In the absence of its founding figure Jesus Christ, Christianity developed diverse expressions of spirituality and worship. Central to this process is the embodiment of Jesus’s presence via representation and reenactment, traversing the milestones of Jesus’s life – his childhood, adult ministry, and passion. It is marked by a duality of identification with Jesus and counter-identification with others, fostering personal transformation and deeper adherence to Jesus’s example.

This chapter explores queer theatre’s continued preoccupation with history, arguing that its persistent attention to the past is part of a broader cultural project of recuperation. By attending to the legislative and social landscape that has criminalised and excluded LGBT+ people in Britain alongside historic moments of political change, the chapter illuminates how queer theatre has been configured by the historical conditions of its production. The chapter traces both the emergence of queer theatre and the sites it continues to move across, from fringe venues and queer arts festivals to national cultural events. It then examines the multiplicity of ways that histories have been produced, remade, or recovered in performance, drawing on the work of queer theatre makers including Gay Sweatshop, Emma Frankland, Nando Messias, David Hoyle, Drew Taylor-Wilson, Elgan Rhys, Rosana Cade, Jo Clifford, Milk Presents, DUCKIE, and Mojisola Adebayo. In continuing to return to the past, queer theatre recovers previously excluded marginalised lives and experiences in Britain, disrupts linear narratives of progress that accompany LGBT+ politics, and makes space for reimagined futures.

The essay sketches the development of W.G. Sebald’s poetry from its beginnings in the mid-1960s through the unpublished writings of the 1970s, the 1980s long poem Nach der Natur (After Nature), and the poems written for the volumes For Years Now and Unerzählt (Unrecounted) shortly before his death. The first section introduces Sebald the poet with several general remarks, touching on a poem from the 1960s, passages from Nach der Natur (After Nature) and two poems from the 1990s. This is followed by sections illustrating effects of the non-simultaneous reception of After Nature in German and English and considering the influence of Southern German, Austrian and Swiss prose on the language of Sebald’s poetry. The final section visits the poet’s ‘lyrical workshop’, in other words the development of his poetry in manuscript form between the 1960s and mid-1980s, and the integration of a significant part of the manuscript ‘Across the Land and the Water’ into the final two sections of After Nature. The essay concludes that Sebald wrote poems throughout his life, and that it is likely he would have published further volumes of poetry had he lived longer.

First-time seizures are a common part of neurology practice. Making an accurate and specific diagnosis is achievable by taking an excellent history. Clinicians should keep in mind that seizures are only part of the differential in a patient with a first-time event, with other diagnoses like syncope common as well. This history should focus on what the seizure feels like to the patient and looks like to observers. Two classification systems, the seizure semiology and International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE), exist to make communicating complex information easier. Key semiology history includes the presence or absence of auras, altered awareness, or convulsions. In addition to history, laboratory, EEG, and imaging data can inform to the specific patient diagnosis. If you determine that the patient has had a first-time seizure without a clear epilepsy diagnosis, you can tell them seizure that the recurrence risk is 40%. If you determine the patient has epilepsy, you can tell them that 50% of people are seizure-free with the first medication used. Patients should be reassured that they can live normal lives with most jobs being obtainable and family life being a possibility if the patient so chooses.

There is a profound ambiguity surrounding all elements of CIL, particularly as regards the psychological element of opinio juris. This is further accentuated by the prevailing, in international law, elements of absence, silence or non-action and their often-monolithic interpretation as non-objection or, even, acquiescence. But is this true, according to the rules of informal logic? What is the value of non-doing? Non-acting or abstaining? Non-believing towards the formation of a certain opinio juris? The mainstream interpretation of CIL overlooks the quantifications and varieties of meaning in non-appearances, such as the conceivable neutrality of absence. This has led to persuasive-teleological argumentation, in the sense that the person or agency elaborating on either absence or silence aims at a certain end and is thus characterised by a certain ‘argumentative orientation’ towards a preferred conclusion. In this spirit, the ICJ has developed several techniques of superficial, persuasive argumentation, teleologically governed by the non liquet principle, the containment of international crises and the effective resolution of international disputes. This repositions the whole enquiry to the proper place of informal logic in international legal reasoning. The author suggests that an open-system approach could shed light on these inconsistencies and political manoeuvres.

