Beckett and Coetzee: alternative identities

Isotopy and Identities in Alternative Algebras

In this paper we show how to construct an isomorphism between an alternative algebra A over a field of characteristic 6= 3 and its isotope A(1+c), where c is an element of Zhevlakov’s radical of A. This leads to the equivalence of any polynomial identity f = 0 in alternative algebras and the isotope identity f(s) = 0. Given an invertible element s of an alternative algebra A, we can form a new ...

Identities for the Associator in Alternative Algebras

The associator is an alternating trilinear product for any alternative algebra. We study this trilinear product in three related algebras: the associator in a free alternative algebra, the associator in the Cayley algebra, and the ternary cross product on four-dimensional space. This last example is isomorphic to the ternary subalgebra of the Cayley algebra which is spanned by the non-quaternio...

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J. M. Coetzee and Colonial Violence

Chronic Conditions: Beckett, Bergson and Samuel Johnson

This article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the eighteenth-century neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). What unites these three very different thinkers is a concern over habitual, automatic and involuntary behavior, which in all three cases has a distinctly neurolog...