LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: 01/25/20

Saturday, January 25, 2020

India's obsession with Kashmir: democracy, gender, (anti-)nationalism

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to make sense of India's obsession with Kashmir by way of a gendered analysis. I begin by drawing attention to the historical and continuing failure of Indian democracy in Kashmir that results in the violent and multifaceted dehumanisation of Kashmiris and, in turn, domesticates dissent on the question of Kashmir within India. This scenario has been enabled by the persuasive appeal of a gendered masculinist nationalist neoliberal state currently enhanced in its Hindutva avatar. I focus on understanding how the violence enacted upon Kashmiri bodies is connected to feminised understandings of the body of Kashmir in India's imagination of itself as a nation state. I argue that the gendered discourses of representation, cartography and possession are central to the way in which such nationalism works to legitimise and normalise the violence in Kashmir. I conclude with a few reflections on how Kashmir is a litmus test for the discourse on (anti-)nationalism in contemporary India.

KASHMIR IS INDIA'S GAZA

#KASHMIR IS #INDIA'S #GAZA

KASHMIR Imprisoned Resistance: 5th August and its aftermath 2019

#KASHMIR IS #INDIA'S #GAZA

Swathi Seshadri

Gautam Mody

Clifton Rozario

Veena Gowda

Saranga Ugalmugle

Mihir Desai

Between August 5 and 6, 2019, two presidential orders, C.O. 272 and C.O.
273, were issued that had the effect of abrogating Article 370 and Article
35A, and effectively dismantled the limited protection afforded to state of
Jammu and Kashmir in self-governance, territorial integrity and the
collective rights to land and livelihood. As lawyers, activists and a medical
doctor, we felt it important out of a sense of solidarity for the peoples of
Jammu and Kashmir, but also out of a sense of responsibility to understand the situation first hand on the ground, in order to advance the true spirit of a democratic society and hold our elected government and the institutions of democracy accountable for their actions. An eleven-member team comprising advocates, trade union and human activists and a psychiatrist visited the Kashmir Division from September 28 – October 4, 2019. The broad objective of the team was to understand the situation persisting in the two months since the abrogation of Article 370, and, second to assess the quality of access to justice in these compelling circumstances.

Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Imprisoned Resistance: 5th August and its aftermath

The Hidden Magic of Masonic Craft Workings

The Green Mountain Freemason, Quarterly, 2011

Travis W Shores

More Info: pp 6-11

Publication Date: Sep 2011

Publication Name: The Green Mountain Freemason, Quarterly

Shakespeare's Use of Occult Beliefs and Sources

Helen H Gordon
Howard Schumann

Shakespeare's use of ghosts, witches, astrology, sorcery, magic, and alchemy indicate familiarity with occult ideas. Edward de Vere, who used "William Shakespeare" as a pen name, had connections with astrologers and alchemists like Dr. John Dee, and Rosicrucians like Francis Bacon. He was both a Rosicrucian (exploring science and supernaturalism) and a Freemason (employing symbols and rituals). The Stratford resident, William Shakspere, had no connections to these secret societies.

SHAKESPEARE AND THE OCCULT A Path to Edward De Vere

By Howard Schumann

According to the scientific/materialist paradigm of our time, the only true reality is the one we can detect with our five senses. Believers and practitioners of the occult are usually dismissed as heretics, blasphemers aligned with the Devil, or just simply crackpots. In the Elizabethan era,however, belief in the occult was virtually universal."he Renaissance era saw the emergence of new ideas and a deep curiosity about anything mystical. It was the age of Nostradamus, when the Renaissance fusion of Christianity, Hermetic Philosophy(a set of beliefs based primarily upon the writings attributed to Hermes "Trismegistus) was accompanied by strong belief in magic, astrology and alchemy.

References to the occult pervade the works of many literary writers of the time, including William Shakespeare. While the plays are obviously filled with occult references, there is no evidence at all that William Shakspere of Stratford was ever involved with such practices or had even read widely on the subject. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence, as will be discussed later, that Edward de Vere was a patron of the wellknown occultist and philosopher Dr. John Dee and was himself a practitioner of the occult art.

