Ethics in Iran: Jacques Lacan and the Films of Abbas Kiarostami\u27s Koker Trilogy

In 1900, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, establishing climacteric concepts for psychoanalysis and creating a structure upon which he built the theory and his career. 20 years later, he had entirely revised these concepts that solidified the foundation of psychoanalysis. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud notably theorizes the ‘death drive’ for the first time, a radical but necessary break from the economics of the pleasure principle. Often, the death drive is taken to be the most important contribution of this essay, but I argue that the lasting message to be gleaned from Freud is what he concludes Beyond the Pleasure Principle with: “We must be ready, too, to abandon a path that we have followed for a time, if it seems to be leading to no good end. Only believers, who demand that science shall be a substitute for the catechism they have given up, will blame an investigator for developing or even transforming his views.” In this thesis, I argue that we can develop a necessary Ethic from this way that Freud approached the formation of his work. Drawing on the further developments from Jacques Lacan, I claim that one can take theory of the gaze as an ethical moment: the point at which one is faced with a disruption that they are tasked to carry out “to see where it will lead,” as Freud puts it. Further, I utilize this formation of the Ethic to read the films of Abbas Kiarostami’s “Koker trilogy” to highlight the points at which we can locate the characters, form, and content of these films as realizations of such ethical moments

Involvement of Hepatitis C Virus NS5A Hyperphosphorylation Mediated by Casein Kinase I- in Infectious Virus Production

Nonstructural protein 5A (NS5A) of hepatitis C virus (HCV) possesses multiple functions in the viral life cycle. NS5A is a phosphoprotein that exists in hyperphosphorylated and basally phosphorylated forms. Although the phosphorylation status of NS5A is considered to have a significant impact on its function, the mechanistic details regulating NS5A phosphorylation, as well as its exact roles in the HCV life cycle, are still poorly understood. In this study, we screened 404 human protein kinases via in vitro binding and phosphorylation assays, followed by RNA interference-mediated gene silencing in an HCV cell culture system. Casein kinase I-α (CKI-α) was identified as an NS5A-associated kinase involved in NS5A hyperphosphorylation and infectious virus production. Subcellular fractionation and immunofluorescence confocal microscopy analyses showed that CKI-α-mediated hyperphosphorylation of NS5A contributes to the recruitment of NS5A to low-density membrane structures around lipid droplets (LDs) and facilitates its interaction with core protein and the viral assembly. Phospho-proteomic analysis of NS5A with or without CKI-α depletion identified peptide fragments that corresponded to the region located within the low-complexity sequence I, which is important for CKI-α-mediated NS5A hyperphosphorylation. This region contains eight serine residues that are highly conserved among HCV isolates, and subsequent mutagenesis analysis demonstrated that serine residues at amino acids 225 and 232 in NS5A (genotype 2a) may be involved in NS5A hyperphosphorylation and hyperphosphorylation-dependent regulation of virion production. These findings provide insight concerning the functional role of NS5A phosphorylation as a regulatory switch that modulates its multiple functions in the HCV life cycle