The femme fatale: a literary and cultural version of femicide

The figure of the femme fatale is understood as inviting her own murder. Supposedly, the cause of the violence done by a man in thrall to her, she is in fact the primary victim of this violence. In the French confessional narrative, the woman is always somehow at fault for the protagonist’s failure, whether by loving him too little or too much; she dies and he lives to tell the tale, recounting it to another man who listens and absolves. Thus, the heroine both dies again and is revived, to be contained—in both senses—in the text. Fictions from three centuries—Prévost’s Manon Lescaut (1753), Mérimée’s Carmen (1845), and Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902)—will be compared for their representation of literary femicide. Almost a century later, the changed ending of Fatal Attraction (directed by Lyne in 1987) demonstrates the public’s clamor for the killing of a supposedly dangerous woman. A final section compares the significance of Princess Diana with these fictional instances of femicide: How did our love for her bring on her violent death

Circuits of desire & loss: Marivaux & My best friend’s wedding

An unpublished paper by Professor Naomi Segal. For copyright reasons, images are not included in this paper

Witnessing through the skin: the hysteric's body

How does the hysteric bear witness through her body? This article looks at ways in which, from antiquity to the present day, the hysteric has borne witness to the anxiety of her time, age and sex through the speaking surface of her skin. In the 8th century CE a doctor tears the veil off the caliph’s concubine; in the Renaissance physicians and witch-finders look for stigmata; in the eighteenth century hysteria is located in ‘the nerves’; in the early twentieth century Charcot displays hysteria to audience or camera and Freud ‘wipes away’ the memories of Frau Emmy von N. What anxieties mark the surface of the troubled young woman of today? In its conclusion, this article suggests that it is exposure that haunts the outside of her body, circling it without protection, in a world where ‘health’ is not a pleasure but a duty

Daughters, dogs and death: triangular desire in "Fatal Attraction", "The Piano" and "The Talented Mr Ripley"

Book synopsis: Third Agents: Secret Protagonists of the Modern Imagination brings together a varied and fascinating range of contributions to explore the role of third agents in the post-Enlightenment literary imagination, including modern narratives such as film. It centres on the figure of ‘the third’ – conceived imaginatively as a liminal agent transgressing social, cultural and spatio-temporal boundaries, and conceptually as the vital yet often problematic element in theories of discourse that seek to operate beyond binary codes of meaning. This figure is revealed to be a ‘secret protagonist’ of modernity, neglected by, and eluding the scope of, existing intellectual and literary histories. Contributors to this volume are drawn from diverse theoretical backgrounds, encompassing work in dialectics, psychoanalysis and systems theory. Through their focus on literature and media, they seek to understand how those conceptions of the third relate to imaginative figurations. This volume offers the first comprehensive account of third agency in modern literature and its intellectual and imaginative pre-history. It provides an accessible combination of close readings and theoretical reflection, presenting figures who inhabit in-between territories such as the adventurer, the bastard, the priest, the angel, the adulterer, the poet and the outcast. These figures are read as protagonists in a genealogy of modernity that has not yet been written. The essays here also provide fascinating answers as to why these secret protagonists often became major figures in modern philosophy and literary theory, and give new insights into such writers as Benjamin, Barthes and Derrida

It’s all a plot”: paranoid characters and mad readers in Gide and Kafka’

The subject matter for this paper arose in response to a thesis I recently examined. A Lacanian reading of certain art objects, it argued that a work of art cannot be a fetish object. ‘A work of art does not ward off anxiety, rather it provokes it’. An unpublished paper by Professor Naomi Segal given to a conference on Culture and the Unconscious: Psychoanalysts, artists, academics

The body in the library: adventures in realism

This essay looks at two aspects of the virtual ‘material world’ of realist fiction: objects encountered by the protagonist and the latter’s body. Taking from Sartre two angles on the realist pact by which readers agree to lend their bodies, feelings, and experiences to the otherwise ‘languishing signs’ of the text, it goes on to examine two sets of first-person fictions published between 1902 and 1956 — first, four modernist texts in which banal objects defy and then gratify the protagonist, who ends up ready and almost able to write; and, second, three novels in which the body of the protagonist is indeterminate in its sex, gender, or sexuality. In each of these cases, how do we as readers make texts work for us as ‘an adventure of the body’

The principles, pleasures and realities of translating psychoanalysis

Are all translators murderers, pests or parasites? Are they humble or the spokespersons of a community? Are they trustworthy or traitors, or even ‘faithful bigamists’? And do translations have to be beautiful or faithful, never both? Might translation be a feminine/ feminised activity because most translators are women, or because the target-language is maternal or because it embodies the paradox of the multi-skilled serving the monoskilled? The second half of this essay focuses on the translation of psychoanalysis, especially Strachey’s brilliant yet much-criticised translation of Freud

Circuits of desire and loss: Marivaux and "My Best Friend’s Wedding"

This essay draws a number of parallels between Marivaux’s love comedies and the 1997 Hollywood comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding. It looks at configurations of desire in terms of a series of ‘coloured shapes moving in space’: the chase, the chain, a variety of triangles (leaning, here, on comparisons with both classical tragedy and the nineteenth-century novel of adultery) and of configurations of four. What is the nature of the happy ending in comedy that brings resolution out of the defeat of a third party? How do formal arrangements induce in the audience a willingness to loop the circuit of desire in such a way that it can end on reason or dance

An AMPKa2-specific phospho-switch controls lysosomal targeting for activation

AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) and mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1) are metabolic kinases that co-ordinate nutrient supply with cell growth. AMPK negatively regulates mTORC1, and mTORC1 reciprocally phosphorylates S345/7 in both AMPK α-isoforms. We report that genetic or torin1-induced loss of α2-S345 phosphorylation relieves suppression of AMPK signaling; however, the regulatory effect does not translate to α1-S347 in HEK293T or MEF cells. Dephosphorylation of α2-S345, but not α1-S347, transiently targets AMPK to lysosomes, a cellular site for activation by LKB1. By mass spectrometry, we find that α2-S345 is basally phosphorylated at 2.5-fold higher stoichiometry than α1-S347 in HEK293T cells and, unlike α1, phosphorylation is partially retained after prolonged mTORC1 inhibition. Loss of α2-S345 phosphorylation in endogenous AMPK fails to sustain growth of MEFs under amino acid starvation conditions. These findings uncover an α2-specific mechanism by which AMPK can be activated at lysosomes in the absence of changes in cellular energy

Blocking AMPK β1 myristoylation enhances AMPK activity and protects mice from high-fat diet-induced obesity and hepatic steatosis

AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is a master regulator of cellular energy homeostasis and a therapeutic target for metabolic diseases. Co/post-translational N-myristoylation of glycine-2 (Gly2) of the AMPK β subunit has been suggested to regulate the distribution of the kinase between the cytosol and membranes through a “myristoyl switch” mechanism. However, the relevance of AMPK myristoylation for metabolic signaling in cells and in vivo is unclear. Here, we generated knockin mice with a Gly2-to-alanine point mutation of AMPKβ1 (β1-G2A). We demonstrate that non-myristoylated AMPKβ1 has reduced stability but is associated with increased kinase activity and phosphorylation of the Thr172 activation site in the AMPK α subunit. Using proximity ligation assays, we show that loss of β1 myristoylation impedes colocalization of the phosphatase PPM1A/B with AMPK in cells. Mice carrying the β1-G2A mutation have improved metabolic health with reduced adiposity, hepatic lipid accumulation, and insulin resistance under conditions of high-fat diet-induced obesity