Emily ShuHui Tsai

This short paper aims to discuss the unbearably-heavy weight of childhood memory and the survivor's guilt as the symptoms in the novel, The Kite Runner, published in 2003, by an Afghan-American writer, Khaled Hosseini. It describes the ambivalent relationship between the father and the son against the background of political turmoil in Afghanistan—how they have a good life together in Afghanistan and afterwards how they are forced to leave their homeland like refugees to Pakistan and then to The United States for a new life with the survivor's guilt after the tumultuous period of the Soviet military invasion. The narrator, Amir, treasures the memories of his old homeland, Afghanistan, the innermost remnants of his being, which has become as the specter haunting his present life in the United States. Amir has to return to his old homeland to meet his father's closest friend, Rahim Khan, and to rescue Sohrad, the son of his half-brother, Hassan, from the Taliban regime. This ethical return to the past not only has unfolded certain secrecy of his father's dishonor but also has healed his sense of survivor's guilt because of his evil rivalry of jealousy against Hassan to fully possess his father's love in his childhood. In my discussion of ethnic hierarchy and conflicts in Afghanistan described in the novel, Jacques Derrida's and Giorgio Agamben's theoretical concepts, such as the problematic of sovereignty, sovereign animality and bare life in The Beast & the Soveriegn and Homo Sacer, will be used to penetrate the deeper understanding of their traumatic past as haunting specters.

To geographers, there are two kinds of islands, continental islands and oceanic islands, as Gilles Deleuze discusses in his book, Desert Islands and Other Texts, but there is the third kind, which is rarely thought, that is, the one in the imaginary of the mythological level as myth related to creativity itself. This virtual island functions as a protective shield for the creators, who exist in solitude or detachment from others, to enjoy the pleasure of imagination for their creativity. Islands are surrounded by oceans. The image of the ocean inspires us to take a rhizomatic line of flight to emancipate from the oppression or restriction of the social hierarchical order which is represented as the metaphorical images of arborescence as it is discussed in A Thousand Plateaus. However, the globalization of neoliberal capitalism with its three principles—deregulation, privatization and liberalization—has liberated human desires without a good ethics for their insatiable enjoyment that has already damaged our environment and also polluted the oceans which have often been regarded for those people without any care of the oceans as a giant tank of garbage. In fact, the oceans have produced more oxygen than the trees on the land for the human health. In addition, the loss of biodiversity has destroyed the great chain of being that is detrimental to our health. The chronic damages of the environment by human collective desires have affected us to have a feeling of ambivalence toward the image of the oceans: serenity, creativity, oblivion and hostility for the human civilization.

This short paper aims to critically analyze a contemporary Taiwanese film, The Fourth Portrait, directed by Meng-Hung Chung, from the perspective of Deleuzian theories. In Deleuze's two books on cinema, the discussion of images demonstrates the entangled juxtaposition of the three levels: brain-thought, cinema-screen, and world-images that compose the cinematic consciousness. Through the interacted movement-images and time-images, the film unfolds the storyline within the aesthetic pleasure of poetic sentiment that gradually leads the audience to learn that a wandering boy, Hsiao-Hsiang, after the death of his father, has had several adventurous encounters that gradually expose the secrecy of his traumatic family: His birth mother has no decent job and his stepfather has killed his own brother. This broken family has been haunted by the shared guilt and the undead memory as Derrida famously claims that hauntology precedes ontology. As the past coexists with the present, Deleuze analyzes the concept of I, with a central fracture in its pure form of the past demonstrating an ontological enigma that remains forever a secret. When the director uses the four portraits to indicate the four important events of this wandering boy, he deliberately leaves empty the fourth portrait, the self-portrait of the boy; it remains as an incomplete piece which symbolizes an enigma of his own life. It shows certain constitutive unnamable forces acting within the boy that seduces him forever to painfully misrecognize himself. It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 86) In both the East and the West, there is a strain of theoretical thought postulating that life is a series of events that repeat in difference. The haunting causality we have been seeking occurs in unknown multiplicities with ontological textures. Perhaps, tracing back toward these unnamable forces means falling into a virtual labyrinth that has no exit. For Marxist revolutionaries, social reality can be changed through a class power struggle, but there remains a certain ontological dimension that has inscribed in each individual his or her singularity of being. Even in Anti-Oedipus, which follows Nietzsche and Marx, Deleuze and Guattari would argue that the unconscious is like a factory for the desiring-machine to work on its disjunction and conjunction as the creative process of becoming; it is not a predestined daddy-mommy-me theater that forces king Oedipus eventually to get trapped in his tragic fate that fulfills Apollo's oracle. Deleuze's theories in his other books, such as The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, prove that he in fact does not entirely deny this

