Journal articles on the topic 'Derrida, Jacques Contributions in theology'

The purpose of the essay is to contextualize and explain the philosophical project that is under way in Jacques Derrida's Khōraof 1993. Upon a cursory reading, the book will appear to be merely the unpacking of yet another undecidable term that Derrida has located within the history of metaphysics. But, in fact, the stakes of this text are much higher in that Derrida's aim is to continue developing a project that was announced in the late 1960s, namely, to deregionalize ontology. Precisely what Derrida meant by that phrase and the various texts one would have to revisit in order to properly understand how Khōra instrumentalizes deregionalization is what this essay attempts to survey. Lastly, as Husserlian phenomenology is quite central to the concerns of this essay, researchers may consider it as a contribution to the study of Derrida's relation to Husserl's philosophy. Major texts by Derrida that are discussed include The Problem of Genesis in Husserlian Phenomenology, ‘La difference’, Voice and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, ‘Plato's Pharmacy’, ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’, and Khora. Major topics include: the transcendental ego, regional phenomenology, voice and writing, differance, origin, genesis, woman, negative theology, khora, and Plato.

This paper aims to draw a connection between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion in regard to the role of negative theology. This scrutiny shows meaningful contributions of the Authors to a new definition of subjectivity in a post-metaphysical age, and their consideration about which possibilities are still open for a non-predetermined history given outside of the presence domain. The future is neither a totalisation of history by its end, nor a simple continuation of the present. It is an eschatological event, where the relationship with the other plays a crucial role for the self-constitution. Such an interlacement is generated by the confession, where the link between past and future is not causally determined, but instead it is self-witness, as in Augustine’s masterpiece, essential reference for both the Authors

In his lectures on the death penalty Jacques Derrida argues the surprising thesis that ‘no philosophical system as such has ever been able rationally to oppose the death penalty’. And he also entertains a second thesis that juridical execution undergirds the legal system. In his support for abolitionism, Derrida participates in ‘philosophy’ without quite belonging there. In fact, he maintains that juridical execution comes into sharper focus only when we pass from philosophy to theology. There is space for further passage in this direction, perhaps, in exploring the Eucharist as ‘unbloody sacrifice’. It is regrettable that the second thesis is insufficiently established.

[The author summarizes the content of Jacques Dupuis's latest work, Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue (Orbis, 2002) and indicates some of the points where it differs from his earlier, longer book, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Orbis, 1997). He then reflects on the terminological and substantial issues that Dupuis has taken up in his two works. Both books offer outstanding contributions to interreligious dialogue.]

This article responds to papers presented at a research conference at London School of Theology in April 2017 interacting with John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift, and subsequently published in Evangelical Quarterly. It responds in turn to Desta Heliso, Conrad Gempf, Matthew Jones, and Graham McFarlane on a journey from Paul to the Gospels, to Martin Luther King, and finally to Jacques Derrida.

Abstract: Jacques Derrida is doubtless one of the most controversial phi- losophers of our time. Controversies surrounding him are mainly caused by his radical ideas which have shaken the main traditions of thinking in Western Philosophy. He demonstrates the contradictions of various philophical concepts. He also uses a provocative approach by connect- ing religion with atheism. This essay will demonstrate Derrida’s concept of religion and how it is connected with atheism. Derrida does not present a theology; however his idea of atheistic faith can contribute to a critical understanding of faith and its expressions within religions. Keywords: Iman (faith), agama (religion), teror (terror), ateis (atheist; athe- istic), hadiah (gift; reward), pengetahuan (knowlegde).

Opening with a consideration of the distribution of the two graphic acts — drawing and writing — this article offers a comparative study of Jacques Derrida's and Jean-Luc Nancy's respective exhibitions and catalogue essays on the subject of drawing. Through a comparative examination of what I take to be their central theoretical contributions to the study of drawing — Derrida its ‘rhetoric’, Nancy its ‘rhythm’ — this article moves on to suggest how these concepts inform a theory of poetic lineation.

Far from being a banality or a philosophical naivety, there is a quintessential nexus between language and meaning, in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). The thrust of Derrida’s idea is that, language is chaotic and meaning is never fixed, in a way that allows us to effectively determine it (that is, meaning is unstable, undecided, provisional and ever differed). As a Poststructuralist, Derrida’s quarrel was with Logocentrism, which privileges speech over writing, and hitherto assume that, we have an idea in our minds, which our writing or speaking attempts to express. But, this, for Derrida, is not the case, for no one possesses the full significance of their words. Texts, in some sense write themselves: that is, are independent of an author or his intentions. Thus, in Derrida’s thinking, intentionality does not play quite the same role, as is traditionally conceived in the philosophy of language; our intention does not determine the meaning of what we are saying. Instead, the meaning of the words we use, determines our intention, when we speak. This does not mean that we do not mean what we are saying, or that we cannot have intentions in communicating. But, since language is a social structure that developed long before and exists prior to our use of it as individuals, we have to learn to use it and tap into its web of meanings, in order to communicate with others; hence, the need for deconstruction. It is this process of deconstruction, which can point the way to an understanding of language, freed from all forms of structuralism, logocentrism, phonocentrism, phallogocentrism, the myth or metaphysics of presence and also open up a leeway, to the idea of différance. Thus, this paper, attempts an expository-philosophical analysis of Derrida’s eclectic contributions to language and meaning, by drawing insights from his magnus opus, captioned De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology).

Far from being a banality or a philosophical naivety, there is a quintessential nexus between language and meaning, in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). The thrust of Derrida’s idea is that, language is chaotic and meaning is never fixed, in a way that allows us to effectively determine it (that is, meaning is unstable, undecided, provisional and ever differed). As a Poststructuralist, Derrida’s quarrel was with Logocentrism, which privileges speech over writing, and hitherto assume that, we have an idea in our minds, which our writing or speaking attempts to express. But, this, for Derrida, is not the case, for no one possesses the full significance of their words. Texts, in some sense write themselves: that is, are independent of an author or his intentions. Thus, in Derrida’s thinking, intentionality does not play quite the same role, as is traditionally conceived in the philosophy of language; our intention does not determine the meaning of what we are saying. Instead, the meaning of the words we use, determines our intention, when we speak. This does not mean that we do not mean what we are saying, or that we cannot have intentions in communicating. But, since language is a social structure that developed long before and exists prior to our use of it as individuals, we have to learn to use it and tap into its web of meanings, in order to communicate with others; hence, the need for deconstruction. It is this process of deconstruction, which can point the way to an understanding of language, freed from all forms of structuralism, logo centrism, phono centrism, phallogocentrism, the myth or metaphysics of presence and also open up a leeway, to the idea of difference. Thus, this paper, attempts an expository-philosophical analysis of Derrida’s eclectic contributions to language and meaning, by drawing insights from his magnus opus, captioned De la grammatologie (of Grammatology).

