The Politics of Identity in Mahmoud Darwish’s Absent Presence : A Textual Act of Resistance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study explores the concept of identity in Mahmoud Darwish’s Absent Presence (2006), a work published less than two years before his death. Though recurrent in many of Darwish’s previous works, the theme of identity is tackled differently in this funeral speech. As a self-eulogy, Absent Presence connects the search for identity with death, showing that this search is endless and inexhaustible. Yet, since the reality of death (as the ultimate signified) is beyond human comprehension, it can be only represented through language, which, from a post-structuralist perspective (a system of free-floating signifiers), shares the same endlessness of what comes after death. In this regard, the search for identity in Absent Presence is ultimately achieved through language, which, for the bereaving Darwish, is the only true and lasting form of identity. By introducing identity as a product of the play of language, the study also aims to prove that resistance in Absent Presence extends to the reality behind it. When defined as a process, identity not only establishes the endless possibility of meaning in the text, but also in the world as meaning is transferred into it to effect change.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".