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This article takes up German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's attention to air and atmospheres to argue for the influential part “objective” thinking plays in disseminating viral pandemics. It follows Sloterdijk's broad approach to “air-conditioning” to interpret the way modern cultures increasingly work to explicate and construct objective figures of (and in) air. A fundamental, yet invisible, “anthropopoietic” element, air resists the forms and figures we use to describe it. This is acutely demonstrated by airborne viruses like COVID-19 and the pandemics they create, where the medial willingness to perceive or “figure” the air becomes a critical, everyday necessity. When Sloterdijk attributes the spread of “affective epidemics” to mass-media technologies, he draws attention to how airborne transmission is a symptom of breathing the same air, which, by affecting and altering air-conditions to reproduce identical figures all across the globe, increases its spread. This article argues that the willingness to make air objective—in both senses of identifying its material properties, and believing in a uniform or consensus figure—eradicates the possibility of vital difference. In doing so, inhabiting what Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior” of reproducible sameness that props up international exchange, modern, globalized culture becomes far more susceptible to the rapid spread of epidemics. Virality is increased by the sameness of objective air-conditioning, and by reintroducing difference into the atmosphere we can bring back its life-giving potential.

This essay reads Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End materially, to claim that Ford's radically ‘modernist’ style worked to refigure history on the basis of the literary mark. Ford's innovative use of the material elements of writing allows his readers to approach history as materialistic historio graphy – a key idea for Paul de Man – that reads writing as marks and traces independent of fluctuating ideological abstractions. In Parade's End, Ford's narration avoids extra-textual context-building, instead sticking as tightly (and often bewilderingly) as possible to the interiority of a character's consciousness. Notably, this technique interacts with the material world in a similar way to de Man's approach to reading. This allows Ford to stage the ‘writing’ of history, where trace-chains are constantly refigured as material inscriptions, taken up and made sense of anew. The essay first interprets Ford's attitude to history as a creative act, ironised by his protagonist Tietjens’ belief in the certainty and self-evidence of unified historicism. It then describes the ‘elliptical’ structure of one of the novels’ key scenes, where Tietjens is forced to learn the unfinishable nature of history–especially via written forms (like the ellipsis itself) that do not speak. Finally, it directs its attention to the tetralogy's conclusion, ‘voiced’ by a mute narrator, that inscribes the potential for meaning to always remain in an unpredictable future. This ‘theotropic’ force cuts through Ford's novels, and in doing so gestures to the ellipsis from which all reading has, always-already, been re-membered.

Writing remains. One could argue that it is precisely because of this uncanny and unpredictable survival that inscription holds an inextricable influence on culture. Deconstructive theory posits this as the ‘biodegradability’ of writing — that culture consumes writing's intended meaning, employing it as fuel for its own survival. In this article, I argue for Michel Houellebecq's awareness of this survival, suggesting that his texts stage their — and their author's — own biodegradability to interweave truth and fiction. Particularly, he utilizes the ‘untranslatability’ of the proper name — its brief resistance to cultural biodegradability — to intercept and write into the future(s) inscription is tied to. This draws attention to the vital paradox of proper names, and suggests that their untranslatability forces every reader to conjure different, contradicting and often ‘out-of-sync’ histories. Houellebecq's names, which necessitate an interminable coining, gesture to the inevitable (re)translation of finitude.

This article emerges from exhausted readings of controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s notorious portrayals of sex and sexuality to observe the relationship between the monstrous, the s...

This chapter offers a new account of the logic of textual presence. It first proposes a reading of subjectivity in the Recherche which contests a commonly-asserted tenet of Proust criticism: the hypothesis that the narrative should be attributed to a single narrator named “Marcel”. From this starting point, it draws a set of wider conclusions concerning static, presentational conceptions of character, which should be replaced by the virtual weaving of textuality itself. In this way, the “blurring” that Roland Barthes argues is privileged in the Recherche with regard to self-identity is applied to the voice that narrates the text, which cannot, then, be contained within any totalizing term. Rather, it should be referred to as a dislocated “voice” that is not speaking, harnessing the complex admixture of presence and absence that is, in fact, a constitutive characteristic of literary fiction. Taking up Derrida’s writing on textual remains, it challenges the possibility of a totalized presentation of both literary and subjective identity, which advances every text’s claim towards transversal unattainability, and contingent sense, disputing materialist or realist conceptions of presence.