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this group of contributions, Aggie Hirst and Tom Houseman, Paulo Cesar Duque-Estrada, Jenny Edkins and Cristiano Mendes reflect on the legacies of Marx and Derrida: on whether Derrida emphasized the wrong Marxian heritage, on the promise and risks of hauntology, on the ghostly potential for justice amidst devastation, and on the paradox of deconstruction’s legacy itself.

Late XX and early XXI centuries are marked by increased interest in deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, which covered with its influence almost all spheres of humanities studies, including theology. In Ukrainian theological discourse the theme of deconstruction is just beginning to be elaborated. The main purpose of the presented article is to consider the key Derridian word-notion “différance” (distinction) – the engine of deconstruction – and its influence on philosophical discourse, the central theme of which is language. The author also critically analyzes the adjacent strategies of “pure gift”, “chora” (khôra) and “unconditional hospitality” in the context of the key symbol of the Derridian corpus: a coming democracy (démocratie à venir), identified in this article with the Christian eschatological symbol “the Kingdom of God”. These strategies, developed by Derrida, aim at a gradual transformation of experience and ethics in the known structures of existence (linguistic, political, religious, social and domestic). The article concludes with an analysis of the relationship between the principles of coming democracy (represented by Derrida’s deconstructivist project and John Caputo’s “weak theology”) and Ukrainian theological thought, as well as a consideration of its possible future.

يهدف هذا البحث إلى إبراز حضور التصوف اليهودي الباطني "القبالي" في نتاج الفيلسوف اليهودي الفرنسي جاك دريدا، وذلك بدراسة العلاقة بين الأدب الفلسفي واللاهوت أولاً، ثم التعريف بالتصوف اليهودي الباطني المعروف باسم القبالة، ثم التعريف الموجز بجاك دريدا وبعض اللحظات المهمة في مسيرته. بعد ذلك، توقَّف البحث عند مقالين قيِّمين للدارسة سوزان هاندلمان، والباحث إليوت وولفسون، اللذينِ أكَّدا -على التوالي- تأثُّر دريدا بالتصوف القبالي وتقاطعه معه. وأخيراً، عرض البحث لمثال تطبيقي على ذلك الحضور القبالي في نص دريدا. This critical study seeks to highlight the influence and presence of the Jewish Mystical tradition, Kabbalah, in the work of the French Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida. The study initially tries to study the relationship between philosophy, literature, and theology. Then, it provides a short biography of Derrida and a basic definition of the Kabbalah. The paper critically discusses two important works, by Susan Handelman and Elliot Wolfson, on the influence and convergence of Kabbalah and Derrida’s work. As a practical example the study shows the presence of Kabbalah in two passages from Derrida.

The theological turn in continental philosophy has beckoned several new possibilities for theoretical discourse. More recently, the question of the absence of a political theology has been raised: Can an ethics of alterity offer a more substantive politics? In pursuing this question, the article considers the late work of Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo. It argues that, contrary to caricatures of Caputo’s “theology of event,” his notion of theopoetics evinces a “materialist turn” in his mature thought that can be considered the beginning of a “radical political theology.” This position is not without its challenges, however, raising concerns over deconstruction’s ability to navigate the immanent but necessary dangers of politics. In order to attempt to speak of a form of “radical political theology”—i.e. a movement from theopoetics to theopraxis—the article turns to some of the political writing of Simon Critchley. It is argued that a much desired “political viscerality” for a radical political theology is supplied by Critchley’s anarchic realism. The latter is neither conceived as utopian nor defeatist, but as a sustained program of inventive and creative political interventions, which act as responses to the singularity of the situation.

Drawing from the works of Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida, this article offers a theory of political theology for the contemporary Western liberal nation-state. Taking as its starting point the death penalty, it presents a triune theory of governance—what I call Trinitarian Governmentality—which exposes the thanatopolitical dimension fundamental to the very articulation of sovereign power and, as such, the theologico-political. It is thus only by conceptualizing sovereignty as Trinitarian Governmentality—composed of biopower/oikonomia, disciplinary power/theologia, and pastoral power/eschatologia—that we can begin to address Derrida’s central question: how might we theorize a properly philosophical abolitionism for the present?

My paper analyses some 20th century bestiaries, focusing on two types of the so-called contemporary “zooliterature”: the one characterized by fantastic/imaginary roots and the one marked by realistical, ethical, and ecological traits. The purpose is, through a critical vision of the western zoological traditions and an approach suitable to the theoretical demands of the contemporary world, to investigate how animals have been portrayed fictionally by writers who subvert or reinvent the bestiaries of the past. This article also discusses the question of the animals and their possible subjectivity, by examining the contributions of Jacques Derrida and J.M.Coetzee to recent debates on this matter in the fields of philosophy and literary theory.

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this fourth group of contributions, Thomas Clément Mercier shows how Derrida’s book, besides questioning reception and influence, yet remains to be read, especially in light of ongoing archival research on Derrida’s engagements with Marx’s writings in seminars from the 1970s; and Paulo Chamon offers a critical assessment of Derrida’s promise of a ‘New International’ by considering how the book spooks itself in such a way as to raise serious questions in regard to sovereignty and subjectivity.

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this fifth group of contributions, three philosophers explore the specters of colonialidade, the specifically Brazilian legacies of Portuguese and European coloniality. Carla Rodrigues opens the dialogue by exploring the haunting and melancholy provoked by colonial forms of violence and shows how confronting Brazilian necropolitics sustains the Derridean legacy; Rafael Haddock-Lobo offers a meditation on the difficulties of being before the law and standing before specters as a means of being justly haunted by the others of European philosophy in Brazil; finally, Marcelo Moraes continues the theme of Europe as a specter-producing machine and invokes specifically the presences of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian political resistances with the aim of deconstructing coloniality.

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this third group of contributions, Jessica Auchter, Bruna Holstein Meireles and Victor Coutinho Lage draw broadly on Derrida’s writings to explore the spectrality of the international or inter-state-eal: of politics itself being based on hospitality toward the ghost as foreign guest, of the possibility of enacting a politics of spectrality that might aspire to a new kind of universality, and of how a ‘without international’ might escape the series of prisons that constitutes the international.

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this sixth group of contributions, Jean Tible sketches how spectrality and phantasmagoria continue to animate recent inheritances of both Derrida’s and Marx’s texts so as to inspire novel thought-struggles; Dirce Eleonora Nigro Solis considers Derrida’s engagement with the question ‘Whither Marxism?’ as a politico-philosophical model of deviation that provokes the displacement of Marxian axioms and a renovation of Marxist and deconstructive thinking for the period of neoliberalism; finally, Michael Shapiro traces a different detour in Derrida’s thought and shows that Derrida’s deviant reading of Freud’s construction of repression opens up the past and the archive to non-official constructions of collective history.

