I was tempted by an Apple, but went for a cheaper and more powerful machine. It has Windows, and something happened to my internal life as I settled to my new existence as mouse potato.

New forms of technology recreate subjectivity in different ways. One can easily imagine, for example, the impact of early industrial machines on the self-image of Europeans in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it is often said that Freudian psychoanalysis is rooted in that impact, and in hydraulic metaphors in which the libido seeks outlet, is repressed, and then erupts in displaced or sublimated ways. Once this image of the mental apparatus was given free reign in Western culture, other images and technologies had to contend with it as a relatively enduring template for the self that we absorb and fashion as our own.

What is Windows as a computer environment but an incarnation and mutation of the unconscious and object relations? I started dreaming vividly, or, at least, started remembering vivid dreams (and maybe that itself is the issue, the symptomatic issue) after being plunged into Windows in a new PC at home. I already had some experience of working with Windows at work, though this was quite desultory and only sufficient to make me familiar with the format; enough that I would not be completely lost, not enough that I should be comfortable in the terrain.

Fourteen years in the making and spanning 18 years, Caveh Zahedi's (born 1960) I Am a Sex Addict, despite a lukewarm reaction upon its initial release, might be the most important film of the new century and will eventually find its place as a major achievement in world cinema.

Talking directly to the camera on his wedding day, Zahedi uses reenactments, animation, home movies, photographs, and other visual aids to tell the detailed story of his sexual addiction; focusing close attention on the suffering he's caused the women in his life. Not afraid of the unflattering self-portrait that emerges, Zahedi plainly shows us the considerable lengths to which he goes to feed his addiction and painstakingly examines his inner struggle to face it. When it is over, aside from being entertained, informed, and ultimately moved, we're left asking how much of it is true. The answer, according to the filmmaker and subject, is all of it.

Ridiculous, embarrassing, and unquestionably courageous, I Am a Sex Addict is what Caveh Zahedi rightly calls a public service announcement. If only all PSAs were this entertaining.

Interview

There is so much to appreciate about this film, but mostly I appreciate the truth that's expressed. Yet the question begs to be asked: If a part of your life unfolds in such a way that doesn't necessarily lend itself to drama, do you flirt with bending or even completely breaking the truth to serve the film?

The emergence of the Taliban as a phenomenon in Afghan politics is of striking significance both in the context of Islamic tradition as well as refugee behaviour. Migration or hijra (an Islamic religious term for migration) has often led to jihad (struggle) against the so-called enemies of the land and religion. The essential question here is: has this jihad been successful in bringing about peace in this war-torn land or have the people fighting jihad become a catalyst for further precipitation of the civil war?

The noun ‘refugee’ has a French origin and was adopted in the English language a century later. It was given a more institutionalized legal meaning by the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of the Refugees and the subsequent 1967 Protocol. But the texts of Islam, especially the Holy Qur'an and the Hadith give a different name to migration of the Muslims. Migration after suffering oppression is hijrah and such a migrant is a mujahir. […] Hence, the universal legal framework of understanding the refugee situation is not significant for the Afghans or the average Muslim people in the neighbouring countries who have given refuge to the Afghan migrants.

M Nazif Shahrani says, unlike the widely used term mujahidin for Muslim fighters in the cause of Allah, Afghan resistance fighters are referred to by the companion term mujahirin, ‘those who leave their homes in the cause of Allah, after suffering oppression’, (Qur'an, 16:41) the appellation of choice for the displaced Afghans, is for the most part ignored by international relief organizations.

‘South Asia has the fourth largest concentration of refugees in the world’. Thus began the first article of Refugee Watch issued a decade ago. This apparently simple sentence reflects both the clarity of vision and concern of Refugee Watch and of course of South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR) and Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (MCRG) – the two organizations, responsible for bringing out Refugee Watch – to the issues of refugees in South Asia.

We have selected portions of Anug Phyro's and Tapan Bose's apparently dated article, ‘Refugees in South Asia: An Overview’ only to show our readers how from the very first issue Refugee Watch relentlessly engaged itself with such a huge human crisis in this part of the world. However, besides the conventional South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries, some articles, included in this section, also narrate the situations in Afghanistan (historically, in case of Afghanistan) and Burma.

Another important piece, ‘Internally Displaced Persons in Sri Lanka’, by Joe Williams, is also a dated one, published in Refugee Watch in its second issue. However, notwithstanding the dated nature of data, it is indeed an extensive article on the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in a country that is, for more than two decades, torn in an almost perpetual ghastly strife. Williams analyses the geographical dimension of the problem and concentrates on north-east Sri Lanka, especially on the Jafna peninsula, mostly populated by the Sri Lankan Tamils.