This chapter examines the picture of temporal experience provided by the novel considered in light of its rejection of presentational logic. It examines the novel’s opening scene to form an understanding of Deleuze’s theories of the virtual and dividual, and suggests that the setting-less, transversal beginning of the Recherche institutes the novel’s peculiarly multi-temporal quality. By incorporating Henri Bergson’s thoughts on nonnumerical multiplicity, as well as the theories of temporality and perception of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Mauro Carbone, this chapter situates its reading across a phenomenological tradition of transcendental sense, but claims that the immanent-real category of literary “remains” anchors this sense in living becoming. In doing so, it offers a reading that, while steeped in and engaging with a specific and critically recognized philosophical tradition, suggests a more “literary” understanding of its possibilities. By observing phenomenally attuned portrayals of experience like dreams and lying, Proust’s fiction directs us towards the depth and imperviousness of imaginative becoming, asking us how much of experience it is possible to forget—or if it is possible to forget at all.

This chapter suggests a reading of mourning that emphasizes the virtual weaving of absence in Proust’s fiction, and examines how Proust responds to the impossible literary depiction of death. In doing so, a unique model for reading literature—reading reading—emerges: one that has significant implications for theories of literature, psychology and affect. How can an author definitively expel a character who, existing only from and as words, needs only words to come back to “life”? Proust considers this aporia from the intimately spectral perspective of literature’s “life”. And fittingly for a novel structured on deferral, he defers his answer to the question of how to write mourning and death, preferring to die instead, leaving each of his readers to learn for themselves this work of mourning as it becomes their reading of his text. This thanatological end-game sketches out broad consequences for human subjectivity, emerging from Proust’s investment in the virtual power of the literary imagination.

Jealousy in the Recherche is tied to the literary imagination, of constructing possible fictions that colour the “sense” of the beloved. This chapter considers Derrida’s reading of the relationship between jealousy and the visual as the invocation of a project towards absolute knowledge to develop an understanding of the infinite production of jealousy’s fictions. Drawing on Derrida and Freud, I suggest that Proust’s jealous lovers experience an overlaid temporality of infinite compossibility—jealousy writes its fictions from multiple, often conflicting versions of the beloved’s image and testimony, and applies the contradictions and verifications (which become the same thing) of these to further generate its veracities, interrogations, and moreover, the sense of its fictions. This “mystic writing pad” has an intimate relation to the significance of inscription, one evident in the Freudian/Derridean reading, but, more unusually, also in Proust’s. Such overlaying phenomenality functions in the same way that Proust describes the sense of dreams: jealousy’s fictions weave together equally possible and impossible versions of the same beloved, giving the lover a richer image of infinity that, like the text of the Recherche itself, is always becoming denser, more dynamic, and more impossible to define.

This introduction focuses on Proust’s refusal of the difference between philosophy and literature. It surveys notable readings of his Recherche by philosophers and critics and argues that in Proust’s challenge to the distinction between literature and philosophy we can note an affirmation of the elusiveness of genre, textual categories, and writing more generally—that any definition of writing reduces, or does violence to, reading. In this sense, Proust shows how writring is under incessant reformation, a process that places all texts under the same movement. Literary texts are constantly becoming-other than themselves, or what we may seek to define them “as”—such resistance to typology is their literary basis. This process of textual becoming is then identified as key to the philosophies of Deleuze and Derrida, and is used as a basis from which to observe the complex approaches to textuality proposed by all three thinkers.

This chapter develops a new theory of Proustian desire that provides a more idiosyncratic reading of desire than encountered in literary criticism. Proust’s narrator describes desire as flux, always directed to some kind of recalibrating past, the sense of a trace that can never be fully accounted for. He notes desire’s transitional relation with place: it is the un-presentable fullness of place and its relation to the subject (that the subject cannot immanently be in or across all aspects of a place simultaneously), or the trace that it instead leads toward, that motivates desire’s movement. Proust indicates that literary fiction has a unique role to play in the representation of desire: it cannot capture the trace of desire, but its infinite reproducibility can point to a lack that is always lacking another lack, or the productive sense of the trace. The literary context of this affect is not simply employed as a testing ground. Rather, literature is critical to desire itself.

