Body / Antibody

Unique object in the exchange-system, the gay body occupies a locus where a phantom identity and an imagined reciprocity define the poles of the subject-object relation. Made of the right stuff, it is an object circulating in a system that tends to reproduce the concept of identity in its search for mirror images of itself. Often rejected by the world, it has recently become a cynosure equated with sickness, pestilence, and death in the age of AIDS. The representations of that object change: no longer perceived as a part of libidinal economy, it has become a mass of symptoms, having changed from being an index of sexuality into being the visible dissipation of the flesh. The gay body in the age of AIDS is the mark of a pariah with the abject nature of the outcast. The body with AIDS takes the form of a text made of many signs and with many ways of reading the checkerboard pattern of the flesh. And the AIDS-narrative turns the body into the limit of the representable

Tournier\u27s Theoretical Pretext Works Like a Charm

By playing on the expectations that a reader would have for a Bildungsroman, Tournier puts generic parameters and received ideas into question. In La Goutte d\u27or, he writes a text in which thematic considerations become so over-determined that they give way to a set of theoretical considerations about how the novel is constructed and perceived. Tournier does engage the reader in two orthodox theoretical perspectives on the nature of the text. The first involves the generation of meaning through the determination of a signified; the second involves the play of the signifier. But the largest portion of the theoretical perspectives of the novel is given over to the development of a phenomenological position of perception within the text. Tournier generates a structure of intentionality, signification, and meaning that he develops by means of the novel\u27s fil conducteur, the photographic image. Tournier eventually refuses the status of image-making for the text and closes with a theoretical perspective that depends on the double valorization of writing: as the aesthetic dance of signifiers and as the seduction of the well-told tale

Unreading Borges\u27s Labyrinths

Borges\u27s stories often valorize the figures of text and labyrinth, and, in The Garden of Forking Paths, an identity is posited between them. This identity is the means to deconstructing the story and, at the same time, for refusing both structuralist and metaphysical readings of the work. The text of the story gradually subsumes the world it seeks to represent under and within an all-encompassing textuality without origin and without any clearly delimited meaning except absence, the destruction of meaning, death. The solution of the labyrinth is its dissolution, that is, the deconstruction of the text. This easily thematizable deconstruction is actually a far more radical and subtle deconstruction of the text as structure or meaning. Intertextuality and fragmentation undo the work and underline what amounts to a series of transgressions. These transgressions, that is, the text itself, are attempts to fill the void of the signified with signifier. And these transgressions, read, understood, and thereby iterated by the reader, are the signs of the deferred desire central to the work, its fundamental and radical difference

Foucault's Body

non

The longest excursion of stochastic processes in nonequilibrium systems

We consider the excursions, i.e. the intervals between consecutive zeros, of stochastic processes that arise in a variety of nonequilibrium systems and study the temporal growth of the longest one l_{\max}(t) up to time t. For smooth processes, we find a universal linear growth \simeq Q_{\infty} t with a model dependent amplitude Q_\infty. In contrast, for non-smooth processes with a persistence exponent \theta, we show that < l_{\max}(t) > has a linear growth if \theta \sim t^{1-\psi} if \theta > \theta_c. The amplitude Q_{\infty} and the exponent \psi are novel quantities associated to nonequilibrium dynamics. These behaviors are obtained by exact analytical calculations for renewal and multiplicative processes and numerical simulations for other systems such as the coarsening dynamics in Ising model as well as the diffusion equation with random initial conditions.Comment: 4 pages,2 figure

Striking universalities in stochastic resetting processes

Given a random process $x(\tau)$ which undergoes stochastic resetting at a constant rate $r$ to a position drawn from a distribution ${\cal P}(x)$, we consider a sequence of dynamical observables $A_1, \dots, A_n$ associated to the intervals between resetting events. We calculate exactly the probabilities of various events related to this sequence: that the last element is larger than all previous ones, that the sequence is monotonically increasing, etc. Remarkably, we find that these probabilities are ``super-universal'', i.e., that they are independent of the particular process $x(\tau)$, the observables $A_k$'s in question and also the resetting distribution ${\cal P}(x)$.Comment: Main text: 6 pages + 2 figs., Supp. Mat: 3 pages + 2 fig

Stochastic Resetting and Applications

In this Topical Review we consider stochastic processes under resetting, which have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. We begin with the simple example of a diffusive particle whose position is reset randomly in time with a constant rate $r$, which corresponds to Poissonian resetting, to some fixed point (e.g. its initial position). This simple system already exhibits the main features of interest induced by resetting: (i) the system reaches a nontrivial nonequilibrium stationary state (ii) the mean time for the particle to reach a target is finite and has a minimum, optimal, value as a function of the resetting rate $r$. We then generalise to an arbitrary stochastic process (e.g. L\'evy flights or fractional Brownian motion) and non-Poissonian resetting (e.g. power-law waiting time distribution for intervals between resetting events). We go on to discuss multiparticle systems as well as extended systems, such as fluctuating interfaces, under resetting. We also consider resetting with memory which implies resetting the process to some randomly selected previous time. Finally we give an overview of recent developments and applications in the field.Comment: 68 pages, Topical Review accepted version to appear in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical 202

Tournier's Theoretical Pretext Works Like a Charm

By playing on the expectations that a reader would have for a Bildungsroman , Tournier puts generic parameters and received ideas into question. In La Goutte d'or , he writes a text in which thematic considerations become so over-determined that they give way to a set of theoretical considerations about how the novel is constructed and perceived. Tournier does engage the reader in two "orthodox" theoretical perspectives on the nature of the text. The first involves the generation of meaning through the determination of a signified; the second involves the play of the signifier. But the largest portion of the theoretical perspectives of the novel is given over to the development of a phenomenological position of perception within the text. Tournier generates a structure of intentionality, signification, and meaning that he "develops" by means of the novel's fil conducteur , the photographic image. Tournier eventually refuses the status of image-making for the text and closes with a theoretical perspective that depends on the double valorization of writing: as the aesthetic dance of signifiers and as the seduction of the well-told tale

Random elastic networks : strong disorder renormalization approach

For arbitrary networks of random masses connected by random springs, we define a general strong disorder real-space renormalization (RG) approach that generalizes the procedures introduced previously by Hastings [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 148702 (2003)] and by Amir, Oreg and Imry [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 070601 (2010)] respectively. The principle is to eliminate iteratively the elementary oscillating mode of highest frequency associated with either a mass or a spring constant. To explain the accuracy of the strong disorder RG rules, we compare with the Aoki RG rules that are exact at fixed frequency.Comment: 8 pages, v2=final versio