Shakespeare and His Sources Shakespeare's Occult Sources

Travis W. Shores

July, 2013

University of Oxford

English Literature Exeter College

Shakespearean plays source themselves from such a multitude of influences that I may spend my entire life pulling apart the intricacies of Elizabethan era, Renaissance philosophy and social awareness. Though the elements of Shakespeare's plays can readily speak to any one of these subject headings it is important to consider what his thoughts were or, at very least, what his awareness was to the idea of death, life, afterlife, magic and religion. We see repeated themes within the Shakespearean cannon that deal with the unknown and unexplained supernatural phenomenon. From ghosts to witches and maddening insanity induced by visions. These elements are some of the most effective in his plays yet they remain behind the shroud of common knowledge and relegate themselves to the mists of speculation and periphery. It becomes my interest then to flesh out, if you will, the parts of Shakespeare's influences that have led to the dramatic situations that we cherish and adore within his greater known works. In essence: I choose to examine what were his immediate spheres of influence with the occult.

"Lady Alcumy": Elizabethan Gentlewomen and the Practice of Chymistry: a Thesis Submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington
2010

Sienna Latham

Publisher: Victoria University of Wellington
Publication Date: Jan 1, 2010

Abstract
This thesis explores the advent of gentlewomen's chymical activities in Elizabethan England. In the sixteenth century, chymistry gained widespread currency under Queen Elizabeth I. This thesis argues that the queen's significant chymical interests contributed to her iconography, thereby bridging England's previously discrete chymical and female realms. It shows that Elizabeth's influence and fundamental societal changes enabled women, beginning with the gentry, to acquire and apply chymical knowledge. Four case studies highlight the queen's impact on her female subjects through an examination of primary manuscript and printed sources. The Protestant gentlewomen Grace Mildmay,Mary Sidney Herbert, Margaret Hoby and Margaret Clifford may first have encountered chymistry in the manifestation of their religious beliefs through charitable healing, but they developed their knowledge in very different ways. Evidence of their engagement with chymical practitioners and writings provides context for their activities. Shared motivations led to divergent practices, indicating that chymistry in Elizabethan England took as many forms as there were practitioners. This thesis asserts the crucial importance of community to early modern chymists, noting courtly links and overlapping social circles. It contributes to limited historiography on Elizabethan alchemy as well as female alchemists
Contents
Introduction 1
1.Gnosis and Praxis: Queen Elizabeth I and Her Chymical Court 16
2.Grace Mildmay 44
3.Noble Nurse of Learning: Mary Sidney Herbert 69
4.Margaret Hoby 91
5.Margaret Clifford and the Elizabethan Chymical Community 115
Conclusion 140

Leah DeVun, "Erecting Sex: Hermaphrodites and the Medieval Science of Surgery," Osiris 30:1, Scientific Masculinities (2015): 17-37.

Leah DeVun

This essay focuses on “hermaphrodites” and the emerging profession of surgery in thirteenth- and fourteenth- century Europe. During this period, surgeons made novel claims about their authority to regulate sexual difference by surgically “correcting” errant sexual anatomies. Their theories about sex, I argue, drew upon both ancient roots and contemporary conflicts to conceptualize sexual difference in ways that influenced Western Europe for centuries thereafter. I argue that a close examination of medieval surgical texts complicates orthodox narratives in the broader history of sex and sexuality: medieval theorists approached sex in sophisticated and varied

manners that belie any simple opposition of modern and premodern paradigms. In addition, because surgical treatments of hermaphrodites in the Middle Ages prefigure in many ways the treatment of atypical sex (a condition now called, controversially, intersex or disorders/differences of sex development) in the modern world, I suggest that the writings of medieval surgeons have the potential to provide new perspectives on our current debates about surgery and sexual difference.

The Jesus Hermaphrodite:

Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe

Leah DeVun

In Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses , a love struck water nymph named Salmacis attempts to seduce Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, at the edge of her fountain.
Despite the youth’s apparent lack of interest, Salmacis follows him into the water, forcibly kissing and fondling him. When he rejects her advances, she asks the gods to join them forever.The result is a single creature of fused male and female body parts:As when one grafts a twig on some tree,he sees the branches grow one,and with common life come to maturity,so were these two bodies knit in close embrace:they were no longer two, nor such as to be called, one, woman,and one, man. They seemed neither, and yet both.

Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power

"At long last: a set of serious, sustained engagements with the complex relationships between anarchism and the politics and practice of sexuality. Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson have gathered together a collection of passionate, provocative papers that incite the reader to recognize the relevance of anarchist ideas to queer and feminist sexual politics.