Marcel Proust’s mythically enormous novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), asks many demands of its reader. Its vast, intoxicating sentences, its innumerable characters, affects, and narrators, as well as its sheer length, continue to test and fascinate critics and scholars. But it precisely in this textual and imaginative expanse that Proust’s enterprise turns these demands into living concerns. This book argues that Proust reimagines the limits of phenomenal experience through deferral, focusing on his troubling of textual and conceptual presence as the always-unfinished exchange between writing and life. In its rethinking of representational and temporal commonplaces, it shows how Proust’s novel anticipates the interventions of two influential poststructuralist thinkers: Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Whereas Derrida and Deleuze are often held to occupy irreconcilable philosophical positions, both philosophers are equally relevant to an understanding of Proust’s philosophical significance, which fundamentally rests on his deferral of textual presence. Drawing on a range of conceptual tools from these two philosophical oeuvres, including many that are often overlooked by commentators, the books argues that À la recherche stages a process of uninterrupted textual becoming, in which the distinction between the concepts of “life” and “literature” themselves is broken down. By showing how textuality is constitutively unfinished, this book suggests a new confluence between all three of its subject thinkers’ emphasis on life as deferral, and stakes a claim for rethinking the difference between thought and inscription, text and life.

PURPOSE To determine whether impaired or absent stereopsis affects the ability to perform simulated microsurgical tasks. SETTING University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. DESIGN Prospective randomized cross-over study. METHODS Visual acuity and stereoacuity were measured. A band-pass filter was placed over the nondominant eye to reduce stereoacuity to 150 seconds of an arc (partial stereopsis), or the nondominant eye was completely occluded (absent stereopsis). Participants completed a computerized surgical simulator task 3 times with a randomized testing order (normal stereopsis, absent stereopsis, and partial stereopsis). The task involved using forceps to grasp and position objects in the anterior chamber. Outcomes included area of ocular injury, time to task completion, and overall score. RESULTS Ocular damage area was significantly worse with partial stereopsis (P = .002) and worse still when stereopsis was absent (P < .001 for normal vs absent stereopsis and P = .005 for partial vs absent stereopsis). The median ocular damage area was 3.55 mm (interquartile range [IQR], 1.21-5.88 mm) with normal stereopsis, increasing to 6.10 mm (IQR, 3.96-12.47 mm) with stereopsis reduced to 150 seconds of an arc and to 9.25 mm (IQR, 4.93-18.70 mm) with no stereopsis. Time taken to complete the task increased and overall score decreased as stereopsis was reduced. The overall score decreased from 53% (IQR, 22.5-82%) under normal stereopsis to 0% (IQR, 0-43.5%) with absent stereopsis. CONCLUSIONS Impaired stereopsis was associated with worse microsurgical performance, which may have implications for surgical training. The absence of stereopsis resulted in worse performance than partial reduction in stereopsis.

This article contends with a primary, yet unresolved, problem in Proust criticism: just who is the narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu? Rather than answering, I seek to de-legitimise the ‘who...

A series of zeolite adsorbents has been evaluated for potential application in post-combustion CO2 capture using a new high-throughput gas adsorption instrument capable of measuring 28 samples in parallel. Among the zeolites tested, Ca-A exhibits the highest CO2 uptake (3.72 mmol g−1 and 5.63 mmol cm−3) together with an excellent CO2 selectivity over N2 under conditions relevant to capture from the dry flue gas stream of a coal-fired power plant. The large initial isosteric heat of adsorption of −58 kJ mol−1 indicates the presence of strong interactions between CO2 and the Ca-A framework. Neutron and X-ray powder diffraction studies reveal the precise location of the adsorption sites for CO2 in Ca-A and Mg-A. A detailed study of CO2 adsorption kinetics further shows that the performance of Ca-A is not limited by slow CO2 diffusion within the pores. Significantly, Ca-A exhibited a higher volumetric CO2 uptake and CO2/N2 selectivity than Mg2(dobdc) (dobdc4− = 1,4-dioxido-2,5-benzenedicarboxylate; Mg-MOF-74, CPO-27-Mg), one of the best performing adsorbents. The exceptional performance of Ca-A was maintained in CO2 breakthrough simulations.

