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Wholes are said to be more than the sum of their parts. This 'more' contains both a promise and a threat. When different elements - which might be individuals, cultures, disciplines, or methods - form a whole, they not only join forces but also generate a surplus from which the parts can benefit. Being part of a whole is a way to acquire meaning and to extend beyond one's limited existence; and having a part in the whole is to have an enlarged agency. But wholes are also more powerful than the sum of their parts. Wholes constitute their parts: they determine what is a part and what is apart, what can become a part, and which parts have no part. Even if parts therefore may not be said to pre-exist a whole, there may still be something in them that exceeds being a part - if only the possibility of being part of a different whole.
This paper reads 'The Detainee's Tale as told to Ali Smith' (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith's story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient's openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith's account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.
In this reflection piece, I look at the feminist artistic landscape emerging in Berlin with its growing, diverse migrant community. I examine the ways in which women* artists challenge the imposed notions of their migrant status in the city and their states of belonging within it. I demonstrate this through two feminist initiatives I have been involved in that aim to amplify the voices of women* artists whose creative practices disrupt carefully constructed frameworks relating to borders of inclusion and exclusion. I argue that the artistic practices of women* in these networks are killjoy because they unapologetically get in the way, dismantling carefully constructed frameworks that delineate borders of inclusion and exclusion. By reflecting on homemaking practices in exile, I exemplify how feminisms from the global south decentralize claims to truth by taking the means of production into their own hands. By framing the chapter around the recent protests in Berlin unfolding in solidarity with the feminist revolution in Iran, I reveal the possible limits of such actions when they do not embrace intersectionality. Ultimately, I propose to invest in feminist artistic practices that destabilize exclusionary politics by creating visibility and bridging theory and practice.
Given the prospect of post-oil futures, this chapter historically situates contemporary Gulf Futurism within cybernetic and logistical aspirations underlying the current global trend of the smartness mandate. Working through the complex visuality that the cybernetic black box animates, the chapter revisits Fredric Jameson's cognitive mapping as an allegorical model for the inherent frictions of computational capital. To this end, it discusses Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri's artistic practice that reclaims a right to speculate while condensing material reality and imaginative threads, thereby going beyond a mere gesture of unveiling or mapping.
This chapter argues against the view that Derrida's emphasis on change makes him complicit in the neoliberal requirement of flexibility that results both in precarity and in the dominance of English. To the contrary, the essay argues that Derrida's idea of 'différance' includes the view that openness both involves loss and is always partial (since incision involves excision), that the singular is precious, and that deconstruction is justice since it is alert to what is excluded even by efforts at inclusiveness. Examples of the preciousness and loss of the singular are circumcision (where incision is excision), hospitality (in which unconditional hospitality has material limitations and conditions), subjectivity (which is never based on full presence), language (which both is my own and comes from an other), and neighbourhoods (since they continue only by incorporating new people). Deconstruction, the essay concludes, need not be complicit in neoliberal dominance but, properly understood, makes us aware of the power dynamics by which the openness of plurilingualism can lead to the dominance of English.
This essay analyzes the semantics of fog in the context of neoliberal austerity in Portugal. Drawing on portraits of young Portuguese in the style of vignettes, the essay historicizes the political and epistemological uses of fog as a medium. Attending to the materiality of fog - a blurring through which visibility occurs - the argument unearths the logical structure of recurrence in and as crisis as it affects the powers of decision-making. The goal is to push the limits of this recurring structure into the present, in order to better expose how two seemingly opposite historical eras - authoritarianism and neoliberalism - share, in fact, the enduring structure of potentiation in language and governance.
Focusing on the specific case of knowledge production in and about Iran, in this chapter, we discuss the risk of reproducing a Northern perspective in the attempts to produce knowledge on and through the Global South(s). We argue that such reproduction leads to cognitive suppression, further peripheralization, or even recolonization of the South(s). We also stress the lasting effects of methodological nationalism among attempts at decolonization and its political consequences, such as in the adoption of nativist discourses historically connected to the 'Islamic' Revolution by scholars focusing on the Global South(s) and in area studies concerning Iran. To avoid these effects, we suggest considering the politics of scale in our recognition and problematization of the hierarchization of Northern and Southern sites of knowledge production and their particularities.
