The abrogation of subjectivity in the psychiatric courtroom: Toward a psychoanalytic semiotic analysis

Conclusion We examined, on a cursory and suggestive level, the role of desire in the psychiatric courtroom. Employing selected conceptualizations from Lacan's semiosis, we demonstrated how this desire is essentially quashed and silenced by the clinicolegal community. Put another way, given the opinion inBoggs, we see how the essential being and way of knowing for diverse mentally ill citizens, are repressed by the psycholegal establishment. Indeed, followingBoggs, the only knowledge claims embraced by the court were those articulations uttered by experts, and others similarly situated, who spoke the jargon of psychiatric justice. Not only does this decision making deny and invalidate the disparate voices of psychiatric consumers, it limits prospects for developing new and alternative sign meanings in law that more fully represent the experiences of the differently abled and other disenfranchised groups. Thus, regrettably,Boggs symbolizes not only the loss of agency for disordered subjects in the clinicolegal system but, more generally, the law's failure to promote emancipatory justice.     

Deterrence and social control: Rethinking the relationship

Until recent years, the operationalization of the deterrence concept has been largely legal in nature. That is, deterrence was defined in terms of certainty and celerity of arrest and severity of sanction. Contemporary research has called this narrow viewpoint into question, pointing out that legal factors are only part of the range of social-control mechanisms. One of the more important of these reformulations was found to have an analytical flaw which could have easily affected the results (Meier and Johnson, 1977). The present study corrects the analysis problems of this previous study and upholds the findings that, for a sample of adult Texas residents, extralegal factors are of more import for determining marijuana use than traditional legal deterrence. Since both legal and extralegal factors are products of the social context, deterrence may be appropriately incorporated into contemporary social- control theories.     

Sir John Bradbury and the Reparations Commission, 1920-25

This article looks at a neglected episode during the work of the Reparations Commission of 1920-25 leading up to the Dawes Plan of 1924, when the British delegate to the Commission, Sir John Bradbury, drew up a plan to reschedule German reparation payments in an attempt to take the venom out of the debate over these payments. It takes as its documentary basis the previously unpublished papers of Sir John in his role as Britain's representative on the Reparations Commission from 1920 to 1925. The article concludes that Bradbury's plan had the potential to defuse at least some of the problems encountered in the political and economic results of the reparations policy and that it made a significant contribution to the thinking that emerged in the Dawes Plan.     

Coetzee’s stones: Dusklands and the nonhuman witness

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a counter-narrative parody of first-personal reports of violence in Dusklands. Such collections of nonhuman witnesses further disclose the longer temporality of ecological violence that extends beyond the text’s represented and imagined casualties. Linking the paired novellas of Dusklands, which concern 1970s America and 1760s South Africa, the essay finds in Coetzee’s strange early work a durable ethical contribution to South African literature precisely for its attention to nonhuman claimants and environments.     

Taiwan’s Sub-national Government Relations with Japan: Post-1979 Developments

In 1972 the Japanese government ended its diplomatic recognition of the Republic of China. And yet it did not. In the aftermath of that decision, colonial legacy ties between Taiwan and Japan were drawn upon to create a new form of relationship, with ties that were official in all but name. Taiwanese cities and counties were also encouraged to develop formal ties with their Japanese counterparts. These sub-national ties are a critical – but little researched – component of the enduring bilateral relationship between these two countries. This article – based on extensive fieldwork in both countries – is an initial effort in understanding how these ties have developed and function, and how they support bilateral relations between Taiwan and Japan. Drawing on additional fieldwork in China, this article also considers what formal limitations exist on the para-diplomatic relations between these countries.