Au-delà du langage, c'est la mort d'un bavard

Le Bavard de Louis-René des Forêts nous livre le spectacle de celui qui ne dit rien. Ce spectacle doit se comprendre comme un énoncé performatif dont les limites s'étendent bien au-delà de quelques mots ou structures isolés. Si nous étudions la performativité en tant qu'événement, nous voyons, grâce à ce roman, que tout sens se lie en dernière analyse à la mort de l'acteur et de son spectacle. Le texte de des Forêts creuse sous la surface du langage parce qu'il crée du sens à partir de ce qui compose le discours vide d'un bavard. Ainsi voit le jour une série de verbes performatifs d'apparence intolérable: «Je parle», «Je mens» et «Je meurs».Louis-René des Forêts' novel, le Bavard, is a performance of the act of saying nothing. As a performative utterance extended beyond the limits of isolated words or structures, this novel shows us, through an exploration of the nature of the performance as event, that meaning is ultimately linked to the death of the performer and the performance. This text goes beyond the surface of language by creating meaning with words which constitute idle talk and thus puts into motion some seemingly impossible performatives: "I am speaking", "I am Iying", and "I am dying"

Characters in Bakhtin\u27s Theory

A common focus in many modern theories of literature is a reassessment of the traditional view of the character in a narrative text. The position that this article defends is that a revised conception is necessary for an understanding of the means by which dialogism is said to function in novelistic discourse. Revising the notion does not, however, involve discarding it outright as recent theories of the subject would have us do. Nor can we simply void it of all psychological content as suggested by many structuralist proposals. To retain Bakhtin\u27s concept of the notion of character, we must understand the term psychological in the context of his early book on Freud. In artificially combining Bakhtin\u27s isolated remarks on the literary character, we arrive at a view which postulates textualized voice-sources in the novel. In such a schema, maximum variability and freedom is afforded to each separate source. Yet we must use the term separate with extreme caution, for in Bakhtin\u27s writings all those beings which we might wish to view as separate entities are in fact intricately intertwined and inseparable. Viewing something as absolutely separate implies knowing intimately all of its boundaries and possibilities. This is surely a capacity which Bakhtin would deny us when it comes to human figures in texts

Cooling Fermions in an Optical Lattice by Adiabatic Demagnetization

The Fermi-Hubbard model describes ultracold fermions in an optical lattice and exhibits antiferromagnetic long-ranged order below the N\'{e}el temperature. However, reaching this temperature in the lab has remained an elusive goal. In other atomic systems, such as trapped ions, low temperatures have been successfully obtained by adiabatic demagnetization, in which a strong effective magnetic field is applied to a spin-polarized system, and the magnetic field is adiabatically reduced to zero. Unfortunately, applying this approach to the Fermi-Hubbard model encounters a fundamental obstacle: the $SU(2)$ symmetry introduces many level crossings that prevent the system from reaching the ground state, even in principle. However, by breaking the $SU(2)$ symmetry with a spin-dependent tunneling, we show that adiabatic demagnetization can achieve low temperature states. Using density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) calculations in one dimension, we numerically find that demagnetization protocols successfully reach low temperature states of a spin-anisotropic Hubbard model, and we discuss how to optimize this protocol for experimental viability. By subsequently ramping spin-dependent tunnelings to spin-independent tunnelings, we expect that our protocol can be employed to produce low-temperature states of the Fermi-Hubbard Model.Comment: References adde

Rigidity of symmetric frameworks on the cylinder

A bar-joint framework $(G,p)$ is the combination of a finite simple graph $G=(V,E)$ and a placement $p:V\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^d$. The framework is rigid if the only edge-length preserving continuous deformations of the vertices arise from isometries of the space. This article combines two recent extensions of the generic theory of rigid and flexible graphs by considering symmetric frameworks in $\mathbb{R}^3$ restricted to move on a surface. In particular necessary combinatorial conditions are given for a symmetric framework on the cylinder to be isostatic (i.e. minimally infinitesimally rigid) under any finite point group symmetry. In every case when the symmetry group is cyclic, which we prove restricts the group to being inversion, half-turn or reflection symmetry, these conditions are then shown to be sufficient under suitable genericity assumptions, giving precise combinatorial descriptions of symmetric isostatic graphs in these contexts.Comment: 37 pages, 17 figure