Nous avons proposé une approche du concept de politique à partir des romans de Lindsey Collen qui auront servi de toile de fond à notre recherche. Notre étude envisage le politique en trois temps qui sont les trois temps selon lesquels Rancière définit le mouvement politique à savoir, l'état initial appelé police, la remise en question de cet état qui est le fait de la politique et l'option d'ouverture que Rancière appelle le politique. Le premier temps énonce un état (État) initial. C'est la société mauricienne qui sera, dans les romans de Collen, cet « état » initial. Elle sera envisagée sous le jour d'une Infrastructure ou base économique et d'une Superstructure, c'est-à-dire la conjonction des appareils dits répressifs et des appareils idéologiques chargés de maintenir le pouvoir en place. Le deuxième temps marque la prise de position, la rupture désirée de cet « État » initialement exposé. Le troisième temps est le temps du politique, le temps de la « troisième option », celle que nous avons inscrite en parallèle du concept de réel en tant que béance et d'absence d'achèvement. Le politique s'inscrit chez Collen à travers l'agencement de réseaux d'images qui dépassent la réalité pour donner une autre dimension interprétative aux évènements. L'Autre en tant que manifestation du politique intervient avec l'autre lieu ou l'Utopie que Collen expose dans ses romans. L'Autre, c'est aussi le féminin en tant que principe en correspondance directe avec la notion de réel et de politique. Enfin, toujours dans une démarche d'inscription filigranée de l'altérité, nous avons proposé d'explorer les notions du mythe et de la danse. Notre démarche analytique et réflexive aura envisagé le concept de politique sous ces trois angles qui en constituent l'aboutissement. / Our research endeavours to demonstrate politics under these three aspects which constitute its theoretical backbone.We propose an approach of politics as a concept, having chosen Lindsey Collen's novels as background for this study. Our study considers politics under three aspects. The first aspect named “la police” by Jacques Rancière concerns the Mauritian society which is exposed as being a conjuction of economic and repressive apparatuses in charge of preserving the State. These forces fall under two categories namely Infrastructure and Superstructure, which function in order to maintain the State in its initial form. They act as conservative forces.The second aspect of politics involves a scission from this initial state in order to open the way to change and flexibility. Jacques Rancière calls it “la politique”.The third and last moment of politics is an opening towards the unachieved, in echo to the concept of the « real », that is with the abstract and the unknown. In Rancière’s theory it corresponds to “le politique”. Politics intervenes in the novels when Collen makes use of images which transcend reality and confer another dimension to interpretation. We also considered the « other » as a concept in direct equivalence to politics. When referring to the other, we consider issues like utopia, the feminine, myths and dance. All these issues evoke alterity in the sense of bypassing the known in an attempt to open new options.

Text in Afrikaans / Die verhaal wat hier vertel word is die van 'n jongeling wat sy ouerhuis verlaat om vir homself te sorg. Dit is die verhaal van die postmodernistiese wetenskaplike wat na 'n tydperk van modernistiese adolessensie moet afstand doen van die geborgenheid van sy kosmiese bestaan om 'n volwasse selfaangewesenheid nate streef. Maar wanneer hy homself (be)vind as die ek wat elke psigo-fisiese en rasioneel-empiriese werklikheid voorafgaan, is dit net om te ontdek dat hierdie ek nog ervaring nog wese is, dat hy hier niks anders (is) nie as 'n verwantskap van hierdie lewe met die dood. Om iets hiervan te begryp moet hy homself as 'n Lacaanse fallus aanskou. Hy is die beeld van die lewensvloed wat sy rol slegs in versluiering kan speel. Sy konstruksie verg altyd alreeds sy destruksie. Al wat (is) is sy masker, 'n persona, 'n vertolkte karakter waaraan die vertolking onttrek en 'n onbeslisbaarheid gepredikeer word · 'n bepaalde/bepalende dekonstruksie. / The story told here is one of a lad who leaves his parental home to take care of himself. It is the story of the postmodern scientist who after a period of modernistic adolescence must give up the safe security of his cosmic existence in the quest for an adult self reliance. But when he finds himself as the I who precedes every psychophysical and rational-empirical reality, it is only to discover that this I is neither experience nor being, that here he (is) nothing but the relationship of this life with death. In order to grasp something of this, he has to see himself as a Lacanian phallus.He is the image of the vital flow that can play its role only when veiled. His construction always already requires his destruction. What (is) is his mask, a persona, an interpreted character from whom the interpretation is being withdrawn and an undecidability predicated- a determinated/determinating deconstruction. / Psychology / D. Phil (Sielkunde)