More than 80 per cent of the world's refugee population comprises of women and their dependent children. An overwhelming majority of these women come from the developing world. South Asia is the fourth largest refugee producing region in the world, a majority of whom are women. ‘Refugee women and children form 76 per cent of the total refugee population in Pakistan, 79 per cent in India, 73 per cent in Bangladesh and 87 per cent in Nepal’. The sheer number of women among the refugee population portrays that it is a gender issue. On the basis of examples taken from different refugee experiences in South Asia, this chapter argues that both displacement and asylum are gendered experiences. At least in the context of South Asia it results from and is related to the marginalization of women by the South Asian states. These states at best patronize women and at worse infantilize, disenfranchise and de-politicize them. It is in the person of a refugee that women's marginality reaches its climactic height. By refusing to create a South Asian refugee regime, states in South Asia continue their castigation of non-conforming women to the status of political non-subjects.

STATE FORMATION AND THE QUESTION OF ABDUCTED WOMEN

The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 witnessed probably the largest refugee movement in modern history. About 8 million Hindus and Sikhs left Pakistan to resettle in India while about 6–7 million Muslims went to Pakistan.

Abstract

Among the most environmentally sensitive sectors are pulp-and-paper and petrochemicals. In a historical perspective, FDI played an important role in the establishment of the petrochemicals industry in Brazil in the 1970's, when it was driven by strategic state policies to develop the domestic intermediate goods industry. In the pulp-and-paper sector, FDI became prominent just after the year 2000, and it has been exclusively driven by market forces. This chapter presents a comparative analysis of the environmental issues related to FDI in these two sectors in Brazil and extensively focuses on the importance of the international context in fostering domestic environmental commitments. One conclusion is that, in general, domestic firms in these sectors are just as environmentally friendly as foreign firms. What would explain such convergence? First, the stringency of the domestic environmental regulations has pushed for higher environmental standards in both sectors; second, and specifically in the case of the pulp-and-paper sector, international market environmental requirements also contributed to this trend. Last, but not least, the technological competencies accumulated by the domestic firms in both sectors, which are closely related to the strategic state industrial policies applied to them, strengthened their capability to enter into an environmental-technological path. One policy lesson drawn from these case studies is that attracting FDI is not a guarantee of a higher level of sectoral environmental control, while an integrated policy approach to environmental, technological and industry capacity to enhance national environmental control at the industry level is highly recommended.

Desires to be connected with everyone else, to feel the barriers between self and others disappear and to enjoy a complete interconnection of experience, are powerful collective forces in this culture. One of the paradoxes and impossibilities of this wished for state of harmonic engagement is that the individual absorbs the wish from the collective; the individual only becomes who they are, and able to articulate the wish by virtue of their place in a wider symbolic matrix. Many varieties of psychoanalysis participate in that paradox by locating the wish to return in the individual, rather than in the collective, and finding narcissistic impulses to ‘return’ in the child within. Like notions of heritage in late modernity, however, this ‘return’ is constructed for us, and it constructs a place for us that never was.

One way of ‘returning’, appropriately enough, is through ‘Ecstasy’, a drug in tablet form best taken while dancing. Go to a club, perhaps ‘Paradise’, and smuggle a dose past the bouncers in your sock. Perhaps you would buy one inside. In my case, an angel bought me one for my birthday. Dope slows you down, unlike Speed, and although it helps you dance for a long time, you are still pretty much in control. One thing I had noticed about the club called ‘Home’, however, had been how friendly all the hot and strobe-lit bodies had been.

The Hindustan–Pakistan plan of 3 June 1947 and the subsequent partition, which resulted in the movement of over 15 million people across the borders of Bengal and Punjab, generated a national memory of rape, abduction and unprecedented brutalization of women. Yet, partition is often interpreted as being beyond gender politics. A corrective entails a new interpretative study of this fracture with a focus on women, which will move beyond women's experiences to metaphoric uses of gender in state politics in a time of crisis.

Our questions then are: Was there a politics of gender in the politics of partition? Has that thrown up an alternative meaning of women's identity? Did this emergent feminine identity result in objectification and exclusion of women? These questions assume greater importance if we consider that women's experiences of migration and destitution during partition and the state's response to it is a pointer to the relationship between the women's position as marginal participants in a highly insecure environment and the politics of gender subordination as perpetrated by the state. […]

ABDUCTION AND SOME ISSUES

A large number of abducted women have been missing during the trans-border movement. On the basis of individual complaints received it seems that the number was well over 50,000. Some incidents relating to these abducted women/persons exemplify the politics of gender during partition.

