I mourn therefore I am.I live my death in writing.In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida hails a new “scholar”—a scholar to come, a scholar of the future—who addresses the dead . This new scholar would stand in stark contrast to the “traditional” scholar, who has never been “capable” of “addressing himself … to ghosts” precisely because the “traditional” scholar insists on the “the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal …, the living and the non-living” and hence does not (...) believe in “the virtual space of spectrality” . The specter—as an incorporeal phantom—challenges such “sharp distinctions”: if the specter doesn’t exist, how can it be?1 How can the nonliving be living, and how can the .. (shrink)

But my real cat is not Alice’s little cat … because I am certainly not about to conclude hurriedly, upon waking, as Alice did, that one cannot speak with a cat on the pretext that it doesn’t reply or that it always replies the same thing. Everything that I am about to entrust to you no doubt comes back to asking you to respond to me, you, to me, reply to me concerning what it is to respond. If you can. (...) The said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means. And how to distinguish the response from a reaction.A response that does not respond to a question is a response that is not the solution to a problem or the .. (shrink)

Les espaces urbains de Belfast sont encore aujourd’hui marqués par des murs de sécurité construits, pour les premiers, après les violents affrontements civils de la fin des années 1960. Cet article se penche sur les paradoxes de la construction et de la pérennisation de ces dispositifs, notamment le décalage apparent entre la multiplication des murs et le processus politique de résolution du conflit dans les années 2000.Belfast’s urban areas still bear the marks of division created by the walls that were (...) first erected after the violent civil conflicts of the late 1960s. This article explores the paradoxes that emerge from the construction and perpetuation of these security barriers, and especially the obvious discrepancy between the increasing number of walls and the political process of conflict resolution since the year 2000. (shrink)

"When you find yourself neck deep in shit, start making bricks," or so I was advised by Luanne T. Frank, a faculty member during my graduate days, who was deftly "translating" Heidegger for us during one class session. And now, decades later, I look around and think, "I'd better get busy, really busy."With that prelude, and apologies to those weak of stomach or imagination—but this is not the time to be queasy—I approach Barbara Cassin's Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism. (...) Indeed, the paperback cover image is of a man knee deep in water, at the least, and he looks down reflectively, somberly, as if to ask: "Really? What to do?"When I first read Cassin's volume—a collection of previously... (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)