In this short paper, I attempt to use Deleuzian theories to interpret a
series of poetic prose pieces on whales and dolphins by the famous Taiwanese
writer and fisherman, Hung-Chi Liao. The idea of immanence is important
throughout the whole Deleuzian philosophical enterprise. In What
Is Philosophy?, Deleuze explains that concepts are events and the plane of
immanence is the reservoir of conceptual events that give rise to the image
of thought. In other words, the plane of immanence is the absolute ground
of philosophy where concepts are created and thus indicates a possibility of
virtual creativity. From this perspective, when we read Liao’s remarkably poetic
prose pieces on whales and dolphins, we feel that his alternative form of
contact withthe ocean is an event, a crucial moment of deterritorialization
that has brought him to “actualize” his creative immanence. In his thirties,
after a traumatic event that forced him to break away from the land, the
ocean as a line of flight became Liao’s “rhizomatic territory” to create a new
life. Whales and dolphins are intelligent marine mammals and his contact
with them seems to have indirectly triggered the creative force of the immanence in him. The ocean imagination has invited him to dive into “a line
of becoming.” As Deleuze has argued in A Thousand Plateaus that every becoming
is an involution, not an imitation, Liao’s ocean writing on becoming
dolphins and whales has brought him to a new identity—a very successful
writer with a deep connection to the ocean.

This paper aims to explore the different levels of masochism, especially the symptomatic fantasy of the masochistic subject in the novel, The Piano Teacher, by Elfriede Jelinek. Erika Kohut, whose symbiotic relationship with the authoritarian mother is rather sadomasochistic, is oriented toward pleasure-seeking violence in sexual masochism. Thus, the ideal romance with her male student, Walter Klemmer, deteriorates into a harsh disillusionment of perverse humiliation. To analyze masochism, I will compare Freudian interpretation to Deleuzian understanding and discuss their difference, together with the Žižekian theory that would postulate that this masochistic enjoyment is the subject’s passion for the Real to avoid a psychotic break down in the symbolic order.

This short paper aims to interpret Beyond Humanity, a collection of Black-and-white photographs by the famous Taiwanese artist, Yao Jui-Chung. Beyond Humanity is one of Yao Jui-Chung’s photographic works on the images of ruins—the deserted buildings or ruined religious idols or houses—in contemporary Taiwanese culture. Employing the theoretical ideas of Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, I first interpret the cultural meanings of this specific photographic collection. I, then, analyze the documentary photographic images as the time image, haunted by its double, the specter of the past. I suggest each frozen piece of the photographic time image refers to the past, pointing out its virtual dimension like the theater in either individual or collective memory. The time image invites the viewers to take a leap from the present moment into its ontologically-virtual dimension of the past.

This short paper interprets a series of poetic picture books by Jimmy Liao, an
internationally famous Taiwanese artist, from the perspective of Gaston Bachelard’s
theories on the imagination of matter and poetic reverie, as presented in Bachelard’s
Air and Dreams, Water and Dreams, The Poetics of Reverie, The Right to Dream. With
reference to Bachelard’s ideas, I will attempt to penetrate deeper into Jimmy’s Secrets in
the Woods, Thank You, Furry Bunny, for a Wonderful Afternoon, The Blue Stone, Sound
of Colors, The Moon Forgets and A Fish With a Smile. These works present the recurrent
themes of the search for lost innocence and the ecstasy of airy f light, water and the
imagination. Bachelard’s ideas on the imagination of matter find expression in Liao’s
The Blue Stone and The Moon Forgets, where images of air, water, stones, the moon and
stars all appear in a state of cosmic delight. In Liao’s art, this imagination of matter has
its central themes of restoring childhood innocence and striving through poetic reverie
toward the spiritual ecstasy of nature and the cosmic imagination. His stories are indirect
critiques of patriarchy, rigid rationality and rationalist ideology. In the spiritual process of
enjoying poetic reverie, the phenomenon of “becoming animals, becoming fish, becoming
rabbits, and becoming stars or moon,” also corresponds to the Deleuze’s theories, in
which affect, associated with the creative arts expresses inexhaustible creative immanence
as we embrace the Other or the Unknown. This Otherness as childhood innocence is not,
in fact, a psychological regression into the past: it refers to a threshold state that opens up
into a future life.

Elfriede Jelinek, a Nobel literature laureate in 2004, is a highly controversial
and radical Austrian feminist playwright and novelist. Jelinek has demonstrated
in her major novels how the brutal patriarchy has exploited and dominated
female sexuality; how sexuality is manipulated as a power struggle and mutually
inflicted pain as pleasure; and how love can be denigrated to the pure violence of
sadomasochistic desire. In Wonderful Wonderful Times published in 1980 (with an
English version in 1990), Jelinek, following her usual sadomasochistic narrative
theme, has created a work that represents the enjoyment of senseless violence by
a group of teenagers, thereby reflecting her vision of Austria’s postwar and postholocaust
politics and the apathetic, cruel mentality of its people. This malevolent
sensational taking of pleasure in violence amongst teenagers has aroused public
panic; not only are there incidents nowadays at the school campus, but there are
also occurrences of domestic tragedy. In this short paper, I attempt to read this
novel from the psychoanalytic perspective. First, I explain how human aggression,
or the narcissistic superego is deeply-rooted in the psychic structure. Second,
I discuss how, in the postwar ideology, pathological narcissism is linked to the
violence of the Maternal Thing as pure pleasure. Finally, I seek to understand how
the apathetic social environment after the war might stimulate the production of malign pheromones, like the air-borne toxins, that transmit sadomasochistic affects
to people.