The use of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) has tremendous potential for regenerative medicine by providing an unlimited source of personalized cells. A number of protocols have been established for efficient differentiation of hiPSCs to the desired lineage in vitro, such as cardiomyocytes and blood. However, the field lacks an in vivo system to evaluate the differentiation potential and quality of hiPSCs. Developmental potential of stem cells derived from experimental animals can be readily assessed by generating blastocyst chimeras and examination of the contribution to the embryos, or by the potential of teratoma formation. However, this is not possible in the case of humans. As a potential solution for this issue, we examined whether porcine parthenotes could be used as an experimental model to test the developmental potential of the hiPSCs. Parthenotes are generated by electrical activation of the oocytes collected at the abattoir and will develop up to gestational day 53 if transferred to a pseudo-pregnant sow. The embryonic culture conditions have also been established and the zygotes can develop normally to the expanded blastocyst stage (day 7 post fertilization/activation), in vitro. We took advantage of this in vitro system and examined the ability of hiPSCs to proliferate and integrate into the parthenogenetic embryos. Parthenogenetic embryos were injected with ten undifferentiated hiPSCs at day 4 (8 cell ~ morula stage) and cultured up to 72 hours. During this period, parthenotes underwent blastocoel cavity formation and hatching. Cell tracing experiments demonstrated that hiPSCs proliferated and integrated into the parthenotes. They retained pluripotency marker expression during this period. hiPSCs and their derivatives were found both in trophoectoderm and embryo proper. We further observed that the hiPSCs underwent cellular proliferation and promoted developmental progression of the parthenote in vitro. In summary, the porcine parthenote model system is an efficient high throughput system to examine the developmental capacity of human stem cell populations.

Despite the large number of metal-organic frameworks that have been studied in the context of post-combustion carbon capture, adsorption equilibria of gas mixtures including CO2, N2, and H2O, which are the three biggest components of the flue gas emanating from a coal- or natural gas-fired power plant, have never been reported. Here, we disclose the design and validation of a high-throughput multicomponent adsorption instrument that can measure equilibrium adsorption isotherms for mixtures of gases at conditions that are representative of an actual flue gas from a power plant. This instrument is used to study 15 different metal-organic frameworks, zeolites, mesoporous silicas, and activated carbons representative of the broad range of solid adsorbents that have received attention for CO2 capture. While the multicomponent results presented in this work provide many interesting fundamental insights, only adsorbents functionalized with alkylamines are shown to have any significant CO2 capacity in the presence of N2 and H2O at equilibrium partial pressures similar to those expected in a carbon capture process. Most significantly, the amine-appended metal organic framework mmen-Mg2(dobpdc) (mmen = N,N'-dimethylethylenediamine, dobpdc (4-) = 4,4'-dioxido-3,3'-biphenyldicarboxylate) exhibits a record CO2 capacity of 4.2 ± 0.2 mmol/g (16 wt %) at 0.1 bar and 40 °C in the presence of a high partial pressure of H2O.

The rapid uptake of simulation-based education has led to the development of simulation programs and centers all around the world. Unfortunately, many of these centers are functioning as localized silos and not taking advantage of the potential for collaboration with other regional centers to promote interprofessional education. In the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada, 38 institutions, including health care authorities, universities, colleges, and other health-related organizations, have participated in assessing the use of simulation in BC and in developing a provincial model that enables collaboration and interprofessional learning at the provincial level.This article describes methods and results of a needs assessment and discusses an interprofessional simulation in health care educational model that provides access for all health care professionals in BC regardless of their geographic location and/or institutional affiliation. We anticipate that this information will be useful to and supportive of others in developing simulation collaborations in their respective regions.

A novel chiral stationary phase consisting of poly-L-leucine supported on porous graphitic carbon has been shown to be effective in the separation of the enantiomers of epoxides 1-5 by chiral high performance liquid chromatography.

A novel chiral stationary phase consisting of poly-L-leucine supported on porous graphitic carbon has been shown to be effective in the separation of the enantiomers of epoxides 1-5 by chiral high performance liquid chromatography.

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One hundred forty-eight cases of colon carcinoma were subjected to further pathologic study. Survival was correlated with stage and grade of the tumor and with the number of involved lymph nodes. In addition, cases were assessed as to the extent of local chronic inflammatory reaction about the lesion and the degree of sinus histiocytosis in draining lymph nodes. A correlation was possible between grading, staging, extent of lymph node involvement, and survival. A substantial difference in five-year survival was shown when local inflammatory reaction was present and when sinus histiocytosis was observed. The presence of both of these factors further improved survival. An adequate evaluation of these factors, both individually and in combination, should improve our ability to assess prognosis in colon cancer.