AbstractThe last decade has witnessed an attempt to solidify debate on war around the dichotomy of just war and holy war. In this dichotomy, the just war has increasingly been depicted as the progressive secularised opposite to holy war's antiquated religious fundamentalism. While wars argued for under the just war banner have been extensively critiqued and protested against, the rights based language of just war theory has largely escaped critical evaluation. Michael Walzer has emerged as a pivotal figure in just war theory's modern, secular rebirth within the discipline of International Relations. Walzer's theory argues the language of just war theory provides an effective means for us to engage with the moral reality of war. Drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida this article investigates the construction of Walzer's moral language and its ethical implications. The first section focuses on Walzer's moral language; its structure, inconsistencies, and theological underpinnings. The second section addresses how Walzer employs this language to justify the sacrifice of combatants in defence of non-combatants. The central arguments presented in this article are that Walzer's theory is inconsistent in itself, and that the sacrifices initiated by this language constitute the unjustified sacrifice of just war theory's own ethical principles.

Since Heidegger, at least, the theme of the event has become a focal point of current debate in continental philosophy. While scholars recognize the important contributions that Jacques Derrida has made to this debate, the significance of his considerations of the death of the other for his conception of the event has not yet been fully appreciated. This essay focuses on Derrida’s efforts to develop the notion of the event in reference to the death of the other through his engagement with Paul Celan in “Rams—Between Two Infinities, The Poem.” I argue that Derrida’s approach results in a three-fold contribution to the debate about the character of the event. Derrida turns to one of Celan’s poems in an effort to find the kind of speech that attests to the event in its singularity, and in this turn, he develops not only the structure of the event’s appearance in the death of the world when the other dies but also the ethical impetus that accompanies this event of the death of the other, namely a call for workless mourning. Through Derrida’s contribution, we learn that the concern for the event not only includes novel approaches to ontology but also attempts to weave together ontological, ethical, as well as existential concerns.

Confucianism as a mode of life was brought to Taiwan as early as Chinese settlement. Regarding Confucian philosophy, however, it must be traced back to the founding of modern institutions. Even though the historical background of the Chinese diaspora after 1949 is rather complex, it seems possible to examine how it has contributed to the development of academic disciplines in Taiwan, especially with regard to Confucianism. The present paper investigates the corresponding contributions of two philosophers, Tang Junyi (1909–1978) and Mou Zongsan (1909–1995). Both are important scholars, who are indispensable for the development of contemporary intellectual history in Taiwan. In order to describe the creativity in their way of dealing with ruptures, of transforming the separation into the renovation of tradition, the author analyses their efforts in terms of geo-philosophy, through the lens of two concepts, dissemination and reterritorialization, that are borrowed from Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.

In this essay I examine the concepts of democracy and religion as devel­oped by Baruch Spinoza and Jacques Derrida. In taking up the argument for the relationship between philosophy and theology that Spinoza makes central to his Theological-Political Treatise, I undertake to show that, in separating philosophy (what he calls natural knowledge) from theology, Spinoza demonstrates that they are equally based upon moral principles that advocate for the autonomy of all human beings. I also in­voke Spinoza's distinction between religion and superstition before turn­ing to Chapter 16 of the Theological-Political Treatise, in which Spinoza demonstrates that political democracy does not have its origin in the state of nature but in the articulation of moral laws that are at once divine and human. Just as the origin of religion is not supernatural for Spinoza, so the civil state does not have its source in the natural evolution of human beings but in a respect for the rights and freedoms of all persons. In developing my argument, I make use of Derrida's concept of religion as well as his notion of the promise of democracy in order to continue to show that the source of both religious concepts and the democratic state in modernity is neither natural nor supernatural but moral. Through­out my paper, then, I point out the relationship between the values that underpin the concepts of religion and democracy for these two thinkers. Consequently, I undertake to show as the overall argument of my paper that biblical religion (as conceived by Spinoza) is democratic in principle in the beginning and that the principles of modern democracy (the rights and freedoms articulated in democratic states, including the freedom of religion) are religious unto the end.

Abstract During his address to the US Congress in 2015, Pope Francis lifted up the Trappist monk and famed spiritual writer Thomas Merton as one of four “great” Americans who “offer us a way of seeing and interpreting reality” that is life-giving and brings hope. Drawing from Merton and gesturing to Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, the author explores the epistemological roots of the environmental crisis, arguing that while intellectual conversion to the crisis is crucial, Merton’s witness suggests a deeper kind of transformation is required. Reading Merton schools the imagination in the way of wisdom, or sapientia, a contemplative disposition that senses its kinship with Earth through the eyes of the heart, illuminating what Pope Francis has called “an integral ecology.” The author considers the impact of two major influences on Merton’s thought: the Russian Wisdom school of theology, or sophiology, and French theologian Jacques Ellul, whose 1964 book “The Technological Society” raises prescient questions about the role of technology in education and spiritual formation. Arguing that our present crisis is both technological and spiritual, epistemological and metaphysical, the author foregrounds Merton’s contributions to a sapiential theology and theopoetics while asking how the sciences and humanities might work together more intentionally toward the transformation of the personal and collective human heart.

This paper is purely theoretical in which I have illustrated the contributions of the founding theorist of Western sociology, by focusing on how they addressed (or didn’t address) organizations. Then, I have discussed (in brief) the development of organizational theory and how organizational theorists are responding to the emergence of challenges to the traditional rational approaches to understanding organizations. These analyses are situated on the historical contexts include major contributions of each theorist. This research is solely based on the secondary information. Paper contents four Sections: first the work of the three founding theorists of Western Sociology, Karl Marx; Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, secondly, I have exemplified the development of organizational theory and the emergence of challenges to the traditional rational approaches to understand the organization; where I have analyzed the work of Classical theorists- Max Weber, Henri Fayol, Frederick Taylor, Luther Halsey Gulick, Herbert A. Simon, Berton H. Kaplan, modern theorist- Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas etc. Third Section covers the contemporary theories and perspectives. In this section I have exemplified how Philip Selznick, Peter Blau, James David Thompson and Charles Perrow incorporated the Weber notion of bureaucracy followed by DiMaggio, Paul, J. and Walter W. Powell etc. and in forth section, covers the feminist approach in theory building with focus of organizational analysis (with the focus of Arlene Daniels, Dorothy Smith, Marjorie DeVault, Gisela Bock and Susan James, Martha Calas, Linda Smircich etc. work). This paper has detailed footnotes quoted from the original sources and contents useful reference of the sociological theory and practices for concerned social scientist to build their knowledge base and research direction.

This paper is purely theoretical in which I have illustrated the contributions of the founding theorist of Western sociology, by focusing on how they addressed (or didn’t address) organizations. Then, I have discussed (in brief) the development of organizational theory and how organizational theorists are responding to the emergence of challenges to the traditional rational approaches to understanding organizations. These analyses are situated on the historical contexts include major contributions of each theorist. This research is solely based on the secondary information. Paper contents four Sections: first the work of the three founding theorists of Western Sociology, Karl Marx; Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, secondly, I have exemplified the development of organizational theory and the emergence of challenges to the traditional rational approaches to understand the organization; where I have analyzed the work of Classical theorists- Max Weber, Henri Fayol, Frederick Taylor, Luther Halsey Gulick, Herbert A. Simon, Berton H. Kaplan, modern theorist- Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas etc. Third Section covers the contemporary theories and perspectives. In this section I have exemplified how Philip Selznick, Peter Blau, James David Thompson and Charles Perrow incorporated the Weber notion of bureaucracy followed by DiMaggio, Paul, J. and Walter W. Powell etc. and in forth section, covers the feminist approach in theory building with focus of organizational analysis (with the focus of Arlene Daniels, Dorothy Smith, Marjorie DeVault, Gisela Bock and Susan James, Martha Calas, Linda Smircich etc. work). This paper has detailed footnotes quoted from the original sources and contents useful reference of the sociological theory and practices for concerned social scientist to build their knowledge base and research direction.

