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« Parole disparue à peine dite ; toujours déjà destinée au silence qu’elle porte et d’où elle vient, parole en devenir qui ne se retient pas dans le présent, mais se voue et voue la littérature qu’elle anime à son essence qui est la disparition. »Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini Dans L’Écriture du désastre, Blanchot écrit la phrase suivante : « Garder le silence, c’est ce que à notre insu nous voulons tous, écrivant ». Cette pensée du silence constitue l’un des traits majeurs non seulemen...

Although the life expectancy of patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) has improved since the introduction of insulin therapy, the acute life-threatening and long-term complications from diabetes mellitus are significant causes of both mortality and morbidity. Percutaneous intra-portal pancreatic islet transplantation (PIPIT) is a minimally invasive, repeatable procedure which allows a β-cell replacement therapy through a liver islet engraftment, leading to insulin release and glycaemic control restoration in patients with diabetes. Allo-PIPIT, in which isolated and purified islets from cadaveric donor are used, does not require major surgery, and is potentially less expensive for the recipient. In case of long-term T1DM, islet-after-kidney (IAK) transplantation can simultaneously cure diabetes and chronic renal failure, while islet-transplant-alone (ITA) is performed in brittle, short-term T1DM, based on the infusion of an adequate islet mass and on a steroid-free immunosuppressive regimen according to the Edmonton protocol. Results of the Collaborative Islet Transplant Registry (CITR) demonstrate that allo-PIPIT reduces episodes of hypoglycemia and diabetic complications, and improves quality of life of diabetic patients. Auto-PIPIT, in which the own patient’s islets are used, has been investigated as a preventive treatment for pancreatogenic diabetes in patients who undergo extensive pancreatectomy for malignant and non-malignant disease. This Review outlines the role of imaging and interventional radiology in allo- and auto-PIPIT.

Many studies agree on the fact that during the late 1980s and 1990s financial market integration increased substantially. Under an efficient and integrated financial market, a set of global risk factors should price international stock returns. However, despite the perception that currently financial markets are highly integrated, many researches proved that empirical local factor models outperform global factor models. We investigate the performance of global factors respect with local factors through a time series and a cross sectional analysis.

The problem of inadequate housing and the lack of basic water and sanitation infrastructures is not new but goes back to the formation of the first cities. However nowadays 31,6% of the world urban population lives in slums, in other words one urban citizen out of three lives in an inadequate housing condition. Slums are not anymore marginalized parts of the city, but on the contrary in many developing countries they have become the main type of human settlement. Slums are the physical and spatial manifestation of urban poverty and intra-city inequalities and they are the result of the lack of low cost houses for the urban poor. There is an extensive literature on slums of Developing Countries, however this phenomenon is still not documented or studied in “Developed Countries”, where slums are presents but in a smaller extent. The present work wants to document the presence of slums in Rome, which has become the “capital city of the housing crisis”. In fact the most vulnerable parts of the population cannot afford to rent or buy a house on the market and they do not receive any support from the State. These people form the “forgotten” housing demand, a part of the housing demands that is not fulfilled by the market or the Welfare State. The hypothesis of this work is that the presence of an unsatisfied demand for low cost houses has forces those excluded from the housing market and abandoned by the State to find informal housing solutions as the slums. However, in Rome this “forgotten” housing demand is very diversified and each segment of this demand has built slums with different characteristics. The work is structured in three parts. The first part contains the theoretical background of the thesis and it presents the slums as a global phenomenon. First of all, the international definition of slum elaborated by UN-Habitat is presented together with the main critics that have been raised by scholars. Secondly the evolution of theories and practices concerning slums is analyzed. Finally an overview of the presence of slums in the world is made. The second part is the central part of the work in which the research hypothesis is tested and the presence of slums in Rome is documented. At first an historical reconstruction of the housing problems of the city of Rome is presented in order to contextualize the problem of slums also in an historic point of view. However the actual housing crisis in Rome is not due, as in the past, to an housing shortage but has deeper roots to be found in the neoliberal system that has cancelled urban planning and transformed our cities from common goods to economic assets. The general causes of the housing crisis in Rome are analyzed: the end of housing public policies and the process of finanziarization of cities. In order to understand the different components of the forgotten housing demand both the demand and the supply of low cost housing are analyzed. Specifically, for the supply side are studied the rental and the purchase markets. Concerning the demand side, the main categories of people that compose the forgotten housing demand are analyzed: young people, migrants and political refugees. A new definition of slum, suitable to the context of Rome, is presented and used to identify the different types slums present in Rome. Slums are then classified regarding to: type of settlement; main characteristics of the dwellers; regularity or irregularity of Visa; temporality which has to be considered as the expected time of staying in the city of Rome. The most descriptive slums visited during the field work, conducted from January 2010 to February 2012, are presented with a fact sheet describing the main characteristics of the settlement and the dwellers. In the third part the possible and feasible solutions to the problem of slums in Rome are outlined. Slums are multi-dimensional phenomena and need to be addressed with an integrated approach that combines political, technical and socio-economic solutions. Only a multi-sectoral approach can bring a real improvement in the quality of life of slum dwellers and not only to a physical renewal of houses and infrastructures. In this part the political, technical and socio-economic solutions identified are analyzed and adapted to the different types of slums previously identified.