BACKGROUND

The interpretation and application of the Exclusion Clauses under the 1951 Convention on the Protection of Refugees has been evolving, factoring in historical and political considerations, not all of which proved to be conducive to securing a comprehensive legal framework designed for refugee protection. In the 1990s, Western Europe faced an unprecedented rise in applications for refugee status, prompting the European Union (EU) member states to tighten borders to keep out ‘illegal migrants’, to shorten asylum procedures, to limit the right of appeal and to pass on responsibility to other nations – ‘safe third countries’ – through which asylum seekers travelled en route to Western Europe. […] The application of the Exclusion Clauses under Article 1F of the Convention is a case in point. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has consistently argued in favour of a restrictive interpretation of the Exclusion Clauses, given the legal nature of the provisions as an exception from Article 1A and the potentially serious consequences of exclusion from Convention protection. But state practice is far from homogeneous and a range of problems regarding the interpretation and application of the Exclusion Clauses persist. […]

At the same time, demographic trends suggest that a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws and policies is required for Western European countries to avoid a slump in population and a subsequent economic backlash. In several countries, legislation has been adopted or brought underway with a view to pave the way for eligible foreign nationals to be granted citizenship.

Among the many questions this thought provoking quotation raises are: who are the people whose stories we tell, what aspects of their stories do we choose to highlight, when and where do we look for stories, how do we tell the stories we find, and why do we tell some stories but not others? More specifically, now, as beachcombers on the many shores devastated by the recent tsunamis, whose experience, knowledge and wisdom do we draw upon to tell the many tales waiting to be told? Which are the stories that have remained untold despite the carpet coverage given to the disaster and its immediate aftermath?

Early critiques of media coverage in the wake of the tsunami tragedy of 26 December and beyond focused primarily on the widespread use of extremely graphic images of the dead and injured, especially on television, in contrast to the discretion exercized by the international media during the 9/11 disaster in the US, suggesting double standards with regard to the dignity and privacy of human beings in the so-called First and Third Worlds.

INTRODUCTION

Forced displacement is a topical issue in all developing countries. It is often seen as an inevitable consequence of development. Thus, forced displacement and social problems associated with it are often represented almost like a ‘collateral damage’ of modernization, which, in turn, is seen as an irrevocable solution for ‘ills’ of the so-called Third World. It is only very seldom if ever that we discuss about forced displacement in the context of so-called highly developed political communities, such as the European Union (EU). This is very unfortunate since forced displacement is connected to the ways European societies are governed. […]

Perhaps, one reason why forced displacement is not seen as such a pressing problem in the EU countries is that once forced displacement takes place due to environmental disasters or some infrastructure development projects, it is thought to be governed in an organized way following the procedures of good governance. While this arguably is a case, what remains unrecognized is that forced displacement of people is conducted also on grounds other than environmental disasters and development. […]

In the European context it is commonplace to locate identity related forced displacement into Europe's ‘peripheries’, such as the Balkan region. But the EU itself is in fact a significant generator of forced displacement. This is not only because the EU countries have played a central role in restructuring world economy which has put people on the move, but it is also a case in a much more immediate sense. Every year about 350,000 people are deported from the EU.

The major debates in the history of printing in Bengal until recently have revolved around the early typefaces and the contribution of Bengalis in making these. The actual impact of printing on Bengali life and culture, by contrast, was assumed to be fairly straightforward. The impact of printing in this straightforward narrative was assumed to have been formative of the wide-ranging cultural phenomena commonly dubbed as the ‘Bengal Renaissance’—a cultural ferment usually framed as one that sought to replace the traditional Bengali cultural milieu based on orality by a textually grounded and rationalized set of cultural practices. Anindita Ghosh's fascinating recent study, however, has challenged this linear account of the relationship between print and cultural transformation. Ghosh argues that the impact of print was much more pluralised and multivalent than has hitherto been acknowledged. Its relationship with precolonial worlds of oral culture was not necessarily one of opposition, and the high literary texts of the Bengal Renaissance were not necessarily the only new cultural trend which took advantage of the new printing technology. Ghosh's work has provided a long-awaited critical framework within which to approach the vibrant plurality of Bengali printing that had already been noticed by a previous generation of historians, such as Tapti Roy and Ramakanta Chakrabarty, and some amateur enthusiasts such as Nikhil Sarkar (better known as ‘Sripantha’). The reformist high literature was only a small component of the entire print output.