-- Sasha Roseneil, author of Common Women, Uncommon Practices: the queer feminisms of Greenham, and Professor of Sociology and Social Theory at Birkbeck, University of London

Not so much a book as a nexus, into which flow some bubbling torrents: utopias, poetry and footnotes, post-theory, rationality, sexuality, Palestine, love, sado-masochism, Kropotkin and Nietzsche, lonely women in all-male meetings, riot grrrls, Queer parades, heteronormativity …and fishbowls. – Something to delight everyone, something to annoy everyone, something to make you think.

-- Sharif Gemie, Professor in Modern and Contemporary History, University of Glamorgan

________________________

Anarchism & Sexuality aims to bring the rich and diverse traditions of anarchist thought and practice into contact with contemporary questions about the politics and lived experience of sexuality. Both in style and in content, it is conceived as a book that aims to question, subvert and overflow authoritarian divisions between the personal and political; between sexual desires categorised as heterosexual or homosexual; between seemingly mutually exclusive activism and scholarship; between forms of expression such as poetry and prose; and between disciplinary categories of knowledge. Anarchism & Sexuality seeks to achieve this by suggesting connections between ethics, relationships and power, three themes that run throughout. The key objectives of the book are: to bring fresh anarchist perspectives to debates around sexuality; to make a queer and feminist intervention within the most recent wave of anarchist scholarship; and to make a queerly anarchist contribution to social justice literature, policy and practice. By mingling prose and poetry, theory and autobiography, it constitutes a gathering place to explore the interplay between sexual and social transformation.This book will be of use to those interested in anarchist movements, cultural studies, critical legal theory, gender studies, and queer and sexuality studies.

Contents:

Preface: Sexual Anarchy, Anarchophobia, and Dangerous Desires, Judy Greenway

1. Ethics, Relationships & Power: An Introduction, Jamie Heckert & Richard Cleminson

2. Alexander Berkman: Sexual Dissidence in the First Wave Anarchist Movement and Its Subsequent Narratives, Jenny Alexander

3. Nobody Knows What an Insurgent Body Can Do: Questions for Affective Resistance, Stevphen Shukaitis.

Poetic Interlude I, Helen Moore

4. Postanarchism and the Contrasexual Practices of the Cyborg in Dildotopia or ‘The War on the Phallus’, Lena Eckert

5. On Anarchism: An Interview with Judith Butler, Jamie Heckert.

Poetic Interlude II, Tom Leonard

6. Love and Revolution in Le Guin’s Four Ways to Forgiveness, Laurence Davis

7. Structures of Desire: Postanarchist Kink in the Speculative Fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, Lewis Call

8. Fantasies of an Anarchist Sex Educator, Jamie Heckert.

Poetic Interlude III,J. Fergus Evans & Helen Moore

9. Sexuality Issues in the Czech Anarchist Movement, Marta Kolářová

10. Amateurism and Anarchism in the Creation of Autonomous Queer Spaces, Gavin Brown.

Afterword: On the Phenomenology of Fishbowls, Kristina Nell Weaver"

More Info: 2011, Routledge; Co-edited with Richard Cleminson

On Anarchism: An Interview with Judith Butler

Jamie Heckert

Exploring questions of race, sexuality and the law, this is Judith Butler's first interview discussing her affinities with anarchism. She resists the temptation to draw a clear line between being inside or outside of the state, for or against the law. Rather, she points to the fragility of any given legal code were regime and its possibility subversion or even dissolution in favour of popular sovereignty. Linking Anarchists Against the Wall, Benjamin, Althusser and the Zapatista encuentros with everyday questions of dignity and survival, this interview demonstrates the possibility and value of queering the border between activist and scholar.

