locale. "Furthermore, it explores, in particular, the psychological and spiritual effects of vast horizontal distances, created by a landscape in which endless plains and immense horizons form an analogue of the wider cosmos. The poem's themes, therefore, bear not only on the prominences of the visible locale, but also explore the salients of an interior world, a landscape of the mind to which the poetry gives shape and meaning."Doctor of Philosoph