Chapter 6, ‘Absence of the Other’, points to moments in Schumann where the music is marked by the absence of another’s voice, be it through the Romantic evocation of distant voices in pieces such as the Novelletten’s ‘Stimme aus der Ferne’, or, more troublingly, the loss of voice in songs like ‘Des Sennen Abschied’ and ‘Die Sennin’ – a non-presence often explicitly denoting death, as is the case at the close of Frauenliebe or in the Kerner setting ‘Aus das Trinkglas eines verstorbenen Freundes’. As is found increasingly in Schumann’s later work, the music may pointedly not trace a successful ‘coming to lyricism’: the emergence of an expected lyrical voice is missing. This tendency is epitomised in the genre of melodrama, where music accompanies a declaimed speech that refuses to attain the subjective presence of lyricism, and in pieces such as Manfred.

The absence of lyrical voice in pieces such as Schumann’s Manfred and Ballads for Declamation may point not only to the absence of the other but also to the absence of the subject itself. ‘Absence of the Self’ explores the potential loss of self implied by the absence of lyrical voice, highlighted in the missing silent ‘inner voice’ of the Humoreske, which forms an apt exemplification of later twentieth-century accounts of the illusory, ‘barred’ subject proposed by such thinkers as Lacan, Kristeva, and Žižek, or the empty centre at the heart of the Eichendorff Liederkreis that results from the absence of a unified subject position and any sense of narrative continuity.

Chapter four discusses the Tallinn Manual as a "restatement" of international law. The restatements in the Tallinn Manual were deemed necessary because specific positive law was lacking. Yet, they were also presented as neutral reproductions of rules already in existence. This led me into the recurring topic of this book: the dialectical relation between repetition and something that is absent, unattainable or unspeakable. However, in this chapter, I add another dimension to the analysis of repetition in international law. After all, the restatements occur in a very specific format, the manual. Through a comparison between the Tallinn Manual, consumer manuals and manuals of etiquette, I try to get a better grip on the inherent tensions that come with restatements of international law in the form of a "manual."

This chapter examines military attitudes toward “emotional injuries” resulting from the end of romantic relationships. Evaluations of why some men “cracked” evolved substantially from World War I to the present. Often, however, psychiatrists attributed servicemen’s maladies to deficient female love: whether that of mothers or romantic partners. In Vietnam, psychiatrists construed romantic rejection as a “narcissistic injury”: a blow to the ego that led men to decompensate in various ways. Alcoholism, going AWOL, self-harm, and violence directed toward others were all associated with Dear John letters. The chapter considers how the military medical and legal establishments adjudicated unlawful acts perpetrated by servicemen whose intimate relationships had recently been severed by letter. It focuses on two court-martial cases: a Korean War POW who briefly rejected repatriation to the United States in 1953, citing a Dear John as his motive for defection, and a Marine Corps private court-martialled in 1969 for killing four Vietnamese peasants. In the latter case, military lawyers deemed the defendant to have been temporarily insane after his fiancée sent him a Dear John.

This chapter shows that marks of punctuation are continuous with the much larger forms of punctuation that interrupt human experiences in time and space, especially ‘larger relations of voice and body, space and absence’. The chapter shows that punctuation has ‘reciprocal and reflexive relationships’ with what it punctuates while at the same time punctuation marks can work ‘as reminders of and reflections on vocal and bodily presence’.

This chapter explores the portrayal of Chicago in the fiction of Saul Bellow, examining the conflict between materialism and visionary idealism that lies at the heart of his work. Starting from the stereotypical characterization of Chicago as the home of brute matter, cynical pragmatism, and the mass production of commodities and physical things, the chapter traces Bellow’s autobiographical search for hidden spiritual truths, connecting this to the Jewish notion of being exiled in a foreign land, vestiges of the soul or the spirit disguised among the quotidian ugliness of industrial America. This conflict between things and ideas, matter and spirit, morality and “the hustle” of economic life, draws on both the conflicts of Bellow’s early life and the wider patterns of Jewish immigration and assimilation. Chicago appears in Bellow’s work as both an overwhelming physical presence and a metaphysical absence, linked to the emptiness of the prairies and haunted by the Jewish-Russian past of Bellow’s family. These contradictions and paradoxes are traced through a close reading of Bellow’s short fiction, as well as his major novels The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift.

