Au commencement était le Crime, et le Crime était avec la Société, et le Crime était la Société : le criminel comme Christ démoniaque de la paternité sociale

Nous nous proposons de développer l’hypothèse selon laquelle l’imaginaire diabolique, attaché au criminel dans Ferragus et le « cycle Vautrin », viendrait non pas caractériser la dimension anomale du personnage mais définir son appartenance à la société même, exprimant l’irrémédiable association de celle-ci avec le Mal et le Crime. Le diabolique dépasserait donc chez Balzac la simple métaphore topique du Mal moral pour devenir le symbole d’un fonctionnement social perverti.Cette alliance est illustrée, de manière allégorique et exemplaire, par le motif du pacte diabolique, contracté entre un criminel – avatar du serpent tentateur ainsi que personnage anti-social – et un jeune homme en quête de pouvoir – être social – qui se damne. Ce couple, dont Balzac souligne l’essentielle unité, constituerait ainsi l’analogon d’un fonctionnement devenu celui du monde parisien dans lequel le pouvoir et la fortune – à tout prix – ont remplacé les hiérarchies et valeurs des siècles précédents. L’association du criminel et de l’arriviste mettrait ainsi au jour les mécanismes obscurs de l’ascension sociale en devenant l’image spéculaire et épiphanique de la naissance d’une société dénaturée, où toutes les métamorphoses sociales sont désormais possibles par l’intermédiaire du crime. Car il s’agit bien d’une naissance, exprimée dans les termes d’une création qui fait du criminel un véritable démiurge, modelant le jeune initié à son image. Au rapport tentateur/ damné succède celui de créateur/ créature, rapport qui fait du criminel un nouvel avatar du Père : diabolique et divin se confondent alors en un syncrétisme blasphématoire qui n’est autre que celui de la société post-révolutionnaire française. Mais l’allégeance de la société au Mal et au Crime constitue un véritable péché originel dont la tache doit être lavée : « sachez seulement vous bien débarbouiller : là est toute la morale de notre époque », tel est l’ultime conseil de Vautrin à Rastignac pour parvenir. Mais cette purification est opérée par l’instigateur même du pacte diabolique, ce qui transfigure le personnage démoniaque en un Christ faisant propitiation en lavant sa création de l’opprobre attachée à son origine. Il s’agirait alors de voir en quoi les rapports de force s’inversent, le pacte diabolique faisant de l’enchanteur l’enchanté et du damné l’idole maléfique à laquelle le criminel offre jusqu’à sa vie. Le pacte diabolique balzacien aboutit en effet, dans un paradoxe vertigineux, à la disparition du criminel, ultime révélation d’un transfert de la toute-puissance du crime à l’ambition.Le criminel serait ainsi l’Alpha et l’Oméga d’une société dans laquelle la boue obscure et informe de l’indistinction sociale peut se transformer par l’alchimie du crime en pouvoir doré. Le pacte diabolique ne nous raconterait alors rien d’autre que la Genèse d’une cosmogonie sociale

Forced Migrants in Russia: An Analysis of Russian Law from a Human Rights Perspective

This paper describes the "forced return" of Russian and Russian-speaking peoples in the new "Republics" to Russia as a consequence of the collapse of the USSR. Although these migrations bear all the earmarks of a refugee displacement, they do not fall within the legitimate definitions of forced migration. Consequently, these individuals are forced to endure all the trauma of displacement without recourse to the normative international or human rights remedies. The author suggests that two new categories, "returnees" and "returning migrants" be delineated to meet the needs of these individuals. Several examples of forced return are described in the paper to clarify the parameters of the problem and illustrate the consequences.Ce texte décrit Ie "retour force" des personnes de nationalité ou de langue russe des nouvelles "Republiques" vers la Russie comme conséquence de l'effondrement de l'URSS. Bien que ces migrations presentent toutes les caractéristiques de la migration forcée des réfugiés, elles n' entrent pas dans la définition traditionnelle de la migration forcée. Par consequent, ces individus sont contraints d'assumer les traumatismes de telles relocalisations sans pouvoir invoquer les remèdes du droit international humanitaire. L' auteur suggère que deux nouvelles catégories, "returnees" et "returning migrants" soient créés pour repondre aux besoins de ces individus. Plusieurs exempIes de retours forcés sont donnés dans Ie texte afin de clarifier les paramètres du problème et en illustrer les conséquences

University Elections Management Portal

Elections form a critical process of many social institutions which uphold principles of representational democracy such as fairness to all and the right to have equal right by way of casting a vote [Alistair McConnachie, 2003]. This paper describes a research carried out at Taita Taveta University College, an institution of higher learning in Kenya and the process undertaken to achieve development and deployment of a web based system to promote free and fair democratic electioneering process: computerizing registration, voting and tallying process involved. The system was developed using the incremental prototyping due to the adaptive nature of web based applications and the system proved that a computerized solution is possible with elimination of human related faults that are a commonplace in employment of human clerks to manage the election process. Application of the online voting has resulted in many advantages in the efficiency of the entire electioneering process and reduced costs the university used to incur using the human clerk electioneering process. Keywords: Internet Voting, Internet Securities, Fool proof