This dissertation is concerned with the representation of the human and of the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity in Nigerian literature. It argues that the Nigerian postcolony is portrayed in the texts under investigation as a site of perpetual emergency, where a progressively more vivid biopoliticisation of politics sanctions the reduction of the postcolonial (non-)citizen to what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has termed “bare life” – a form of life that, exposed to sovereign violence, or caught in the sovereign ban, may be killed without committing homicide. Concentrating in particular, but not exclusively, on contemporary fiction writing, this dissertation aims at examining the aesthetic strategies adopted by a number of postcolonial writers in order to signify the lack of rights protection all too often suffered by the postcolonial (non-)citizen. It will be pointed out that an imagery of war is often employed to describe postcolonial Nigeria as a country where the state of exception and the withdrawal of constitutional protection have become the rule. This study thus will not only investigate the depiction of the Civil War of the late 1960s, but will also show that Nigeria’s fractured post-war times are often configured in terms that recall the Foucauldian definition of politics as “the continuation of war by other means.” Part One, “The Exception,” aims at analysing the portrayals of moments of state emergency declared in the context of armed struggle. The first chapter is devoted to the discussion of a selected number among the numerous works that, ever since the 1970s, have enlarged the rich corpus of Nigerian Civil War literature. Chapter Two provides a cross-disciplinary, comparative reading of two war novellas which narrate an unnamed conflict and which, through the depiction of their young protagonists, contribute to the heated debates regarding the figure of the child soldier. As indicated by the title of Part Two, “The Rule,” I will then discuss how war – a period of emergency conducive to the supposedly momentary suspension of the rule of law – is presented as becoming the rule in the normal abnormality of post-war dictatorial Nigeria. In this context, particular attention will be devoted to the literary representation of two sites, namely the autocrat’s overcrowded jail and the dysfunctional postcolonial family, where, it will be argued, the phenomenon of the perpetuation of the exception acquires great visibility. Part Three, captioned “Camps on the Move,” investigates texts recounting the lives of combative women who, either victims or accomplices of illegal practices, do not resign themselves to their superfluous status within the biopolitical hierarchies produced in the context of ‘war-scapes’ of unending exception. It will be noticed that the characters’ ambitions of upward social and ontological mobility are often reduced to a horizontal movement between Agambenian ‘camps,’ between conditions of essential invisibility, and abandonment, before the law. The texts under examination, however, do not only protest their protagonists’ exclusion from an effective regime of rights, and thus, paradoxically, from humanity itself. By highlighting without resolving the paradox itself, they also invite to resignify and expand the concepts of the universal and of the human, underscoring the need for an agonistic, future-oriented reconfiguration of the human rights paradigm and of the relationships between the individual and the state

Purpose Methods and Materials Results Conclusion References Personal Information, Purpose: Most patients with colorectal liver metastases (CLM) present with unresectable disease at diagnosis, while only 15-25% are eligible for surgery. The best strategy to address the issue of non-resectability is the use of a multidisciplinary approach:...

Purpose Methods and Materials Results Conclusion References Personal Information, Purpose: Biliary fistulas are an abnormal passage or communication from the biliary system to another intra- or extrahepatic location, and most commonly follow liver, biliary and pancreatic surgery. They are a major cause of postoperative morbidity, often...