The hypochondriac feels ill, is reminded they are always ill, and is always told they are never ill because they’re a hypochondriac. They get better, only to read their symptoms as illness again, in a health-illness dialectic that undermines the medical, clinical, or social cure. The social figure of hypochon­dria embodies the relation between the health-illness of the psyche and the health-illness of the world, as a figure of critique and a coming of age with it. By its very structure, (...) hypochondria is a critical incision in the health-illness and mind-body divides, and it is also a metaphor for a broader modern illness. This essay investigates histories of hypochondriacal symptoms and hypochondria as a historical symptom of the modern condition, that birthed it. Additionally, I include autotheoretical fragments—a historically recurring and amenable form to hypochondria—to better theorize hypochondria’s immanent critique of clinical and medical certainty. Foregrounding the contradiction of a body trying to protect and a body trying to kill, a body lived as an outside threat and a body lived as an inside to protect, the hypochondriac becomes a dialectical diagnostician of what it may mean to seek health in sickness if health is not cure but recurring symptom, struggle, and overcoming. (shrink)

Abstract:The hypochondriac feels ill, is reminded they are always ill, and is always told they are never ill because they’re a hypochondriac. They get better, only to read their symptoms as illness again, in a health-illness dialectic that undermines the medical, clinical, or social cure. The social figure of hypochondria embodies the relation between the health-illness of the psyche and the health-illness of the world, as a figure of critique and a coming of age with it. By its very structure, (...) hypochondria is a critical incision in the health-illness and mind-body divides, and it is also a metaphor for a broader modern illness. This essay investigates histories of hypochondriacal symptoms and hypochondria as a historical symptom of the modern condition, that birthed it. Additionally, I include autotheoretical fragments—a historically recurring and amenable form to hypochondria—to better theorize hypochondria’s immanent critique of clinical and medical (un)certainty. Foregrounding the contradiction of a body trying to protect and a body trying to kill, a body lived as an outside threat and a body lived as an inside to protect, the hypochondriac becomes a dialectical diagnostician of what it may mean to seek health in sickness if health is not cure but recurring symptom, struggle, and overcoming. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coeditors’ IntroductionRetro III: As We RestartAlyson Cole and Kyoo Leethe covid-19 pandemic drags on, and, as the world is now trying to recover from it by learning to at least live with it better, philoSOPHIA has arrived at the third and final issue of RETRO. The fact that this series ended up being framed by the turbulent temporality of the current pandemic is something that some future editors of (...) philoSOPHIA, too, might find worth remembering.For now, we return to the now-point, as expected. To that end, here we have assembled articles on historical, individual, and gendered stigmas and wounds and traumas, among others, focusing also on their relationships to existential time, namely, present moments that persist.We turn first to the pressing issue presented by “Shackling Pregnant Women: US Prisons, Anti-Blackness, and the Unfinished Project of American Abolition”: Brady Heiner offers a lucid “interpretation of the social meaning of shackling imprisoned pregnant women and its persistence despite widespread normative consensus in favor of its abolition,” a joltingly specific, haunting reminder of how deeply the legacy of slavery is embedded in the US criminal legal system and the ways in which American abolition remains an “unfinished project.”Finally, RETRO III marks an ending and a restart of another kind. As of this issue—or, rather, this volume—philoSOPHIA is transitioning from a biannual to an annual publication schedule. In recent years, the journal has transformed in various ways. In 2018, we adopted a new transContinental approach and, with it, a new subtitle. We have expanded to include different [End Page v] genres, media, and voices, always aiming to reflect on our current moment and rethink persistent feminist philosophical questions from divergent angles. Publishing one volume per year is, we are certain, the best way to sustain this breadth of inquiry and continue deepening our alliances with critical race, disability, literary, media, and queer studies, among other fields. As we restart, readers can expect us to keep pushing boundaries, as we always have, while maintaining the same high quality and standards. This is essentially a change in the journal’s format, not in its substance.Wound/stigma as process also emerged as a key notion in Retro III partly because of our preliminary editorial conversation with Annette-Carina van der Zaag about three years ago, who, in response to our call for proposals on “retro” themes, had proposed an idea of guest editing an issue. Although that plan unfortunately did not materialize as we dealt with various pandemic challenges still faced by so many of us on a daily basis, Annette did write a spirited article while encouraging some other colleagues to explore related ideas, for which we remain grateful. In this piece, “Touching Wounds: On the Fugitivity of Stigma,” which explores stigma’s queer-responsive “transformational energy,” van der Zaag articulates ways of “inhabiting” wounds on three registers—material, affective, and fugitive—as an open-ended, future-embracing pathway beyond identity-bound ontology. Ghalya Saadawi, in turn, in her engagingly autobiographical essay “Critical Incision: Hypochondria, Autotheory, and the Health-Illness Dialectic,” autotheoretically draws out “critical” energy from this critical “illness” of hers, hypochondria, to the effect of destabilizing the temporally linearized and medically coordinated discursive ideals of health and being/living well.Survival, at the end of the day, often requires some literal transcending. A case in point has been movingly portrayed and theorized by Na-Young Lee, a sociologist and justice activist who, in “Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identities,” revisits questions of historical trauma and collective stigma. Here, she introduces and reflects on her oral history interviews with Korean “Halmoni Activist-Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery as Postcolonial Subjects,” with whom she herself continues to fight in solidarity. Focusing on the stories of two foundational figures, “Yun Chung-ok, a leading scholar and activist who, having managed to escape the fate of many other peers, first spoke out about Japanese military sexual slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a survivor and human rights activist,” Lee shows how “overcoming trauma and reaching out to others continues to drive the redress movement” and how “through mutually constructed identities, activist-survivors broke away from... (shrink)

This article explores Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage, and Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, A Daughter of Isis, and Walking Through Fire. It contrasts their works and argues that location and genderawareness play an important role in the writing of autobiographies. The focus is on showing how El Saadawi’s positioning as a feminist activist in Egypt and Ahmed’s location in the USA determine the texts’ themes and shape the construction of the autobiographical “I.”.