This paper is purely theoretical in which I have illustrated the contributions of the founding theorist of Western sociology, by focusing on how they addressed (or didn’t address) organizations. Then, I have discussed (in brief) the development of organizational theory and how organizational theorists are responding to the emergence of challenges to the traditional rational approaches to understanding organizations. These analyses are situated on the historical contexts include major contributions of each theorist. This research is solely based on the secondary information. Paper contents four Sections: first the work of the three founding theorists of Western Sociology, Karl Marx; Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, secondly, I have exemplified the development of organizational theory and the emergence of challenges to the traditional rational approaches to understand the organization; where I have analyzed the work of Classical theorists- Max Weber, Henri Fayol, Frederick Taylor, Luther Halsey Gulick, Herbert A. Simon, Berton H. Kaplan, modern theorist- Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas etc. Third Section covers the contemporary theories and perspectives. In this section I have exemplified how Philip Selznick, Peter Blau, James David Thompson and Charles Perrow incorporated the Weber notion of bureaucracy followed by DiMaggio, Paul, J. and Walter W. Powell etc. and in forth section, covers the feminist approach in theory building with focus of organizational analysis (with the focus of Arlene Daniels, Dorothy Smith, Marjorie DeVault, Gisela Bock and Susan James, Martha Calas, Linda Smircich etc. work). This paper has detailed footnotes quoted from the original sources and contents useful reference of the sociological theory and practices for concerned social scientist to build their knowledge base and research direction.

AbstractOne of the less obvious contributions of Saussure is his role in establishing modern communications theory. The sender-message-receiver (SMR) model of communication was developed by Shannon and Weaver (1949, The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press). Within the humanities, it is Roman Jakobson’s version of the SMR model that is most influential. Jakobson’s model creates a methodology for considering such complexities as the sender’s intentions, the context of transmission, metalinguistic codes, the transmission medium, and the relation to the referent. Despite the complexity of Jakobson’s model, it is still bound by the assumption that perfect communication can be achieved through the full recovery of contexts. The most thorough and powerful critique of what’s often called the “transmission model” of communication is found in Jacques Derrida’s “Signature Event Context.” Derrida’s critique begins by demonstrating “why a context is never absolutely determinable” (1988a: 3, Signature event context. In Gerald Graff (ed.), Limited inc., Samuel Weber (trans.), 1–23. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). In place of context, Derrida proposes the notion of “dissemination” in which a text is radically adrift of the conditions of its utterance or reception. At face value, Saussure’s “speech circuit” model represents an early and underdeveloped model of communication. As if often the case, however, a closer reading of the Cours reveals something far more radical and profound. Closer attention to Saussure’s speech circuit model re-opens many questions in communication theory, and in associated fields such as literary theory, cultural studies, and semiotics.

Resumo: O presente artigo busca discutir as contribuições de Michel Foucault e Jacques Derrida para a formulação da teoria queer, apresentando algumas de suas propostas teóricas que passeiam e incorporam movimentos políticos e acadêmicos, bem como corpos em constante construção de si, incorporados por enunciados de gênero, suas oposições, mas também por suas Diferanças. Para isso, apresentamos inicialmente os itinerários históricos dos movimentos políticos queer, ou seja, uma pragmática que se dará ao longo da sua construção, base para o pensamento teórico. A seguir, apresentamos o pensamento desses autores como pressupostos para a potencialização, tanto dessa pragmática, como de dispositivos que compõem a analítica das normalizações dos gêneros e para além deles, constitutivas da Teoria Queer. Palavras-chave: Gênero; Teoria Queer; Michel Foucault; Jacques Derrida. Devices of Queer Theoretical Formation: contributions from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida Abstract: This article aims to discuss the contributions of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to the formulation of queer theory, presenting some of their theoretical proposals that walk and incorporate political and academic movements, as well as bodies in constant construction of themselves, incorporated by statements of gender, its oppositions, but also for its Differances. For this, we initially present the historical itineraries of queer political movements, that is, a pragmatics that will take place throughout their construction, the basis for theoretical thinking. In sequence, we present the thought of these authors as presuppositions for the potentializing of both this pragmatics and devices that make up the analysis of the normalizations of genres and beyond them, which are constitutive of the Queer Theory. Keywords: Gender; Queer Theory; Michel Foucault; Jacques Derrida. Dispositivos de Formación Teórica Queer: aportes de Michel Foucault y Jacques Derrida Resumen: Este artículo busca discutir los aportes de Michel Foucault y Jacques Derrida a la formulación de la teoría queer, presentando algunas de sus propuestas teóricas que caminan e incorporan movimientos políticos y académicos, así como cuerpos en constante construcción de sí mismos, incorporados por declaraciones de género, sus oposiciones, pero también por sus Diferancias. Para eso, presentamos inicialmente los itinerarios históricos de los movimientos políticos queer, o sea, una pragmática que se irá dando a lo largo de su construcción, base del pensamiento teórico. La continuación, presentamos el pensamiento de estos autores como presupuestos para la potencialización tanto de esta pragmática como de los dispositivos que componen el análisis de las normalizaciones de géneros y más allá de ellos, que son constitutivos de la Teoría Queer. Palabras clave: Género; Teoría Queer; Michel Foucault; Jacques Derrida. Data de registro: 16/09/2021 Data de aceite: 19/01/2022

This article brings the concept of democracy � as an open-ended tradition � in conversation with notions dealing with historicity and the future, such as �democracy to come�, �promise�, and �a democratic vision�. It is argued that although these notions are rightfully associated with the future, they also imply that democracy should not be disconnected from an emphasis on an inheritance from the past. With this emphasis in mind, the first part of the article attends to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida�s intriguing term, �democracy to come�, whereas the second part of the article takes a closer look at some aspects of the work of the South African theologian John de Gruchy on democracy, with special reference to his distinction between a democratic system and a democratic vision. The third, and final, part of the article brings some of the insights taken from the engagement with Derrida and De Gruchy into conversation with the continuing challenges facing theological discourse on democracy in South Africa today.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: A constructive proposal is made that emphasises the futural openness of democracy in a way that challenges a vague utopianism.Keywords: Democracy; Derrida; De Gruchy; future; historicity

