The impact of ‘exile’ on thought: Plotinus, Derrida and Gnosticism

This article examines the impact of ‘exile’ – as an individual or collective experience – on how human experience is theorized. The relationship between ‘exile’ and thought is initially approached historically by looking at the period that Eric Dodds famously called the ‘age of anxiety’ in late antiquity, i.e. the period between the emperors Aurelius and Constantine. A particular interest is in the dynamics of ‘empire’ and the concomitant religious ferment as a context in which ‘exile’, both experientially and symbolically, appears to assume an overbearing significance. Plotinus’ narrative of emanation and epistrophe as well as a group of narratives often classified as ‘Gnosticism’ are juxtaposed as two radical examples of a wider spiritual trend at the time according to which ‘exile’ could be considered constitutive of human experience. By way of an historical analogy, the insights gained from this study of late antiquity are then used to guide an analysis of the current, ‘restless’ epoch, in which experiences of displacement and exile on a mass scale undermine traditional notions of belonging, thus reviving the gnostic vision of cosmic reality as an alien, exilic environment. The article concludes with a discussion of Jacques Derrida’s work as an example of contemporary gnosticism, in which a ‘metaphysics of exile’ is presented in the disguise of an ‘exile from metaphysics’

AD51B in Familial Breast Cancer

Common variation on 14q24.1, close to RAD51B, has been associated with breast cancer: rs999737 and rs2588809 with the risk of female breast cancer and rs1314913 with the risk of male breast cancer. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of RAD51B variants in breast cancer predisposition, particularly in the context of familial breast cancer in Finland. We sequenced the coding region of RAD51B in 168 Finnish breast cancer patients from the Helsinki region for identification of possible recurrent founder mutations. In addition, we studied the known rs999737, rs2588809, and rs1314913 SNPs and RAD51B haplotypes in 44,791 breast cancer cases and 43,583 controls from 40 studies participating in the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC) that were genotyped on a custom chip (iCOGS). We identified one putatively pathogenic missense mutation c.541C>T among the Finnish cancer patients and subsequently genotyped the mutation in additional breast cancer cases (n = 5259) and population controls (n = 3586) from Finland and Belarus. No significant association with breast cancer risk was seen in the meta-analysis of the Finnish datasets or in the large BCAC dataset. The association with previously identified risk variants rs999737, rs2588809, and rs1314913 was replicated among all breast cancer cases and also among familial cases in the BCAC dataset. The most significant association was observed for the haplotype carrying the risk-alleles of all the three SNPs both among all cases (odds ratio (OR): 1.15, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.11–1.19, P = 8.88 x 10−16) and among familial cases (OR: 1.24, 95% CI: 1.16–1.32, P = 6.19 x 10−11), compared to the haplotype with the respective protective alleles. Our results suggest that loss-of-function mutations in RAD51B are rare, but common variation at the RAD51B region is significantly associated with familial breast cancer risk