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky's paper 'Cinematographic Aesthetics as Subversion of Moral Reason in Pasolini's Medea' explores the 1969 film "Medea". Pasolini's Medea, masterfully played by Maria Callas, betrays her homeland and her origin, stabs both her children, sets her house on fire, and dispossesses Jason of his sons' corpses. But Deuber-Mankowsky argues that it is ultimately not these acts that render the film particularly disturbing and disconcerting, but, rather, the fact that the spectator is left behind in suspension precisely because Medea cannot be easily condemned for her acts. Pasolini's film and its cinematographic aesthetics thereby not only subvert the projection of Medea into the prehistorical world of madness and perversion, but also undermine belief in the validity of the kind of moral rationality developed and constituted in an exemplary way by Immanuel Kant in his "Critique of Practical Reason". In particular, Pasolini seems to relate conceptually to Nietzsche's artistic-philosophical transfiguration of Dionysus and to accuse belief in a world of reasons of failing to grasp the groundlessness, irrationality, or even a-rationality of reason itself.
Eirini Avramopoulou asks the following questions in her essay 'Claims of Existence between Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics': How is the desire for existence implicated in the experience of identity as wound? Under which conditions does the demand for desire appear to confront the repetition of trauma? Or else, what echoes in the last breath of someone dying? In Istanbul, a city built upon neoliberal structures of governance and cosmopolitan aesthetics, and defined by severe policing and local histories of ethnic and gender violence, these questions reflect upon a particular historical and political period through a personal story. The essay focuses on a transgender activist named Ali, his fight against transphobia, his illness and death, while reflecting on the 2013 public uprising in Istanbul following attempts by the Turkish government to demolish Gezi park. By exploring the notion of spectral survival as a political praxis, it argues that this notion, rather than acceding to claims over a fuller subjectivity, mobilizes an aporia of de-subjectivation. De-constituting the 'I' here attests to an attempt neither to reconfigure its parts nor to merely perceive life as dismantled, but rather to speak of a loss that no familiar language can yet describe. The spectrality of this 'I' troubles and repoliticizes, then, the very notion of haunting, as it lays claims to its own differing and deferral from the constitution of a proper name, or of a 'self'-acclaimed existence, especially when the fight for existence here is also a performative assertion of loss and death connected to processes of resisting sexist, neoliberal, heteronormative, and phallogocentric representations of possession and belonging.
Havana's apartment-galleries have been vital venues for the city's art scene since the 1990s, hosting art exhibitions, workshops, and conferences. In the context of Cuba's limited art market and dearth of cultural institutions with international reach, these residential spaces have offered artists a unique opportunity to display their work and to connect with international art circuits. Focusing on the histories of three specific apartment-galleries - El Apartamento, Estudio Figueroa-Vives, and Avecez Art Space - this chapbook reflects on the complex interplay of the local and the global in the 'worlding' of cultural institutions.
In his major theoretical work on experimentation, "Towards a History of Epistemic Things" (1997), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger writes: 'If experimental systems have a life of their own, precisely what kind of life they have remains to be determined.' Rheinberger is alluding to the slogan Ian Hacking gave to the post-Kuhnian 'practical turn' in the history and epistemology of science.
What is the effect of weathering in a confined space? What if this space is the bathroom of the famous Mexican painter Frida Kahlo? Writer Mario Bellatin and photographer Graciela Iturbide venture into this once intimate room and through a series of artistic interventions breathe new life into it. The logic of the archive is their guiding principle: in order to preserve what has been locked away and stored, it must be exposed and put to new uses.
Dante as a gay poet
(2011)
The reception of the "Vita nuova" among contemporary Italian poets is not based on the love theme. The "Vita nuova" provides Italian twentieth-century poets more with a model of autobiographical writing than with an erotic paradigm. What is essential is that the imitation of the "Vita nuova" expresses a clearly polemical anti-Petrarchan poetics - something which, of course, one would have no reason to look for in American poets. The American poet Frank Bidart's idiosyncratic appropriation of the young Dante, as opposed to the Dante-versus-Petrarch-based interpretation of Italian poets, is peculiar but by no means as exceptional in the American panorama as it might at first appear. Other gay American poets also treat Dante as a model: Robert Duncan, J. D. McClatchy, and James Merrill. In this essay Nicola Gardini attempts to explore, however rapidly, the grounds on which Dante may have become so essential for such poets. To be sure, the Dantism of these gay American poets may be viewed as a particular moment of the well-established American interest in Dante which goes as far back as Emerson and Longfellow and had its peak in Pound and Eliot. But Gardini argues that such gay Dantism - which no survey of Dante's twentieth-century influence has yet brought to the fore - is a kind of cultural allegiance stemming originally and specifically from the soil of gay discourses and gender preoccupations. Interestingly, Dante, not Petrarch, also serves as a model for some Italian homosexual poets: Michelangelo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Giovanni Testori. What, then, is it in the work of a poet like Dante, who confined the sodomites in hell and mostly sang the praises of one woman, that is so compatible with, indeed inspiring for, gay views?
