The Embodied Apophaticism of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul

2015

espanolYuxtaponiendo dos terminos, a la vez separados y conectados por una barra, el titulo de la obra Homebody/Kabul (2001), de Tony Kushner, plantea preguntas sobre la constitucion de la identidad y su relacion con el lugar. La obra sugiere que el hogar y el cuerpo, evocados por el primer termino del titulo, actuan como salvaguardia de una identidad estable y coherente en regiones privilegiadas mientras que los hogares y cuerpos de otros lugares estan continuamente expuestos a la amenaza de la violencia. La obra demuestra como la violencia sistemica y la simbolica (Žižek) imponen fronteras totalizantes (Bhaba), proyectando un Otro homogeneo que sirve como objeto a conquistar. Al mismo tiempo ese Otro homogeneo es una precondicion para la proyeccion de un yo hegemonico estable y coherente. Sin embargo, la obra demuestra como cualquier proyecto de un yo estable y coherente se ve socavado por la heterogeneidad y la alteridad inapropriable del Otro EnglishJuxtaposing two terms, at onc...

Through an analysis of Tony Kushner’s 2001 play "Homebody/Kabul" and the Old English "Ruin" poem, this essay explores the tension, anxiety, and isolation inherent in the aesthetic and philosophical enterprises of measuring the distance that separates myth from real being (a project that takes place, I would argue, against Levinas, not just outside of the artwork--as criticism--but also within it, in the relationship between the artist and his medium, and even within the medium itself). This essay also ruminates, with reference to an extremely topical contemporary play and a densely opaque remnant of Anglo-Saxon poetry, the ethical dimensions of the use of the imagination to stage encounters between the present and the past, between being and history. According to Levinas, being cannot be explained in its total reality without “the perspective of the relation with the other” (“Reality and its shadow”); therefore, following the ethical thought of Levinas, and also the historiographical thought of Michel de Certeau, this essay looks as well at the expression of heterology (or, a discourse on the Other) in both works--an expression, moreover, that, in Certeau’s words, “causes the production of an exchange among living souls” that “fashions out of language the forever-remnant trace of a beginning that is as impossible to recover as to forget.”

Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities , 2022

This essay offers a critical analysis of Tony Kushner's play Homebody/Kabul. Overall, it is argued that politics and culture represent salient dimensions along which the author has structured characters' identities and organized the narrative of the play. Drawing upon the work of Edward Said, particular attention is paid to Orientalist representations of Kabul by the Homebody as symptoms of and reactions against legacies of imperialism and colonialism. The function of language as a marker of culture, political affiliation, and identity is discussed. Further scholarly attention is strongly indicated.

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2017

In my article I seek to uncover the spiritual content underlying the 2015 slasher film, Headless. The film in question portrays a psychotic serial killer who beheads his female victims. Working through the disturbing content, I seek to unpack an " atheology " , to use Georges Bataille's expression and argue that we must see beyond the graphic violence to understand the spirituality of the slasher film. Adapting Cleanth Brooks' approach to poetics, I take the film itself as the object of my aesthetic study, as distinct from its broader environment. Objects are self-sufficient realities whose autonomy must be respected. Rudolf Otto's notion of the " numinous " may be of some help in regard to outlining " beheaded " spirituality as it appears in Headless. Violence unveils the flesh, leading to unspeakable revelations that can only be transmitted through darkness and silence. For Otto, experience of the numinous cannot be put into words. Incommunicability pervades Headless, not only because of the unspeakable crimes perpetrated by the killer, but also because of his own muteness. When confronted with the numinous, we are rendered numb by the awe of this vision. This lack of communication serves to build up tension, until the final scene is unleashed upon the viewer. Using Lee Edelman's theory of negative queerness, I make the case that the mute serial killer is a sinthomosexual, in that he disavows participation in heterosexual reproductive sexuality and indeed does all he can to deconstruct the heterosexual family.

Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2018

In my article, I examine a segment of the 2013 horror anthology, V/H/S/ 2. Entitled „Safe Haven” and directed by young directors Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw Evans, this segment stands out for its religious and metaphysical subject matter. Examining broader media theory concerns relating to the „found-footage horror” subgenre, I consider how, during the course of „Safe Haven”, the screen as frame is gradually supplanted by the increasingly unreal events portrayed in the segment. I seek to simultaneously engage with the question of realism in found footage films, while also utilizing Evan Calder-Williams’ notion of „horrible form” to illuminate the various aesthetic features of Tjahjanto and Evans’ intensive work. In addition, I hope to shed new light on the found footage genre through utilizing some aspects of Aron Gurwitsch’s neglected work in field psychology. Borrowing Gurwitsch’s concept of „thematic field”, I show how the various themes represented in „Safe Haven” gradually modify the viewer experience, while also deforming the fields portrayed in the film. From a realistic, almost documentary film-style aesthetic, Tjahjanto and Evans transport us to a realm of transgressive religion. Beneath the form of religious piety, we uncover a transgressive spirituality, organized around what Friedrich Nietzsche characterizes in his Geneaology of Morals as the „will to nothingness.” Beneath representation, the demonic lies in wait, eager to transcend the human element. Degrading everything it infects, the will to nothingness is born, tearing apart corporeality and, indeed, the realism of found footage as orphaned media. Both frame and body alike are torn to shreds. The key imperative of found-footage horror is the following: only the footage may remain intact.

Identities, 2020

In theorising penal politics, this article investigates the marking of the colonised through an analysis of state violence over dead bodies. Delving into and describing the political scene in which the statethrough its courts, law, military, and policeleaves dead bodies bleeding after death, withholds them in carceral refrigerators, and tortures their communities, uncovers what I define as necropenology. Developed from the voices of Jerusalemite families whose children were imprisoned after death, this paper argues that expanding spaces of carcerality, criminalising those who are already dead, and penetrating Palestinian spaces of mourning, illustrates new modes of penology, a necropenology. Necropenology conquers new bodies, psychics, and territories in life and in death through the performance of power that marks both dead and living bodies as disposable. Jerusalemite families articulate first-hand how this form of power strips control of one's own emotions, inscribes indignities, and keeps the colonised as dangerous entities, always on trial in death and when dead.

Interventions, 2020

through an assessment of Abigail's self-scarification, and through analyses of costume and cross-dressing in Graceland and Virgin in Flames, respectively: all corporeal practices, whichshe showsenable a transformation of Abani's transnational bodies "into spaces of intimate dwelling".