‘They Called Them Communists Then … What D'You Call ‘Em Now? … Insurgents?’. Narratives of British Military Expatriates in the Context of the New Imperialism

This paper addresses the question of the extent to which the colonial past provides material for contemporary actors' understanding of difference. The research from which the paper is drawn involved interview and ethnographic work in three largely white working-class estates in an English provincial city. For this paper we focus on ten life-history interviews with older participants who had spent some time abroad in the British military. Our analysis adopts a postcolonial framework because research participants' current constructions of an amorphous 'Other' (labelled variously as black people, immigrants, foreigners, asylum-seekers or Muslims) reveal strong continuities with discourses deployed by the same individuals to narrate their past experiences of living and working as either military expatriates or spouses during British colonial rule. Theoretically, the paper engages with the work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. In keeping with a postcolonial approach, we work against essentialised notions of identity based on 'race' or class. Although we establish continuity between white working-class military emigration in the past and contemporary racialised discourses, we argue that the latter are not class-specific, being as much the creations of the middle-class media and political elite

After the End Times: Postcrisis African Science Fiction

We live in a moment of “apocalyptic time,” the “time of the end of time.” Ours is a moment of global ecological crisis, of the ever-impending collapse of capital. That we live on the brink is too clear. What is not, however, is our ability to imagine the moment after this dual crisis. In recent years, African artists have begun to articulate this “moment after,” ushering in a new paradigm in African literature and film that speculates upon postcrisis African futures. Writers and filmmakers such as Nigeria’s Efe Okogu and Kenya’s Wanuri Kahiu have imagined future African topographies—spaces that have felt the fullest effects of climate change, nuclear radiation, and the imbalances of global capitalism. Biopolitics, sovereignty, and the human have all been reconfigured in these African science fictions. Okogu and Kahiu’s futurist aesthetics are specters that loom over our present, calling for a radically reimagined politics of the now

Fanon's Letter Between Psychiatry and Anticolonial Commitment

The name of Frantz Fanon has become a symbol of anticolonial militancy and the struggles of national emancipation against colonial rule. However, Fanon was also a psychiatrist, who never abandoned clinical practice even after resigning from his post in colonized Algeria in 1956. The coexistence, in Fanon, of medicine and political involvement represents one of the most productive and contradictory aspects of his life and work. Fanon was highly critical of colonial ethnopsychiatry, but never abandoned his commitment to improving the condition of psychiatric patients. After his escape from Algeria, he wrote extensively for El Moudjahid, the journal of the anticolonial resistance, but also practised in the hospital of Charles Nicolle in Tunis. In this essay I propose a new assessment of the relation between psychiatry and politics by addressing Fanon's influence on Franco Basaglia, leader of the anti-institutional movement in Italian psychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s. Basaglia was deeply inspired by the example of Fanon and the contradictions he had to confront. Rereading Fanon through the mirror of Italian anti-institutional psychiatry will define a new understanding of Fanon as committed intellectual. Indeed, this may suggest a new perspective on the function of intellectuals in contexts signed by the aftermath of colonial history, drawing on the example of two psychiatrists who never ceased to inhabit the borderline between the clinical and the critical, medicine and militancy, the necessity of cure and the exigency of freedom

Locating the ‘radical’ in 'Shoot the Messenger'

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below, copyright 2013 @ Edinburgh University Press.The 2006 BBC drama Shoot the Messenger is based on the psychological journey of a Black schoolteacher, Joe Pascale, accused of assaulting a Black male pupil. The allegation triggers Joe's mental breakdown which is articulated, through Joe's first-person narration, as a vindictive loathing of Black people. In turn, a range of common stereotypical characterisations and discourses based on a Black culture of hypocrisy, blame and entitlement is presented. The text is therefore laid wide open to a critique of its neo-conservatism and hegemonic narratives of Black Britishness. However, the drama's presentation of Black mental illness suggests that Shoot the Messenger may also be interpreted as a critique of social inequality and the destabilising effects of living with ethnicised social categories. Through an analysis of issues of representation, the article reclaims this controversial text as a radical drama and examines its implications for and within a critical cultural politics of ‘race’ and representation

Feeling, Knowledge, Self-Preservation: Audre Lorde’s Oppositional Agency and Some Implications for Ethics

Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression depends on acting from the recognition and valorization of her feelings as a deep source of knowledge. This claim, taken as a portrayal of agency, poses challenges to standard positions in ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. This article examines the oppositional agency articulated by Lorde’s thought, locating feeling, poetry, and the power she calls “the erotic” within her avowed project of self-preservation. It then explores the implications of taking seriously Lorde’s account, particularly for theorists examining ethics and epistemology under nonideal social conditions. For situations of sexual intimacy, for example, Lorde’s account unsettles prevailing assumptions about the role of consent in responsibility between sexual partners. I argue that obligations to solicit consent and respect refusal are not sufficient to acknowledge the value of agency in intimate encounters when agency is oppositional in the way Lorde describes