In her astute study of contemporary Arab women writers, Anastasia Valassopoulos begins by noting the pitfalls of much existing criticism of writers such as El Saadawi and Djebar in the West. Citing Amal Amireh’s article on the fraught history of the reception of El Saadawi in Egypt and in Europe, Valassopoulos comments that Arab women’s literature tends to be seen as ‘documentary’, and this obscures the ‘core issue of representation’ as it is explored and challenged by women writers. (...) In the face of this omission, the present article explores a selection of works by El Saadawi and Djebar from an aesthetic perspective. El Saadawi and Djebar use literary writing as a means to escape the constraints placed upon them by patriarchy, as well as by colonialism, and uphold creativity and poetry as a possible release from imprisonment. This article also uses Glissant’s and Bhabha’s concepts of literary opacity and the right to narrate as a partial framework for a reading of the relation between writing, freedom and aesthetic form in the works of El Saadawi and Djebar. El Saadawi and Djebar purposefully deploy a form of self-effacement, both in their autobiographical representations and in their portraits of female characters, also akin to Trinh Minh-ha’s strategy in Woman, Native, Other. Minh-ha’s dissemination of the writing voice, and the affirmation of collective solidarity between multiple but internally fragmentary feminist positions, serves, then, as a further theoretical backdrop for El Saadawi’s and Djebar’s use of opacity and the right to narrate as tools in an active feminist resistance to sexist and racist discourses. Both El Saadawi and Djebar use their writing to conceive women’s liberation from various forms of imprisonment, and they figure women’s fractured, convoluted and at times opaque self-expression as a direct form of resistance to both patriarchal and colonial oppression. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Persecution of Writing: Revisiting Strauss and CensorshipGeorges Van Den Abbeele (bio)In the 1542 edition of Pantagruel, Rabelais’s narrator terminates a long tirade extolling the Gargantuan Chronicles’ extraordinary virtues (curing toothaches, relieving the pain of treatments for syphilis, and so on) with the proviso that he will maintain the absurd truth of these claims “jusques au feu exclusive (to any point short of the stake)” [215]. This clause, absent (...) from earlier editions, while implicating the comic cowardice of the narrator also adumbrates a tragic sense of prudence. In the early years of the sixteenth century, not just Rabelais but the rest of his Renaissance world had come increasingly to know the heavy hand of censorship and persecution. Bookburning, of course, had lost its traditional source of terror with the invention of the printing press: no longer could a single bonfire extinguish all versions of a single manuscript. Instead, Church and State authorities had in the course of the Renaissance to invent new practices for controlling and regulating the circulation of dangerous words: bans on publication, excision of offensive passages prior to printing, indices of prohibited books, and so on. When left with no other alternative, however, one could still burn not just sample copies of the book but the offending author too, such as in the case of Giordano Bruno, whose auto-da-fé menacingly lit up the skies in the very first year of the seventeenth century. 1Today, with the advent of electronic media and the virtual extirpation of texts from the materiality of print and paper, it is even more difficult to abolish or even regulate the spread of refractory discourses. In the last decade, though, we have seen renewed attempts at censorship, not just of modern visual, aural, and electronic modes of representation (as is commonly recognized and debated), but also of that reputed cornerstone of liberal democratic rights, the printed text. And while in the contemporary American context it may seem that the debate over censorship has “become an argument almost exclusively about pornography and obscenity” [McGrail 51], there is also a critical need for reflection on the renewed onslaught today in virtually every part of the planet against the freedom of writers and that of the press per se. The gravity of the situation best emblematized by the case of Salman Rushdie should not blind us to the parallel stories of Taslima Nasrin, Wole Soyinka, Farag Fuda, Nawal el Saadawi, and others sadly too numerous to list. 2 [End Page 3]In this context, Leo Strauss’s 1941 essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing” retains a remarkable currency on the subject and remains a crucial point of departure from which to reflect on the contemporary crisis of censorship and the writer. Written at a time, over half a century ago, when another wave of explicit attacks on writers shocked the intellectual world, Strauss’s essay, on the one hand, struck a hopeful chord by evoking the kinds of techniques available to writers in their efforts to evade or foil censorship, that is, by demonstrating that no censorship can fully succeed in terroristically bringing about an end to heterodox forms of expression. On the other hand, he posits at least the possibility for every text that it has an inexorable core that is esoteric. No censorship can be total, but there is also no such thing as a pristine state of letters prior to censorship. As Michael Holquist has written in a more recent venue, “censorship is” [16], and all discussion must begin from that understanding if we are ever to approach the magnitude of the contemporary debacle.It is perhaps no small irony, too, that a certain Straussianism begs the question of censorship, complaining about the strictures of “political correctness” while seeking to restore a canon that not only would deny many forms of alternative discourse but also the very historicity of such constructs as canons and approved reading lists as well as indices of “forbidden books.” A useful approach might be to consider whether more recent forms of censorship have historically exceeded the terms of Strauss’s argument or whether the Straussian version of history is not itself an... (shrink)