This chapter explores Elena Ferrante’s use of Virgil’s Dido as a model for Elena and Lila, the two protagonists of the Neapolitan Novels, through the lens of absence. Not only is Ferrante able to conjure and comment on the Aeneid’s treatment of one of its most divisive characters following the classical rules of intertextual engagement with the ghosts of masterpieces past; she ends up changing the whole game. By teasing narrative material out of Virgil’s silences in Dido’s story-arch, Ferrante centres and requalifies the very reason of Dido’s undoing – the trauma which stems from the loss of love – as the generative force behind both Elena’s and her own literary output. However, by making Lila’s invisible writing and her subsequent disappearance into the beating heart of Elena’s writing, Ferrante uses Virgil as her Muse to stage a woman-centred takeover of literary greatness. Elena’s anxieties over how much of Lila’s life she has truly cannibalized, and her responsibility in Lila’s disappearance, not only take Virgil to task for hiding his Muse, but suggest an alternative model of criticism; moving beyond the postmodern view of the absent author and his unaccountability by giving agency back to the Muse.

Soon after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, Pompeii seemed to have vanished. The buried city maintained a presence in the region’s collective memory primarily as an overwhelming absence, repressed even in the near-contemporary poetry that ruminated on its demise. In such texts, the name of Pompeii is conspicuous by its absence, and the shock over the swallowing up of this solid ancestral ground is keenly felt. This chapter argues that Martial, Statius, and others initiate the trope of Pompeii as an absent presence that continues to characterize our responses to the site today, even in the face of the apparently abundant materiality of the site. By following Pompeii’s disappearing act from these Latin authors through a variety of more recent engagements with the city – from the subterranean journey to the site in Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), to the sci-fi dislocation of the city in Amelie Nothomb’s novella, Péplum (1996), and the recent video installation Soleil Noir (2014), in which Pompeii becomes a post-human landscape – we can observe Pompeii’s importance as a locus for understanding the absences that permeate Roman culture, and our modern receptions of it.

This essay formulates a critical response to scholars’ Freudian-Lacanian understanding of Ovidian desire in terms of frustration, futility, absence and lack. It focuses on the Remedia Amoris, a poem it takes as paradigmatic and culminatory in Ovid’s elegiac project, and attempts to give an account of what is meaningful and productive about the rhythmic process of Ovidian amor in and of itself, through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent book on jouissance (Coming, 2017). The Remedia, it argues, performs absence not as tragic loss but as an undoing-remaking that continually regenerates desire and teaches investment in the pleasure of process. The second half of the essay explores how the poem’s temporal instabilities and dislocated subject positions produce a series of imagined inter-relations and ‘elsewheres’ that move readers away from Lacanian desire as continually projected into an ungraspable future, and into the experience of jouissance in the elegiac present.

What should we make of the glaring absence of the emperor Nero from Seneca’s Epistulae morales – not mentioned once in 124, often lengthy, letters, written by a man who had been for many years one of his closest associates? Although Seneca does sometimes allude to the question of how frank advice may be offered to the powerful, the letters barely touch on imperial politics, beyond advising their addressee that he would be better off withdrawing from the public sphere. Yet if Nero is not present explicitly, there are a number of respects in which Nero’s domination of others as well as his failure to exercise control over himself are constructed as implicit and potent anti-models in the letters. When Seneca reflects on the dynamics of vice in its more florid and imaginative forms (the examples analyzed here are letters 90 and 114), his terms frequently resonate quite specifically with ancient accounts of Neronian Rome (notably those of Tacitus and Suetonius) and other works of Neronian literature (particularly Petronius and Persius). As it turns out, highly refined vices even play a notable role in Seneca’s model of the development of philosophy.