From its peculiar birth in Freud's self-analysis to its current state of deep crisis, psychoanalysis has always been a practice that questions its own existence. Like the patients that risk themselves in this act of questioning - it is somehow upon this threatened ground that th…
Violence, desire, and the sacred
Violence, desire, and the sacred
The problem of the passions, called the principal concern of Greco-Roman moral philosophy, is also a chief preoccupation of ancient Jewish and Christian homiletic and paraenetic texts. Whereas such texts often treat desire and self-restraint, passion and renunciation, as opposed…
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the transnational sex trade that has developed between Turkey and the former Soviet Union in the post Cold War era. It is based on 16 months of field research in Trabzon, a port town on the northeastern Turkish Black Sea coast, where…
This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary approach to address the literary-historical debate surrounding the definition of “Expressionism” in German-speaking literature. Foregrounding the movement's inherently messianic worldview, it argues that what commentators traditiona…
While Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others try to bring into relief our current political situation by depicting an original, "natural" condition that preceded the "conventional" state of politics, Spinoza brings that natural state forward and shows how we never truly leave it. W…
Colonial narratives and nationalist rhetoric in Africa have always associated female sexuality with male desire and consumption, aberrance, or perversion. While historical narratives suggested that native women’s bodies should be tamed and possessed, African nationalist narrativ…
This thesis is the first history of the early Soviet regime's legal, administrative and medical approaches to homosexuality, using psychiatric archival and criminal records. Treating the period from 1917 to 1941, it uncovers the subcultures of male and female homosexuals in soci…
A contrastive study of Kiswahili and Spanish, two different languages both genetically and morphologically, and at the same time identical since they are both human languages. The study develops gradually, touching on themes related to language and communication, general linguis…
The figure of the medieval go-between found in several Iberian texts in both Romance and Semitic languages works to undermine certain beliefs held by the dominant culture within which she finds herself. The exact nature of her profession is ambiguous, but at its most basic const…
Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a rich testament to our ubiquitous preoccupation with the tangled web of death and desire. In these pages we find nuanced analysis that blends Plato with Shelley, Holderlin with Foucault. Dollimore, a gifted thinker, is not content to…