Dante's "Inferno" and Walter Benjamin's cities : considerations of place, experience, and media
(2011)
When Walter Benjamin wrote his main texts, the theme of the city as hell was extremely popular. Some of his German contemporaries, such as Brecht or Döblin, also used it. Benjamin was aware of these examples, as well as of examples outside Germany, including Joyce's "Ulysses" and Baudelaire's "poetry". And he was - at least in some way - familiar with Dante's "Inferno" and used it, and in particular Dante's conception of hell, for his own purposes. Benjamin's appropriation of the topos of the Inferno has been seen as a critique of capitalism and as a general critique of modernism by means of allegory. In the following analysis, Angela Merte-Rankin takes a slightly different approach and, despite Benjamin's status as an expert on allegory, considers hell in its literal sense as a place and examines the issues of implacement that might follow from this standpoint.
Dante's 'Strangeness' : the "Commedia" and the late twentieth-century debate on the literary canon
(2011)
A reflection on Dante and the literary canon may appear tautological since nowadays his belonging to the canon seems a self-evident matter of fact and an indisputable truth. It is for this very reason, though, that a paradigmatic role has been conferred on Dante in the contemporary debate both by those who consider the canon a stable structure based on inner aesthetic values and by those who see it as a cultural and social construction. For instance, Harold Bloom suggests that 'Dante invented our modern idea of the canonical', and Edward Said, in his reading of Auerbach, seems to imply that Dante provided foundations for what we call literature "tout court". While his influence on other poets never ceased, the story of Dante's explicit canonization through the centuries revolved around the same critical points we are still discussing today: his anti-classical 'strangeness' in language and style, the trouble he occasions in genre hierarchies and distinctions, and the vastness of the philosophical and theological knowledge embraced by the "Commedia" (and, as a consequence, the relationship between literature and other realms of human experience). Dante's canonicity is also evinced by the ceaseless debates that he has inspired and the many cultural tensions of which he is the focus. In the next few pages Federica Pich tries to reflect on the features that make the "Commedia" central both to the arguments of the defenders of the aesthetic approach, such as Bloom and Steiner, and to the political claims of the so-called 'culture of complaint'.
This chapter is a journey of thought exploring decolonial critique as a situated practice while thinking through exilic consciousness and its constitutive conditions. I begin by reflecting on decolonialities to gesture toward varied forms of decolonial projects that need to be situated, given that each location generates different sets of questions/problems that demand different answers. In this way, I reconfigure the exilic condition, and the space of displacement in general, as a plurilingual space that unsettles various colonial forms of epistemic monolingualism predicated on the selfsufficiency of thought. To this end, I reflect on the potentiality of exilic consciousness to generate decolonial critique when thinking from/about the Global South. Finally, this chapter demonstrates the significance of acknowledging the diverse locations and trajectories of decolonial critique and the plurality of thought embedded within the exilic intellectual formation that can potentially undo colonial forms of knowledge-making and being in the world.
The article provides a close reading of the video "Sometimes you fight for the world, sometimes you fight for yourself", dir. by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz (2004, 5'). It reads the video as promoting what it calls a 'queer politics of paradox', that is, a politics that acknowledges desire as a constitutive moment of the political and at the same time challenges the political via a queer understanding of desire in order to make room for the political articulation of the Other. The article argues that a reworking of the political - one that aims at de-centring its hegemonic dynamic and creating space for Otherness - becomes possible if one invites paradox as a specific, anti-identitarian, and agonistic mode of tension to function as a constitutive moment of desire and of the political.
Pasolini was simultaneously a revolutionary Marxist and a man forever influenced by his religious childhood. So his question was: do the revolutionary becoming of history and political negativity represent a destruction of the tragic beauty of the Greek myths and of the peaceful promise of Christianity? Or do we have to speak of a subtraction where an affirmative reconciliation of beauty and peace becomes possible in a new egalitarian world?
