This paper treats Mori’s uncanny valley as more than a robotics hypothesis about a fall in affinity toward almost-human machines. Read in both directions, the curve traces the machine’s approach to the human and the reciprocal process by which the human is rendered technically legible, reproducible, and partly machine-like. The paper reads Mori alongside Jentsch and Freud, bringing uncertainty at the animate/inanimate boundary into relation with the double, repetition, repression, and death anxiety. The discussion follows a cultural lineage of automata and androids in Hoffmann’s “The Automata” and “The Sandman,” Shelley’s Frankenstein, Čapek’s R.U.R., Lang’s Metropolis, Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Scott’s Blade Runner, and Nolan and Joy’s Westworld. Across these works, the disturbance does not arise solely because an artificial figure falls short of human appearance. It arises when androids, doubles, replicants, and hosts make the category of the human uncertain for the person doing the classifying. At the low point of Mori’s curve, the concern is not only that an android could be mistaken for a human; it is that the person doing the classifying loses certainty about their own identity, no longer knowing whether they are human or android.
Through a Bergsonian analysis of contemporary user-facing large language models, I distinguish their operational organization from the sociotechnical assemblages that produce their outputs and from the discourses that attribute these distributed processes to a unified intelligent subject. Drawing on Bergson’s accounts of duration, memory, embodiment, and action, I argue that material execution, interactional path dependence, operational histories, opacity, and unforeseen novelty are genuine properties of large language models, although they do not by themselves establish lived duration or morally answerable subjectivity. I contend that process philosophy and theories of algorithmic temporality clarify the differences between technical process and lived continuity, operational novelty and Bergsonian creation, causal efficacy and moral answerability, and black-box opacity and interiority. On this basis, I reframe agency and responsibility while demonstrating how the personification of artificial intelligence can conceal the labour, institutions, infrastructures, and political decisions through which algorithmic effects are produced.
Clinical practice frequently encounters a paradox: patients articulate a clear desire for change and possess explicit intellectual awareness of their self-defeating trajectories, yet remain locked in them. While frameworks such as habit formation or repetition compulsion explain specific behavioral persistence, they do not fully capture the overarching directional persistence of a life as a whole. This paper introduces Biographical Inertia as a clinical-phenomenological concept to address this gap. Drawing on the phenomenology of lived time as developed by Minkowski and Fuchs, and narrative identity theory as developed by Ricoeur and McAdams, Biographical Inertia is defined as the resistance of an ongoing life trajectory to redirection, even when that redirection is consciously desired and structurally available. This resistance emerges from the sedimentation of embodied routines, narrative emplotment, and existential affective background, and is best understood as an emergent structural feature of an ongoing life trajectory rather than a deficit or diagnosis. Through composite clinical vignettes, the paper illustrates how this resistance manifests across diagnostic categories. A qualitative heuristic is proposed to help clinicians recognize and engage with biographical inertia in case formulation. By reframing apparent “resistance to change” as the pre-reflective preservation of a trajectory that anchors personal identity, the framework offers a non-pathologizing and clinically useful lens for understanding the complexities of therapeutic change.
This paper offers a decolonial feminist reading of embodied memory in Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile (2014), The Barefoot Woman (2016), Cockroaches (2018), and Kibogo (2021). Situating the analysis within decolonial feminism, memory studies, and trauma theory, the article argues that Mukasonga relocates memory from institutional archives and official historiography into bodies, domestic practices, oral traditions, rituals, silence, and everyday acts of survival. The study explores how women’s embodied experiences function as counter-archival modes of preserving cultural identity in the face of colonial, patriarchal, and genocidal violence. Through a qualitative literary-critical methodology grounded in close textual analysis, the article examines the interconnected themes of silence, absence, trauma, gendered survival, and resistant remembrance across Mukasonga’s select works. The analysis demonstrates that silence in Mukasonga’s writings is not merely the absence of speech, but a politically charged and affective mode through which trauma and historical violence become legible. Similarly, absence functions not as disappearance but as a continuing presence sustained through memory, ritual continuity, mourning, storytelling, and domestic labour. The study further argues that Mukasonga constructs a decolonial counter-archive that preserves marginalized histories excluded from dominant institutional narratives, particularly women’s labour, oral memory, and embodied knowledge. By foregrounding maternal care, ritual practice, bodily endurance, and communal continuity, Mukasonga challenges Eurocentric archival frameworks and redefines resistance through intimate and everyday practices of remembrance. Ultimately, the article demonstrates that Mukasonga’s literary project transforms silence, absence, and embodied memory into powerful forms of historical preservation that resist cultural erasure and affirm the survival of communal identity in post-genocide Rwanda.
This article examines the cinematic subversion of authoritarian Savarna masculinity in Ratheena P. T.’s film Puzhu (2022). The article situates the film against the backdrop of real-world caste killings in contemporary Keralam, such as the highly publicized cases of Athira Rajan and Kevin George. It investigates how inter-caste marriage serves as the ultimate site for the violent reproduction of caste boundaries, effectively dismantling the secular façade of a post-caste Keralam. Combining theories on caste with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of micro fascism, the analysis explores how the Savarna patriarch deploys lethal violence in the domestic sphere. The article argues that caste killings occur not as isolated instances of individual madness or impulsive anger, but as the final, desperate necropolitical attempt of a decaying Savarna patriarchal order threatened by Dalit upward mobility and marital agency. Ultimately, the article’s contribution to film theory is inextricably linked to its social critique; by employing an anti-caste aesthetic, the film makes visible the invisible necropolitical mechanics that protect the caste-based order of marriage. Thus, the discussion of contemporary cinema becomes a discussion of how caste survives and is actively resisted even in the twenty-first century.