This study explores the nature of writing and the sorts of presence that writing gives us access to. This understanding of writing includes not only all speaking and all writing in the narrow sense of marks on a page, but goes beyond this to include the sense in which Derrida uses the term ‘writing’ in Of Grammatology, to mean a broad and complex process of the construction of textual traces or presences necessarily brought about through the structural mechanism of difference inherent in the writing process (Derrida, 1997). This study argues that writing is a system that creates Subjects or selves as the writing happens. It suggests that writing is a remarkable site from which to explore the construction of selves, because it gives us access to (partially) identifiable presences, in the apparent absence of the writer. It goes on to demonstrate that this identity can be distinguished through written traces of difference left for the reader to decipher, by analysing different aspects of the plot and writing devices in Peter Greenaway’s film The Pillow Book and in Kafka’s short story In the Penal Colony. These two texts are considered particularly relevant to this study, in that they both explicitly deal with the contradictory nature of writing and how it relates to the Being (there or the contextualised Being of Dasein) and being (in general), the life and death, the empowerment and destruction of the Subjects that writing sets up. Both texts explore salient aspects of writing on the human body. The study uses these texts as a platform for speculation about the kind of presence that can be traced through writing, and proposes that the written Subject is multiple, contradictory and reflexive, connected and related, and that it is impermanent and has a deferred presence. Finally, this written Subject is also explored in the context of Foucault’s expositions of the self in texts such as Technologies of the self (Foucault, 1994) and ‘What is an Author?’ (Foucault, 1977) in answer to his question Who are we in the present, what is this fragile moment from which we can’t detach our identity and which will carry our identity away with itself? (Foucault, 1994:xviii) Copyright / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Philosophy / unrestricted

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Selves and Others: The Politics of Difference in the Writings of Ursula Kroeber Le Guin has two founding premises. One is that Le Guin's writing addresses the political issues of the late twentieth century in a number of ways, even although speculative fiction is not generally considered a political genre. Questions of self and O/other, which shape political (that is, powerinflected) responses to difference, infuse Le Guin's writing. My thesis sets out to investigate the mechanisms of representation by which these concerns are realized. My chapters reflect aspects of the relationship between self and O/other as I perceive it in Le Guin's work. Thus my first chapter deals with the representations of imperialism and colonialism in five novels, three of which were written near the beginning of her literary career. My second chapter considers Le Guin's best-known novels, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974), in the context of the alienation from American society recorded by thinkers in the 1960s. In my third chapter, the emphasis shifts to intrapsychic questions and splits, as I explore themes of sexuality and identity in Le Guin's novels for and about adolescents. I move to more public matters in my fourth and fifth chapters, which deal, respectively, with the politicized interface between public and private histories and with disempowerment. In my final chapter, I explore the representation of difference and politics in Le Guin's intricate but critically neglected poetry. My second founding premise is that traditional modes of literary criticism, which aim to arrive at comprehensive and final interpretations, are not appropriate for Le Guin's mode of writing, which consistently refuses to locate meaning definitely. My thesis seeks and explores aporias in the meaning-making process; it is concerned with asking productive questions, rather than with final answers. I have, consequently, adopted a sceptical approach to the process of interpretation, preferring to foreground the provisional and partial status of all interpretations. I have found that postmodern and poststructuralist literary theory, which focuses on textual gaps and discontinuities, has served me better than more traditional ways of reading / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

Selves and Others: The Politics of Difference in the Writings of Ursula Kroeber Le Guin has two founding premises. One is that Le Guin's writing addresses the political issues of the late twentieth century in a number of ways, even although speculative fiction is not generally considered a political genre. Questions of self and O/other, which shape political (that is, powerinflected) responses to difference, infuse Le Guin's writing. My thesis sets out to investigate the mechanisms of representation by which these concerns are realized. My chapters reflect aspects of the relationship between self and O/other as I perceive it in Le Guin's work. Thus my first chapter deals with the representations of imperialism and colonialism in five novels, three of which were written near the beginning of her literary career. My second chapter considers Le Guin's best-known novels, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974), in the context of the alienation from American society recorded by thinkers in the 1960s. In my third chapter, the emphasis shifts to intrapsychic questions and splits, as I explore themes of sexuality and identity in Le Guin's novels for and about adolescents. I move to more public matters in my fourth and fifth chapters, which deal, respectively, with the politicized interface between public and private histories and with disempowerment. In my final chapter, I explore the representation of difference and politics in Le Guin's intricate but critically neglected poetry. My second founding premise is that traditional modes of literary criticism, which aim to arrive at comprehensive and final interpretations, are not appropriate for Le Guin's mode of writing, which consistently refuses to locate meaning definitely. My thesis seeks and explores aporias in the meaning-making process; it is concerned with asking productive questions, rather than with final answers. I have, consequently, adopted a sceptical approach to the process of interpretation, preferring to foreground the provisional and partial status of all interpretations. I have found that postmodern and poststructuralist literary theory, which focuses on textual gaps and discontinuities, has served me better than more traditional ways of reading / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)