This article analyzes the postmodern philosophical ideas of three main thinkers, namely Friederich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault through which several serious consequences are faced for the study of Christian theology today. Postmodernism's critique and attack on the absolute truth claims of modernism also have an impact on the concept of Christian theology. These impacts result in the dismantling of the authority of God's word, confusion, lack of purpose and meaning in contemporary human life. This research uses a literature study with a descriptive qualitative method. Data analysis uses philosophical hermeneutics which includes interpretation, descriptive and comparative studies. The results of this study indicate that the idea of postmodernism has resulted in: The rejection of the monopoly of truth claims that have an impact on cultural superiority, the emergence of pluralism and relativism, the absence of absolute meaning in the biblical text, and the free play of interpretation of biblical texts. A number of these consequences are challenges that need to be addressed immediately.AbstrakArtkel ini menganalisis gagasan-gagasan filsafat postmodern dari tiga pemikir utamanya yaitu Friederich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida dan Michel Foucault yang melaluinya sejumlah konsekuensi serius diperhadapkan bagi kajian teologi Kristen masa kini. Kritik dan serangan postmodernisme terhadap klaim kebenaran absolut dari modernisme juga berdampak pada konsep teologi Kristen. Dampak tersebut mengakibatkan terjadinya pembongkaran terhadap otoritas firman Allah, kebingungan, ketiadaan tujuan serta makna hidup manusia kontemporer. Penelitian ini menggunakan studi kepustakaan dengan metode kualitatif deskriptif. Analisis data menggunakan hermeneutika filosofis yang mencakup kajian interpretasi, deskriptif dan komparasi. Adapun hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa gagasan postmodernisme telah menghasilkan: Penolakan terhadap monopoli klaim kebenaran yang berdampak pada superioritas kultural, munculnya pluralisme dan relativisme, ketiadaan makna absolut pada teks Alkitab, dan permainan bebas interpretasi teks-teks Alkitab. Sejumlah konsekuensi ini merupakan tantangan yang perlu dan segera direspons.

The purpose of this article is to stress the relevance of Jacques Derrida to theology and the study of religions. In The Gift of Death he deals with philosophical as well as scientific conceptualizations of ethics in discussion with various authorities in the field - such as Levinas, Kierkegaard, Patocka, Heidegger and Mauss. Derrida’s primary concern is to reject the classical empiral treatment of ethics (as represented by Mauss’ The Gift), according to which the gift becomes the crown example of circularity of love and good deeds. Derrida regards this as a reduction of the ethical complexity to a matter of calculation which is caused by Christianity in its claim for visual certification and knowledge. Instead he pleads for a philosophical concept of ethics as the ultimate gift that breaches with circularity and calculation in the attempt to meet and embrace the Other without prejudice or expectation of gain. Ethics viewed as unlimited responsibility makes it incommensurable with scientific enterprise in general. Derrida’s mission is not to free ethics from religion, but rather to reintroduce a different religious insight into the field of ethics - namely from the viewpoint of faith: openness and fundamental non-knowledge; in other words, Derrida wants to remind us of what it is all about, i.e., that we will never know what it is all about.

ABSTRACT1 The writing of this text is mobilized by the discomfort caused by what is argued to be the “naturalization” of the idea of commonality present in curricular theories and policies. It is from this discomfort that it is proposed to reflect about the meanings of subject and, consequently, definitions of knowledge have been mobilized in curricular theories and policies? Assuming a deconstructive Derridean position, the democratic pretensions of discourses that project the formation of common identities filled by knowledge meant as universal is problematized. Arguments based on the contributions of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory are developed, in dialogue with the reflections produced by Jacques Derrida related to the philosopher’s critique of logocentrism. Without attempting to offer definitive truths, this text is an invitation to reflect on the need to destabilize norms and expose their limits, deconstructing the fragile pillars of structures that support the democratic pretensions of common formation projects. The bet is on the potential hyperpolitization of the social struggle that opens with the appropriation of theoretical contributions presented in this text.

Postmodernity: Crisis or challenge? An examination of the role played by the way Scripture is viewed. Theologians see the postmodern era either as a crisis or a challenge, depending on their view of Scripture and on the roots of the postmodern era. This is illustrated by contrasting the views of Johan Janse van Rensburg and Andries van Aarde. The view of Johan Janse van Rensburg is described as "foundationalist". According to this view, science is viewed as only being possible when built on indubitable facts. As the philosophies of the modern era are questioned by those of the postmodern era, the "foundationalist" view of Scripture experiences the new era as a crisis. Andries van Aarde sees postmodernity as a positive challenge to the church. This optimism is founded on a view of Scripture that can withstand the scrutiny of the postmodern era built on the insights of Jacques Derrida. In order for the church and theology to take up the demands of the new era, this article hopes to prompt the on the view of Scripture.

Christian theology finds in the Eucharist its most ancient and primary intercessory link to the presence of Christ. It is here, the Faith teaches, that the risen Lord can be ritually and truly encountered. The precise nature of the encounter, however, has been explored and explained variously over the past two millennia. Louis-Marie Chauvet in Symbol and Sacrament has proposed a postmodern account of being rooted in Eucharistic symbolic exchange. However, Chauvet's position inherits certain weaknesses from his sources, Heidegger and Derrida. Certain of these can be amended by approaching the question from the perspective of theological aesthetics. This paper attempts to raise possible aesthetic contributions to Eucharistic theology in light of Chauvet by drawing on David Bentley Hart’s work, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. While Chauvet rightly highlights the symbolic mediacy of human access to being, Hart's aesthetic theology can be used to supplement Chauvet's account particularly in its explanation of gift and desire. Beginning with the analogia entis, Hart proceeds to explain creation in terms of analogia delectationis and finally analogia verbi. This provides a basis for understanding all of being Eucharistically; the mirror of being is the Sacrament itself. Thus “creation” describes not only a former event at the beginning of time, but a particular relation to the Creator.

Electronic music is often presented as originating with the Futurists, John Cage, Robert Moog, Kraftwerk and the Detroit techno scene, yet such descriptions elide the role of women in the history of electronic and experimental music and, importantly, occlude contributions from non-western and non-white musicians. This clandestine history is further obscured by the fact that although there are as many women artists working within electronic and experimental music as there are men, men continue to dominate related events and festivals. In this article, I use Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology—a portmanteau of ‘haunting’ and ‘ontology’—to frame such practices of historiography. For Derrida, hauntology marks not a belief in ghosts but, rather, an ethical injunction to preserve otherness, even while such otherness may not be wholly comprehensible to us. The aim of this article is thus twofold: first, to provide a contextualisation of hauntology; and second, to produce a spectrography of electronic and experimental music, of occluded histories and their haunting presence/absence coordinates, in order that we might remember—sit with—the forgotten h(er)istories while all the time acknowledging that these tellings are themselves necessarily partial.