More Info: Pre-proof version. For final version, see J. Heckert and R. Cleminson (eds.) Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power. London/New York: Routledge

Anarchist theory and practice in a global age

BOOK PDF
Anarchism
Anarchist theory and practice in a global age
edited by
Jonathan Purkis
and
James Bowen
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave

2004

Carnival against capital: a comparison of Bakhtin,Vaneigem and Bey
GAVIN GRINDON
Department of English and American Studies School of Arts, Histories and Cultures

University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL

ABSTRACT

Since the mid 1990s, many anarchists and Marxists, drawing on the writings of Hakim Bey, the Situationist International and Mikhail Bakhtin, have increasingly articulated the concept of ‘carnival’ as a valuable form of resistance that merges the political and the aesthetic. This essay looks at these writings and the cases they make, and examines the extent to which they form a coherent body of thought.The central texts under discussion will be Mikhail Bakhtin’s

Rabelais and HisWorld , Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life

and Hakim Bey’s TAZ:The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism

Leonora Carrington, Surrealism, and Initiation

Symbolic Death and Rebirth in Little Francis and Down Below

Kristoffer Noheden

Abstract

In 1940, the surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was incarcerated ina Spanish mental asylum, having been pronounced “incurably insane.”

Down Below , an account of the incident first published in the surrealist journal VVV in 1944, acted as an important part in her recovery from mental illness. In it, she works through her experience in the light of her reading of Pierre Mabille’s (1908–1952) book Mirror of the Marvelous (1940).

This work let Carrington interpret the intricate correspondences she perceived during herillness through the imagery of alchemy, and allowed her to find a similarity between herexperience and the trials depicted in many myths, thus infusing her harrowing experiences with symbolic meaning.

This article discusses the significance of Mabille and his work forCarrington’s sense of regained health. This is further emphasised through a comparison ofthe motif of symbolic death in Down Below

with its depiction in Carrington’s earlier, partly autobiographical, novella “Little Francis” (1937–38). The depiction of a loss of self in this work prefigures the ordeals in Down Below, but it is only in the latter text that Carrington also effects a form of rebirth. The article proposes that the enactment of a symbolic rebirth means that

Down Below can be considered a form of initiation into the surrealist marvellous, and that Carrington’s experiences both parallel and prefigure surrealism’s concerns with esotericism, myth, and initiation, during and after the Second World War.

Keywords

Pierre Mabille; alchemy; myth; André Breton; esotericism; psychosis

Bauduin, T.M. 2014. Surrealism and the Occult. Occultism and Esotericism in the Work and Movement of André Breton. Amsterdam University Press/Chicago University Press.
2014

T. Bauduin, PhD -...
This book offers a new perspective on a long-debated issue: the role of the occult in surrealism, in particular under the leadership of French writer André Breton. Based on thorough source analysis, this study details how our understanding of occultism and esotericism, as well as of their function in Bretonian surrealism, changed significantly over time from the early 1920s to the late 1950s.

'Ithell Colquhoun, Surrealism and the Occult',
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9 (Summer 2011)

Papers of Surrealism, 2011

Victoria Ferentinou

The work of the British artist Ithell Colquhoun has been comparatively overlooked. Only in the last few years have a few publications appeared. This paper adds to these studies by reviewing Colquhoun's negotiation of surrealism and the occult and by exploring the impact that this twofold affiliation had upon her oeuvre. It lays particular emphasis on Colquhoun's revisionist tactics and her use of the occult as a site for personal enlightenment and reaffirmation as a woman artist. The discussion centres on Colquhoun's interest in androgyny, a hermetic motif also employed by the surrealists. The paper addresses Colquhoun's esoteric and feminist appropriation of the concept, delineates her trajectory as an artist and sheds light on the development of her mystical vision.

Issue: 9
Page Numbers: 1-24
Publication Date: 2011

Publication Name: Papers of Surrealism

Take Two Emerald Tablets in the Morning_Surrealism and the Alchemical Transubstantiation of the World_Alchemical Traditions_MARVELL.pdf

Leon Marvell

In nineteen-fourty-eight an interviewer asked André Breton whether he still had any
faith in the ‘initiatic tradition’. Breton replied:

What role do I ascribe to the initiatory tradition? [A]n increasingly important one. observe
[...] that the best things said in France since the liberation (a latent liberation if ever there
was one) aim at the long overdue elucidation of the bond that makes the modern
conceptions of poetry, revolution and love part of the occult process.

"Embodying the Androgyne: Psychoanalysis & Alchemical Desire in Max Ernst’s Men Shall Know Nothing of This (1923)", in Black Mirror, vol. 1: Embodiment, ed. Judith Noble et. al., London, 2016, pp. 176–194.

