FICTION and POLYPHONY

Before I come to explain what some of the consequences of fiction as polyphony are, let me say, by way of introduction, that our problem in a nutshell involves the symbolic and what we understand by this term. In particular, things in this regard could be said to turn around what is still, to my mind, a perennial problem in literary criticism, namely, an author's relationship to what he/she writes. Perhaps it is hardly necessary to repeat that, here, it is a question of life and death: the 'Death of the author' whose absence takes on a kind of 'presence' (= life) in the text - a 'resurrection accomplished in signs' , as Julia Kristeva has called it. (Kristeva, 1981;181) In a sense, therefore, those who used to maintain (and often still do- if only by implication) that a dash of psychology was sufficient to provide literary interpretation with illumination, may in fact have given us a clue as to how the literary critic might get onto the right track in this matter. For psychology, as our epigraph has it, 'is a knife that cuts both ways' (Dostoevsky, 1976;690); it oscillates between the notion of truth as referential and fiction (we will return to this point)

Ethnocentrism, Racism, Genocide ...

As introduction, I shall examine some aspects of the background to this paper concerning the transition, as I see it, from ethnocentrism in the eigh-teenth century to genocide in the twentieth. When I came to reflect on the cultural construction of race, I posed some fairly obvious questions; How can one understand the concept (or 'idea', as Robert Miles in this volume has argued) of 'race' in the eighteenth cen-tury when European voyagers began 'discovering' different societies at an increasingly rapid rate? Is it the same as the term we use today? Or is it that we tend to conflate two things; ethnocentrism, which has been with us for centuries, and today's term 'race'? I came to the view that the least one could do was pay some attention to what has been written about race, how it emerged within twentieth-century context, especially as regards Natural History and the writings of voyagers and naturalists. To begin in this way means that conclusions other than those we are used to have to be enter-tained. We have to consider, for instance, the possibility that 'race' as it in-itially appeared in Western thought had nothing to do with the notion of race we understand today, even if many historians fail to recognise this.

Recent experiments with the European 1MW, 170GHz industrial CW and short-pulse gyrotrons for ITER

The European Gyrotron Consortium (EGYC) is developing the European 1 MW, 170 GHz Continuous Wave (CW) industrial prototype gyrotron for ITER in cooperation with Thales Electron Devices (TED) and Fusion for Energy (F4E). This conventional, hollow-cavity gyrotron, is based on the 1 MW, 170 GHz Short-Pulse (SP) modular gyrotron that has been designed and manufactured by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in collaboration with TED. Both gyrotrons have been tested successfully in multiple experiments. In this work we briefly report on the results with the CW gyrotron at KIT and we focus at the experiments at the Swiss Plasma Center (SPC). In addition, we present preliminary results from various upgrades of the SP tube that are currently tested at KIT

Completion of the 8 MW Multi-Frequency ECRH System at ASDEX Upgrade

Over the last 15 years, the Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating (ECRH) system at the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak has been upgraded from a 2 MW, 2 s, 140 GHz system to an 8 MW, 10 s, dual frequency system (105/140 GHz). Eight gyrotrons were in routine operation during the current experimental campaign. All gyrotrons are step-tunable operating at 105 and 140 GHz with a maximum output power of about 1 MW and 10 s pulse length. The system includes 8 transmission lines, mainly consisting of oversized corrugated waveguides (I.D. = 87 mm) with overall lengths between 50 and 70 meters including quasi-optical sections at both ends. Further improvements of the transmission lines with respect to power handling and reliability are underway

Civil identity and 'bare life' : Arendt and Agamben's challenge to human rights

Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben's reservations regarding the nature and enforcement of human rights in today's political environment is examined.20 page(s

Eleven theses on sculpture

8 page(s

Julia Kristeva

7 page(s

Fred Williams : the Australian landscape through Derrida's eyes

6 page(s

Love, life, complexity and the 'flesh' in Kristeva's writing experience

This in-depth critical assessment of the work of French psychoanalyst and literary theorist, Julia Kristeva, brings together for the first time readings both classical and new. Kristeva's writing on literature and psychoanalysis, language and social issues, as well as her fiction, are all considered. Each reading confronts questions raised by Kristeva's thought and contributes to giving an overview of her concerns. Chapters written especially for this volume take the reader into the most recent work of this most eminent thinker of the post-War era.17 page(s