I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vaginal, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/clitorial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated clitoris, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. Indeed, in the intersection of my theoretical, creative, psychological, and somatic praxis, the heat (read hot and messy, insightful and insistent signage) of my body’s knowledges perhaps intensifies – with a ripe bouquet – the inevitably ongoing odour/aroma of the reproductive world. ReferencesAngel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “On Moving and Being Moved: The Corporeality of Writing in Literary Fiction and New Media Art.” Literature and Sensation, eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephan McLaren. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009: 162-172. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Brodzinsky, David. “Adjustment to Adoption: A Psychosocial Perspective.” Clinical Psychology Review 7 (1987): 25-47. doi: 10.1016/0272-7358(87)90003-1.Brodzinsky, David, Daniel Smith, and Anne Brodzinsky. Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues. California: Sage Publications, 1998.Carnochan, Peter. “Containers without Lids”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 16.3 (2006): 341-362.Cixous, Hélène. “To Live the Orange”. The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1979/1994. 81-92. ---. “Preface.” The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1994. xv-xxii.Coull, Kim. “Womb Tongues: A Collection of Poetry.” Honours Thesis. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2007. ---. “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Late Discovery Adoptee Pre-Verbal Trauma into Narrative”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Durey, Judith. Translating Hiraeth, Performing Adoption: Art as Mediation and Form of Cultural Production. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Murdoch University, 2010. 22 Sep. 2011 .Ekis Ekman, Kajsa. Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self. Trans. S. Martin Cheadle. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2013. Gardiner, Amanda. “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. NSW: Allen &. Unwin, 1994. Grotevant, Harold D., Nora Dunbar, Julie K. Kohler, and Amy. M. Lash Esau. “Adoptive Identity: How Contexts within and beyond the Family Shape Developmental Pathways.” Family Relations 49.3 (2000): 79-87.Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Harper Collins, 1992. Howard, Sethane, and Mark W. Crandall. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: What Happens in the Brain. Washington Academy of Sciences 93.3 (2007): 1-18.Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s List. London: Serpentine Publishing Company, 1982. Kenny, Pauline, Daryl Higgins, Carol Soloff, and Reem Sweid. Past Adoption Experiences: National Research Study on the Service Response to Past Adoption Practices. Research Report 21. Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Kirby, Vicky. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Klorer, P. Gussie. “Expressive Therapy with Severely Maltreated Children: Neuroscience Contributions.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 22.4 (2005): 213-220. doi:10.1080/07421656.2005.10129523.Levy-Shiff, Rachel. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees in Adulthood: Family Environment and Adoption-Related Correlates. International Journal of Behavioural Development 25 (2001): 97-104. doi: 1080/01650250042000131.Lifton, Betty J. “The Adoptee’s Journey.” Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 11.2 (2002): 207-213. doi: 10.1023/A:1014320119546.Lusebrink, Vija B. “Art Therapy and the Brain: An Attempt to Understand the Underlying Processes of Art Expression in Therapy.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 21.3 (2004): 125-135. doi:10.1080/07421656. 2004.10129496.Lynch, Catherine. “An Ado/aptive Reading and Writing of Australia and Its Contemporary Literature.” Australian Journal of Adoption 1.1 (2009): 1-401.---. Doubting Adoption Legislation. n.d.McCutcheon, Sandy. The Magician’s Son: A Search for Identity. Sydney, NSW: Penguin, 2006. Metta, Marilyn. “Putting the Body on the Line: Embodied Writing and Recovery through Domestic Violence.” Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013: 486-509.Pert, Candace. Molecules of Emotion: The Science behind Mind-body Medicine. New York: Touchstone, 2007. Rambo, Carol. “Twitch: A Performance of Chronic Liminality.” Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013: 627-638.Riley, Helen J. Identity and Genetic Origins: An Ethical Exploration of the Late Discovery of Adoptive and Donor-insemination Offspring Status. Dissertation. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2012.---. “Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence and Denial of Difference for Late Discovery Persons and Donor Conceived People.” Australian Journal of Adoption 7.2 (2013): 1-13.Skilbeck, Ruth. “First Things: Reflection on Single-Lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-Angle Lens.” International Journal of the Image 3 (2013): 55-66. Talwar, Savneet. “Accessing Traumatic Memory through Art Making: An Art Therapy Trauma Protocol (ATTP)." 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Neither mere flesh nor mere thing, the yellow woman, straddling the person-thing divide, applies tremendous pressures on politically treasured notions of agency, feminist enfleshment, and human ontology. — Anne Anlin Cheng, OrnamentalismIn this (apparently) very versatile piece of clothing, she [Michelle Zauner] smokes, sings karaoke, rides motorcycles, plays a killer guitar solo … and much more. Is there anything you can’t do in a hanbok?— Li-Wei Chu, commentary, From the Intercom IntroductionAnne Anlin Cheng describes the anomaly of being “the yellow woman”, women of Asian descent in Western contexts, by underlining the haunting effects of this artificial identity on multiple politically valent forms, especially through Asian women’s conceived ambivalent relations to subject- and object-hood. Due to the entangled constructiveness conjoining Asiatic identities with objects, things, and ornaments, Cheng calls for new ways to “accommodate the deeper, stranger, more intricate, and more ineffable (con)fusion between thingness and personness instantiated by Asiatic femininity and its unpredictable object life” (14). Following this call, this essay articulates a creative combination of José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification and Avery Gordon’s haunting theory to account for some hauntingly disidentificatory ways that the performance of diaspora sensibilities reimagines Asian American life and femininity.This essay considers “Everybody Wants to Love You” (2016) (EWLY), the music video of Michelle Zauner’s solo musical project Japanese Breakfast, as a ghostly performance, which features a celebration of the Korean culture and identity of Zauner (Song). I analyse it as a site for identifying the confrontational moments and haunting effects of the diaspora sensibilities performed by Zauner who is in fact Jewish-Korean-American. Directed by Zauner and Adam Kolodny, the music video of EWLY features the persona that I call the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, singing in a restroom cubicle, eating a Dunkin Donuts sandwich, shotgunning a beer, shredding a Fender electric guitar on the hood of a truck, riding a motorcycle with her queer lover, and partying with a crowd all in the traditional Korean attire hanbok that used to belong to her late mother. The story ends with Zauner waking up on a bench with a hangover and fleeing from the scene, conjuring up a journey of self-discovery, self-healing, and self-liberation through multiple sites and scenes of everyday life.What I call a ghostly performance is concerned with Avery Gordon’s creative intervention of haunting as a method of social analysis to study the intricate lingering impact of ghostly matters from the past on the present. Jacques Derrida develops hauntology to describe how Marxism continues to haunt Western societies even after its so-called failure. It refers to a status that something is neither present nor absent. Gordon develops haunting as a way of knowing and a method of knowledge production, “forcing a confrontation, forking the future and the past” (xvii). A ghostly performance is thus where ghostly matters are mobilised in “confrontational moments”:when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. (xvi)The interstitiality that transgresses and reconfigures the geographical and temporal borders of nation, culture, and Eurocentric discourses of progression is important for understanding the diverse experiences of diaspora sensibilities as critical double consciousness (Dayal 48, 53). As Gordon suggests, confrontational moments force us to confront and expose the interstitial state of objects, subjects, feelings, and conditions. Hence, to understand this study identifies the confrontational moments in