Daniel Zamani

This essay offers a new analysis of Max Ernst's 1923 composition "Men Shall Know Nothing of This". As the first emblematic example for the Surrealists' fusion of alchemy and psychoanalysis, the work played a seminal role in the gradual shift from Paris Dada to the rise of the Surrealist avant-garde. Informed by Ernst's early studies of Psychology and History of Art at the University of Bonn, the work marked Ernst as a key player on France's artistic scene and firmly placed an engagement with psychoanalysis at the forefront of the Surrealists' artistic and political agenda. Previous approaches to the painting have nevertheless traced its cosmological symbolism to one specific prototype: Freud's 1911 study on the so-called Schreber case, in which he analysed Schreber's neurotic obsession with the solar principle as an unconscious fixation on the father-image, supposedly indicative of an 'inverted Oedipal complex'. My paper argues against this dominant reading of Ernst's composition as a 'pictoral transcript' of Freud's case-study, first postulated by Geoffrey Hinton in 1975 and never seriously challenged in recent research on the artist. I aim to demonstrate that Ernst's psychoanalytically informed painting has to be considered instead as a sophisticated blend of several iconographic sources, resulting in the highly abstracted image of the alchemical androgyne as symbol of perfect oneness and harmony. Ernst's emphasis on the merging of microcosm and macrocosm, the male and the female, the human and the divine ultimately embraced the idea of alchemical symbolism as an unconscious expression of what C.G. Jung later termed the animus/anima archetypes. The use of an alchemical metaphor, which resonated with ideas of metamorphosis and gradual transformation into ever higher states of psychic perfection, was thus a particularly potent symbol for Surrealism's artistic and political aspirations, clearly signaling a new direction for the French avant-garde of the early 1920s.

Dada and Surrealism:
A Very Short Introduction
David Hopkins

The Surrealist Movement in Egypt in the 1930s and the 1940s

Ondřej Beránek

Introduction

In the past decade, the crisis concerning types of literary self-expression has made the latest generation of Egyptian artists turn to the past to look for new sources of inspiration. Among other things, these artists have discovered their heritage in the Surrealist movement. The basic feature of this revived interest was the publishing of reprints of the most important books written by prominent members of the Egyptian Surrealist group called

al-Fann wa’l-ḥurrīya (Art and Liberty), which was founded in Cairo thanks to the initiative of Georges Hénein, the leadinG Egyptian poet and Surrealism theorist.

It should be noted that this event was accompanied by a “suspicious silence”1 on the part of country’s best critics and contemporary Egyptian literature historians. After 1946, another group, La part du sable ,continued the group’s cultural activities. Anwar Kāmil (1913-1991), one of thefounders of the Art and Liberty group and the editor-in-chief of its Arabic review,at-Taṭ awwur (Evolution) should be credited for this revival of Cairo heritage. It was his contribution that made it possible to publish, between 1987 and 1991 and in a limited print run, a range of important Egyptian Surrealist works.This paper attempts to depict the genesis and the main features of the Surrealist movement in Egypt and will be primarily concerned with the movement’s heyday during the 1930s and 1940s. It is beyond the reasonable scope of this paper to give a complete historical and aesthetic analysis of Egyptian Surrealism. Instead,emphasis will be placed on the examination of the basic trends in its evolution. The organization of the article therefore follows the development of the main features of Egyptian Surrealism. Consequently one may ask to what extent it is possible to transfer certain art forms that were created under speciﬁc artistic,and above all historical, conditions to a cultural environment that is markedly different.The Surrealist group in Egypt, one of the most active in the world, was ofﬁcially established on January 9, 1939, sixteen years after the publishing of the ﬁrst Surrealist manifesto in Paris. Georges Hénein played an important part in the process; during his studies in France he got acquainted with the key representatives of Surrealism and he and André Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, even became friends. Besides Hénein, other people were important participants in creating the Egyptian group,namely Ramsīs Yūnān, Fu’ād Kāmil, and Kāmil at-Tilimsānī, all of whom were distinguished painters as well as writers. Hénein coordinated the Egyptian activities with the French group and other groups in the world, including Belgium, Great Britain, and the USA. The Egyptian Surrealist movement ﬂourished during the ﬁrst ﬁve years of its existence. The period 1940-1945 saw ﬁve Surrealist exhibitions in Cairo under the common label Macāriḍ al-fann al-ḥurr (The Exhibitions of the Free Art), where the Egyptian Surrealists tried to articulate all their theoretical concepts.