Bringing these threads into conversation with queer subjectless critique, I would add that it is precisely through the waiting room that asylum-seekers--those whose asylum claims have not been verified, who are not even intelligible as "real" refugees--emerge as
figurally queer.
The reader, first tracing the historical narration in Scripture,
figurally relates its features with the person and work of Christ in the New Testament and the mystical body of Christ (i.e., the Church) in the present.
Ambrose therefore reads the bodies of the newly baptized as that by virtue of which the invisible element is made clear, that is, as that by virtue of which scripture can be read
figurally. Because they point typologically to the invisible, the bodies of the newly baptized are as much figures of scripture as scripture provides figures for them: that is, their bodies, as baptized, are not strictly self-sufficient, but are dependent for their status on the bodies of earlier material and textual figures as well as on an invisible expansion of meaning or divine intent between them.
Figurally conceived, the measures he codified for the reform of slave discipline and management at Hordley may be seen as the spatializing capacities of nationspace acting as a prophylactic in colonyspace (Journal, entry for March 4, 1818).
Here, the Christianized version of the Temple acts to formulate ecclesiastical space as "the New Temple," appropriating and displacing the ancient prototype, both
figurally and conceptually.
Figurally, cannibalism results in self-consuming fictions, by which political and economic structures based upon oppression lead inevitably to their own self-destruction.
In both we find an awareness of all facts as
figurally realized--of the mingling of is with seems--and also an insistence that imagination does not generate the world out of itself but responds to a nature that, encircling and transcending mind, engages us creatively.
their
figurally induced equivalence although not, I think, their actual
14; emphasis original) The poem closes with a change of perspective: what we had read as an account of immediate experience is now recontextualized as a memory, a moment of fundamental experience reinvoked because of its exemplary importance, both existentially and
figurally:
The text is written on clay, the same kind of material as forms the city walls, of which it constitutes literally and
figurally the foundation, as it is hidden in the "foundation box of copper" (I, 25).
But retinality marks more positivist genres as well, as we shall find if we turn from the fantastic tale to the detective novel: more specifically, to the popular turn-of-the-century novelist Gaston Leroux's Le Mystere de la chambre jaune--a text that, like Claire Lenoir, also
figurally links domestic chambre to optical chamber through a bedroom whose features echo and exteriorize the pigmented anatomy of the human eye.
From the start, Garcia Marquez has practiced two relatively distinct styles of writing: the
figurally charged prose already on brilliant display in his earliest fiction, Leaf Storm, which was rejected for publication at the time, with the concession that it was "poetic"; and the objective concision of such tales as No One Writes to the Colonel or reportages like News of a Kidnapping.