Zauner’s performance as a method to identify and deconstruct the triggering moments of diaspora sensibilities.While deconstructing the ghostly performances of diaspora sensibilities, the essay also adopts an object-oriented approach to serve as a focused entry point. Not only does this approach designate a more focused scope with regard to applying Gordon’s hauntology and Muñoz’s disidentification theory, it also taps into a less attended territory of object theories such as Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented ontology due to the overlooking of the relationship between objects and racialisation that is much explored in Asian American and critical race and ethnic studies (Shomura). Moreover, while diaspora as, or not as, an object of study has been a contested topic (e.g., Axel; Cho), the objects of diaspora have been less studied.This essay elaborates on two ghostly matters: the hanbok and the manicured nails. It uncovers two haunting effects throughout the analysis: the conjuring-up of the Korean diaspora and the troubling of everyday post-racial America. By defying the objectification of Asian bodies with objects of diaspora and refusing to assimilate into the American nightlife, Zauner’s Korean woman persona haunts a multiculturalist post-racial America that fails to recognise the specificities and historicity of Korean America and performs an alternative reality. Disidentificatory ghostly performance therefore, I suggest, thrives on confrontations between the past and the present while gesturing toward the futurities of alternative Americas. Mobilising the critical lenses of disidentification and ghostly performance, finally, I aver that disidentificatory ghostly performances have great potential for envisioning a better politics of performing and representing Asian bodies through the ghostly play of haunting objects/ghostly matters.The Embodied (Objects) and the Disembodied (Ghosts) of DisidentificationThe sonic-visual lifeworld constructed in the music video of EWLY is, first of all, a cultural public sphere, through which social norms are contested, reimagined, and reconfigured. A cultural public sphere reveals the imbricated relations between the political, the public, and the personal as contested through affective (aesthetic and emotional) communications (McGuigan 15). Considering the sonic-visual landscape as a cultural public sphere foregrounds two dimensions of Gordon’s hauntology theory: the psychological and the sociopolitical states. The emphasis on its affective communicative capacities enables the psychological reach of a cultural production. Meanwhile, the multilayered articulation of the political, the public, and the personal shows the inner-network of acts of haunting even when they happen chiefly on the sociopolitical level. What is crucial about cultural public spheres for minoritarian subjects is the creative space offered for negotiating one’s position in capacious and flexible ways that non-cultural publics may not allow. One of the ways is through imagination and disputation (McGuigan 16). The idea that imagination and disputation may cause a temporal and spatial disjunction with the present is important for Muñoz’s theorisation of disidentification. With such disjunction, Muñoz believes, queer of colour performances create future-oriented visions and coterminous temporality of the present and the future. These future-oriented visions and the coterminous temporality can be thought through disidentifications, which Muñoz identifies asa performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social. It is a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification. (97)Disidentification offers a method to identify specific moments of imagination and disputation and moments of temporal and spatial disjunction. The most distinct example of the co-nature of imagination and disputation residing in the EWLY lifeworld is the persona of the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, as she intrudes into the everyday field of American life in a hanbok, such as a bar, a basketball court, and a convenience store. Gordon would call these moments “confrontational moments” (xvi). When performers don’t perform in ways they are supposed to perform, when they don’t operate objects in ways they are supposed to operate, when they don’t mobilise feelings in ways they are supposed to feel, they resist and disidentify with “the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology” (Muñoz 97).In addition to Muñoz’s disidentification and Gordon’s confrontational moments, I adopt an object-oriented approach to guide my analysis of disidentificatory ghostly performances. Object theory departs from objects and matters to rediscover identity and experience. My object-oriented approach follows new materialism more closely than object-oriented ontology because it is less about debating the ontology of Asian American experiences through the lens of objects. Instead, it is more about how re-orienting our attention towards the formation and operation of objecthood reveals and reconfigures the vexed articulation between Asian American experiences and racialised objectification. To this end, my oriented-object approach aligns particularly well with politically engaged frameworks such as Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Eunjung Kim’s ethics of objects.Taking an object-oriented approach in inquiring Asian American identities could be paradoxically intervening because “Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects” (Shomura). Furthermore, this objectification is doubly performed onto the bodies of Asian American women due to the Orientalist conflations of Asia as feminine (Huang 187). Therefore, applying object theory in the case of EWLY requires special attention to the interplay between subject- and object-hood and the line between objecthood and objectification. To avoid the risk of objectification when exploring the objecthood of ghostly matters, I caution against an objects-define-subjects chain of signification and instead suggest a subjects-operate-objects route of inquiry by attending to both the haunting effects of objects and how subjects mobilise such haunting effects in their performance. From a new materialist perspective, it is also important to disassociate problems of objectification from exploration of objecthood (Kim) while excavating the world-making abilities of objects (Bennett). For diasporic peoples, it means to see objects as affective and nostalgic vessels, such as toys, food, family photos, attire, and personal items (e.g., Oum), where traumas of displacement can be stored and rehearsed (Turan 54).What is revealing from a racialised subject-object relationship is what Christopher Bush calls “the ethnicity of things”: things can have ethnicity, an identification that hinges on the articulation that “thingliness can be constituted in ways analogous and related to structures of racialization” (85). This object-oriented approach to inquiry can expose the artificial nature of the affinity between Asian bodies and certain objects, behind which is a confession of naturalised racial order of signification. One way to disrupt this chain of signification is to excavate the haunting objects that disidentify with the norms of the present, that conjure up what the present wants to be done. This “something-to-be-done” characteristic is critical to acts of haunting (Gordon xvii). Such disruptive performances are what I term as “disidentificatory ghostly performances”, connecting the embodied objects with Gordon’s disembodied ghosts through the lens of Muñoz’s disidentificatory reading with a two-fold impact: first exposing such artificial affinity and then suggesting alternative ways of knowing.In what follows, I expand upon two haunting objects/ghostly matters: the manicured nails and the hanbok. I contend that Zauner operates these haunting objects to embody the “something-to-be-done” characteristic by curating uncomfortable, confrontational moments, where the constituted affinity between Koreanness/Asianness and anomaly is instantiated and unsettled in multiple snippets of the mundane post-racial, post-globalisation world.What Can the Korean Woman (Not) Do with Those Nails and in That Hanbok?The hanbok that Zauner wears throughout the music video might be the single most powerful haunting object in the story. This authentic hanbok belonged to Zauner’s late mother who wore it to her wedding. Dressing in the hanbok while navigating the nightlife, it becomes a mediated, trans-temporal experience for both Zauner and her mother. A ghostly journey, you could call it. The hanbok then becomes a ghostly matter that haunts both the Orientalist gaze and the grieving Zauner. This journey could be seen as a process of dealing with personal loss, a process of “reckoning with ghosts” (Gordon 190). The division between the personal and the public, the historical and the present cease to exist as linear and clear-cut forces. The important role of ghosts in the performance are the efforts of historicising and specifying the persona of