These little essays on what it is to be a human subject in a culture permeated by psychoanalytic sign systems were first published between 1994 and 2008. The first of these predate the publication of my academic studies of the social construction of contemporary psychoanalysis, and most were written before and during my training as a psychoanalyst. These are occasional pieces, and so they address quite diverse cultural phenomena in order to make sense of how they hook their audiences, us.

Many of the essays were published in the organs of psychological, psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic bodies. This is because an argument needs to be made against those who too easily assume that only their particular concepts capture and describe fantasy and reality. I have tried, often in vain, to disturb the strongly held belief of those in thrall to psychoanalysis that it is universally true. What I describe in the essays is how psychoanalysis functions as something that is only locally true. The argument applies to each of different varieties of psychoanalysis I find at work in the phenomena I explore, and it is important to recognise the different functions that different ideas in psychoanalysis serve, as their proponents battle against each other and pretend that they alone have the keys to unlock our secrets.

The more refugees suffer, the more women suffer. Women and their dependent children constitute over 80 per cent of the world's refugee population. This sheer quantity makes the refugee issue largely and qualitatively a gender issue. In this section, a host of writers and activists pen the pains and agony of hapless women whose sufferings as ‘refugees’ reflect the general condition of their servitude to existing social conditions of oppression even during the so-called merrier times. But, this victimhood is only one part of the tale; the other part is the story of the rising of women as agents of resistance and change, and thereby of politics. Not only in the present times of so-called ‘empowerment’ of women, but in all the ages, they stood up to do so, employing the available means of their times. So do the refugee women of today's world: they suffer and struggle.

However, in the post-partition (1947) Indian subcontinent scenario, women suffered doubly when an attempt was made by the consensual decision of the prime ministers of India and Pakistan, to repatriate the ‘persons’ (mainly raped women), abducted during the outbreak of the worst ever communal riot on the eve of partition, on both sides. A law was duly passed by Indian Parliament on this issue. Paula Banerjee unfolds the politics of such an impracticable and insensitive approach towards women (because they constituted the highest number among these ‘persons’ and, secondly, although they were citizens, age wise, in the eyes of the law, but had no voice over the one-sided decision) by the androcentric newborn states.

Most stories about psychoanalysis are about others, how we might interpret what they have made of it. Not in this case. One of the intriguing elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis is the idea that an analysand may give account of the progress and end of their analysis through the institution of ‘the pass’. In this way, something secret is told and such testimony might, Lacan once hoped, serve to validate and provide more knowledge about the psychoanalytic process. The most important secret, though, is precisely that psychoanalysis is always already public, a public event between two people perhaps, or a secret that is shared between many who may not want to say that they recognise the nature of this secret. Or they may secretly hold to another view of the public account they profess to be the correct one.

I realised that I had reached an end to my analysis, and could account for it, one morning when I was sitting on the toilet. I was expelling something. I had eaten Cheerios for breakfast (and a stupid Lacanian joke about the importance of serial repetition has it that ‘the cereal is serious’). Time to move on. What I had ‘discovered’ is that psychoanalysis does not have to be true for it to work, and the way psychoanalysis has worked for me is precisely to rediscover that psychoanalysis does not have to be true for it to work.

The connection between mental illness and female articulation, assertiveness and creativity is one that society has nurtured. The idea that a woman who speaks her mind, acts in her own interests and–most significantly–openly expresses her sexuality must be insane goes back millennia, linked to the concept of “female hysteria” recorded by Plato and found even earlier in Egyptian papyri. Closer to home is the modern woman whose refusal or inability to conform to stifling social norms has resulted in her incarceration and abuse at the hands of family, church and the mental health industry who gain from the silence of women.

In Dialogues with Madwomen (1994), filmmakers Allie Light and her husband Irving Saraf have coaxed seven “madwomen” – including Light herself–into telling their stories. Using a mixture of home movies, archival footage of mental wards, reenactments and (mostly) interviews with their subjects, Light and Saraf have created a complex, moving portrait of women in whom depression, schizophrenia and multiple personalities coexist with powerful, sometimes inspired levels of creativity.

These women are often dazzling in their verbal facility, talking with honesty, humor and passion about the most intimate details of their lives. The first interviewee is director Light, who recalls the loss of interest in her domestic life that made her check herself into a hospital for treatment. She tells of her doctor's unusual attempts at behavior modification: “One weekend he told me I could go home if I promised to bake a turkey.