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Wholes are said to be more than the sum of their parts. This 'more' contains both a promise and a threat. When different elements - which might be individuals, cultures, disciplines, or methods - form a whole, they not only join forces but also generate a surplus from which the parts can benefit. Being part of a whole is a way to acquire meaning and to extend beyond one's limited existence; and having a part in the whole is to have an enlarged agency. But wholes are also more powerful than the sum of their parts. Wholes constitute their parts: they determine what is a part and what is apart, what can become a part, and which parts have no part. Even if parts therefore may not be said to pre-exist a whole, there may still be something in them that exceeds being a part - if only the possibility of being part of a different whole.
The de-constitution of the 'I' is at the centre of Manuele Gragnolati's essay 'Differently Queer: Temporality, Aesthetics, and Sexuality in Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Petrolio" and Elsa Morante's "Aracoeli"'. The essay explores the relationship between temporality, aesthetics, and sexuality in the final novels of two twentieth-century Italian authors: Pasolini's "Petrolio" (1972–75) and Morante's "Aracoeli" (1982). Both novels mobilize a form of temporality that resists a sense of linear and teleological development and that instead appears contorted, inverted, and suspended. The article argues that both novels thereby allow for the articulation of queer desires and pleasures that cannot be inscribed in normative logics of completion, progression, or productivity. It shows how the aesthetics of Pasolini's and Morante's texts replicate the movement of queer subjectivity and dismantle the traditional structure of the novel but do so differently. The fractured and dilated movement of "Petrolio's" textuality corresponds to a post-Oedipal and fully formed subject who is haunted by his complicity with bourgeois power and wants to shatter and annihilate himself by replicating the paradoxical pleasure of non-domesticated sexuality. "Aracoeli", by contrast, has a 'formless form' ('forma senza forma') that corresponds to the position of never completing the process of subject formation by adapting to the symbolic order. The poetic operation of Morante's novel consists in staging an interior journey, backwards along the traces of memory and the body and at the same time forward towards embracing the partiality and fluidity of an inter-subjectivity that is always in the process of becoming.
Marcus Coelen's essay 'An Eclipse of the Screen: Jorge Semprún's Scripts for Alain Resnais' starts from the assumption that the peculiar status of film scripts (not written to be read as such) can be illustrated by the figure of their eclipse. For they are, in inverting the very logic of the figure they invite, eclipsed for the sake of and by the fractured light on the screen they help to produce. Yet just as the sun, obscured by the 'black writing' of the moon, leaves an ephemeral contour in the skies - a spectacle to many when happening - so too can the script that is made to disappear by the screen be assumed to draw its own particular and even more vanishing traits into the movie that is given not only to sight but also to thought. The analyses and critical constructions proposed by Coelen try to detect such traits in the work of Jorge Semprún the screen writer. Writing not only for movies by Alain Resnais - most notably "La guerre est finie" (1966) and "Stavisky" (1974) - but also publishing versions of them after their release and calling those versions 'scénarios' despite various divergences and subtly violent inversions of the movies' images, the screenwriter's figure describes yet another twist of the eclipse. It can be assumed not only that Semprún strongly resisted the influence of the constellation formed by writing and cinematographic shooting, as well as projecting, but furthermore that this writing was almost imperceptibly yet essentially directed against the eclipse it was drawn into. No minor forces are conjured up in this enterprise. Driven by the desire to re-appropriate cinema's a-personal and anti-psychological movement, to domesticate the images of scribbling lights drifting away from the mental and into thought - as well as into a history not mastered -, Semprún attempted to shape mastery itself and most traditional forms of authorship, along with memory and agency, in order to cloud the eclipse of script - that is, we might add, to conjure up a ghost recovering the trace of what has been eclipsed so that it may continue to haunt.
This essay on the nature of the boundary of the comics form is an analysis of US Congressman John Lewis’s autobiography March, which recounts his early days as a civil rights leader and is in the form of a comic or "graphic novel". A few key examples are examined in which normally distinct images and textual elements blend together thereby bringing into question the nature of the boundary in a more general sense as it functions in the comics. Some of the formal elements of the graphic novel analyzed by the essay include its symbolic composition, arrangement of panels and images, treatment of light and dark areas, deployment of racialized icons, and blurring of temporalities and history.
In Japan, most contemporary readers expect comics, or manga, to be entertaining fiction ('story manga'), magazine-based, and targeted at age- and gender-specific demographics. These narratives eventually reappear in bound book editions ('tankōbon'), after they have proven to be popular to an extent that would warrant print runs of more than 5,000 copies. Due to the central role of magazines as first site of publication since the 1960s, genre specificity has been essential – for editors, readers, and artists alike. While manga's traditional genres have been gender- and age-specific, thematic genres such as SF, horror and comedy, or recently also blog-like essay manga, come to the fore whenever the otherwise prevalent categories forfeit efficacy. But there is one genre which does not comply with these categories, i.e. gakushū manga, educational or instructional comics.
Eirini Avramopoulou asks the following questions in her essay 'Claims of Existence between Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics': How is the desire for existence implicated in the experience of identity as wound? Under which conditions does the demand for desire appear to confront the repetition of trauma? Or else, what echoes in the last breath of someone dying? In Istanbul, a city built upon neoliberal structures of governance and cosmopolitan aesthetics, and defined by severe policing and local histories of ethnic and gender violence, these questions reflect upon a particular historical and political period through a personal story. The essay focuses on a transgender activist named Ali, his fight against transphobia, his illness and death, while reflecting on the 2013 public uprising in Istanbul following attempts by the Turkish government to demolish Gezi park. By exploring the notion of spectral survival as a political praxis, it argues that this notion, rather than acceding to claims over a fuller subjectivity, mobilizes an aporia of de-subjectivation. De-constituting the 'I' here attests to an attempt neither to reconfigure its parts nor to merely perceive life as dismantled, but rather to speak of a loss that no familiar language can yet describe. The spectrality of this 'I' troubles and repoliticizes, then, the very notion of haunting, as it lays claims to its own differing and deferral from the constitution of a proper name, or of a 'self'-acclaimed existence, especially when the fight for existence here is also a performative assertion of loss and death connected to processes of resisting sexist, neoliberal, heteronormative, and phallogocentric representations of possession and belonging.