the Korean woman, which is a strategy for minoritarian performers to resist “the pull of reductive multicultural pluralism” (Muñoz 147). These ghostly matters haunt a pluralist multiculturalist post-racial America that refuses to see minor specificities and historicity.The Korean woman in an authentic hanbok, coupled with other objects of Korean roots, such as a traditional hairdo and seemingly exotic makeup, may invite the Orientalist gaze or the assumption that Zauner is self-commodifying and self-fetishising Korean culture, risking what Cheng calls “Oriental female objectification” operating through “the lenses of commodity and sexual fetishism” (14). However, she “fails” to do any of these. The ways Zauner acts in the hanbok manifests a self-negotiation with her Korean identity through disidentificatory sensibilities with racial fetishism. For example, in various scenes, the Korean woman appears to be drunk in a bar, gorging a sandwich, shotgunning a beer, smoking in a restroom cubicle, messing with strangers in a basketball court, rocking on a truck, and falling asleep on a bench. Some may describe what she does as abnormal, discomforting, and even disgusting in a traditional Korean garment which is usually worn on formal occasions. The Korean woman not only subverts her traditional Koreanness but also disidentifies with what the Asian fetish requires of Asian bodies: obedient, well-behaved model minority or the hypersexualised dragon lady (e.g., Hsu; Shimizu). Zauner’s performance foregrounds the sentimental, the messy, the frenetic, the aggressive, and the carnivalesque as essential qualities and sensibilities of the Korean woman. These rarely visible figurations of Asian femininities speak to the normalised public disappearance of “unwanted” sides of Asian bodies.Wavering public disappearance is a crucial haunting effect. The public disappearance is an “organized system of repression” (Gordon 72) and a “state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts to harrowingly haunt a population into submission” (115). While the journey of EWLY evolves through ups and downs, the Korean woman does not maintain the ephemeral joy and takes offence at the people and surroundings now and then, such as at an arcade in the bar, at some basketball players, or at the audience or the camera operator. The performed disaffection and the conflicts substantiate a theory of “positive perversity” through which Asian American women claim the representation of their sexuality and desires (Shimizu), engendering a strong and visible presence of the ghostly matters operated by the Korean woman. This noticeable arrival of bodies disorients how things are arranged (Ahmed 163), revealing and disrupting whiteness, which functions as a habit and a background to actions (149). The confrontational performances of the encounters between Zauner and others cast a critique of the racial politics of disappearing by reifying disappearing into confrontational moments in the everyday post-racial world.What is also integral to Zauner’s antagonistic performance of wavering public disappearing and failure of “Oriental female objectification” is a punk strategy of negativity through an aesthetic of nihilism and a mediation of performing objects. For example, in addition to the traditional hairdo that goes with her makeup, Zauner also wears a nose ring; in addition to partying with a crowd, she adopts a moshing style of dancing, being carried over people’s heads in the hanbok. All these, in addition to her disaffectionate, aggressive, and impolite body language, express a negative punk aesthetics. Muñoz describes such a negative punk aesthetics as an energy that can be described “as chaotic, as creating a life without rhyme or reason, as quintessentially self-destructive” (97). What lies at the heart of this punk dystopia is the desire for “something else”, something “not the present time or place” (Muñoz). Through this desire for impossible time and place, utopian is reimagined, a race riot, in Mimi Thi Nguyen’s term.On the other hand, the manicured fingernails are also a major operating force, reminiscent of Korean American immigrant history along with the racialised labor relations that have marked Korean bodies as an alien anomaly (Liu). With “Japanese Breakfast” being written on the screen in neon pink with some dazzling effect, the music video begins in a warm tone. The story begins with Zauner selecting EWLY with her finger on a karaoke operation screen, the first of many shots on her carefully manicured nails, decorated with transparent nail extensions, sparkly ornaments, and hanging fine chains. These nails conjure up the nail salon business in the US that heavily depended on immigrant labor and Korean women immigrants have made significant economic contributions through the manicure business. In particular, differently from Los Angeles where nail salons have been predominantly Vietnamese and Chinese owned, Korean women immigrants in the 1980s were the first ones to open nail salons in New York City and led to the rapid growth of the business (Kang 51). The manicured nails first of all conjure up these recent histories associated with the nail salon business.Moreover, these fingernails haunt post-racial and post-globalisation America by revealing and subverting the invisible, normalised racial and ethnic nature of the labor and objects associated with fingernails cosmetic treatment. Ghostly matters inform “a method of knowledge production and a way of writing that could represent the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives” (Gordon xvii). They function as a reminder of the damage that seems forgotten or normalised in modern societies and as an alternative embodiment of what modern societies could have become. In the universe of EWLY, the fingernails become a forceful ghostly matter by reminding us of the damage done onto Korean bodies by fixing them as service performers instead customers. The nail salon business as performed by immigrant labor has been a business of “buying and selling of deference and attentiveness”, where white customers come to exercise their privilege while not wanting anything associated with Koreaness or Otherness (Kang 134). However, as a haunting force, the fingernails subvert such labor relations by acting as a versatile agent operating varied objects, such as a karaoke machine, cigarettes, a sandwich, a Fender guitar, and a can of beer. Through such operating, an alternative labor relation is formed. This alternative is not entirely without roots. As promoted in Japanese Breakfast’s Instagram (@jbrekkie), Zauner’s look was styled by a nail artist who appears to be a white female, Celeste Marie Welch from the DnA Salon based in Philadelphia. This is a snippet of a field that is now a glocalised industry, where the racial and gender makeup is more diverse. It is increasingly easier to see non-Asian and non-female nail salon workers, among whom white nail salon workers outnumbered any other non-Asian racial/ethnic groups (Preeti et al. 23). EWLY’s alternative worldmaking is not only a mere reflection of the changing makeup of an industry but also calling out the societal tendency of forgetting histories. To be haunted, as Gordon explains, is to be “tied to historical and social effects” (190). The ghostly matters of the manicure industry haunt its workers, artists, consumers, and businesspeople of a past that prescribes racialised labor divisions, consumption relations, and the historical and social effects inflicted on the Othered bodies. Performing with the manicured nails, Zauner challenges now supposedly multicultural manicure culture by fusing oppositional, trans-temporal identities into the persona of the Korean woman. Not only does she conjure up the racialised labor relations as the child of a Korean mother, she also disidentifies with the worker identity of early Korean women immigrants as a consumer who receives service from an artist who would otherwise never perform such labor in the past.Conclusion: Toward a Disidentificatory Ghostly PerformanceThis essay suggests seeing the disidentificatory ghostly performance of the Korean woman as an artistic incarnation of her lived Othering experience, which Zauner may or may not navigate on an everyday basis. As Zauner lives through what looks like a typical Friday night in an American town, the journey represents an interrogation of the present and the past. When the ghostly matters move through public spaces – when she drinks in a bar, walks down the street, and parties with a crowd – the Korean woman neither conforms to what she is expected to do in a hanbok nor does she get fully assimilated into this American nightlife.Derrida avers that haunting, repression, and hegemony are structurally interlocked and that “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” because “hegemony still organizes the repression” (46). This is why the creative capacity of disidentificatory performances is crucial for acts of haunting and for historically repressed groups of people. 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