The de-constitution of the 'I' is at the centre of Manuele Gragnolati's essay 'Differently Queer: Temporality, Aesthetics, and Sexuality in Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Petrolio" and Elsa Morante's "Aracoeli"'. The essay explores the relationship between temporality, aesthetics, and sexuality in the final novels of two twentieth-century Italian authors: Pasolini's "Petrolio" (1972–75) and Morante's "Aracoeli" (1982). Both novels mobilize a form of temporality that resists a sense of linear and teleological development and that instead appears contorted, inverted, and suspended. The article argues that both novels thereby allow for the articulation of queer desires and pleasures that cannot be inscribed in normative logics of completion, progression, or productivity. It shows how the aesthetics of Pasolini's and Morante's texts replicate the movement of queer subjectivity and dismantle the traditional structure of the novel but do so differently. The fractured and dilated movement of "Petrolio's" textuality corresponds to a post-Oedipal and fully formed subject who is haunted by his complicity with bourgeois power and wants to shatter and annihilate himself by replicating the paradoxical pleasure of non-domesticated sexuality. "Aracoeli", by contrast, has a 'formless form' ('forma senza forma') that corresponds to the position of never completing the process of subject formation by adapting to the symbolic order. The poetic operation of Morante's novel consists in staging an interior journey, backwards along the traces of memory and the body and at the same time forward towards embracing the partiality and fluidity of an inter-subjectivity that is always in the process of becoming.
Structural anthropology remains a hidden influence in Frantz Fanon's theory of the 'sociogenesis' of mental illness. This chapter outlines how Fanon's belief in the therapeutic capacity of 'socialization' critically absorbs Claude Lévi-Strauss's examination of the link between 'madness' and the symbolic structure of society. These innovations, Chamberlin argues, pushed Fanon to institute 'semihospitalization' as a radically dialectical method of treatment in his final role as a clinician at the Neuropsychiatric Day Centre in Tunis (1958–60).
This contribution consists of an explanatory introduction and extracts from recent fiction works, 'White Tales' (novel) and 'Peep Show' (novel in progress). Both fiction works explore the spiralling tensions between intensity and excess, desire and jouissance, via the structure and methodology pioneered in the author's previous work with 'subconscious narrative' film. The result of this prior work was the 18-minute subconscious narrative film 'The Dangers', which explores an experimental narrative structure and is fascinated by the creation and sustenance of suspense, particularly when created with the notion of the uncanny in mind.
This chapter explores medieval exegetical and affective characterizations of the birthplace of Christ. It focuses in particular on evocations of this birthplace as an exposed, liminal location and argues that the radical exposure endured by Christ at the moment of his birth was crucial to medieval understandings of the significance of the Incarnation. But it also points out that its condition of openness is always in a dialectical relationship with its capacity to enclose and protect.
Enduring ornament
(2020)
This is an essay about rust. Iron usually plays the part of strength, stubbornness, and impenetrability, but rust registers the dimension of time in the material, reminding us that it always carries the potential for its own decomposition. While great expense is incurred to stave off iron's oxidization, we read the uselessness that rust precipitates as an interruption of the instrumental logics that sustain racial capitalism. Looking to the rusted ring that became Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's "Enduring Ornament" (1913), we consider how the discarded and defunctionalized lend themselves to ornamental redeployment. The essay then turns to works by the contemporary American artists David Hammons and Andrea Fraser, both of which transform Richard Serra's rusty steel sculptures into a backdrop for fleeting gestures of impromptu reclamation. Attending to questions of susceptibility and monumental weathering, these reflections look to rusty leakages that play out the impossibility of refusing the environment. Rust, we suggest, is a material archive of exposure that does not keep itself, but flakes apart and seeps away.
Over the six months in which Vajiko Chachkhiani's "Living Dog Among Dead Lions" was exhibited at the Georgian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, heavy rain was pouring inside the installation. This artificially generated process provokes thoughts on the nature of the here and now as well as of the afterlife and of the future appearance of the hut's water-sensitive insides. Eventually, the spaces and furniture exposed to rain and water stagnation will begin to rot and disintegrate, and mould and moss might grow over them. Its viewers feel caught between what they see and what they hope to see; between their perceptions and expectations, in an exceptional time zone where 'natural' weathering is being performed as a subject of meditative observation.
The essay discusses the notion of counterpublics in the context of the creation of the Solidarność labour union in Poland in 1980. The proposed reading of these events not only offers a feminist recontextualization against the grain of Western liberal triumphalism, but furthermore explores the implications of postcolonial thought for the analysis of the recent history of a Central European country as well as for the discussion concerning the public spheres of the excluded and marginalized. The thought of Eduard Glissant, as well as that of Gloria Anzaldua and Gayatri Spivak, allows for a rethinking of these events and theories in a global perspective, thus facilitating a universalizing practice based on a particular, localized experience.
Throughout his career, Stanley Cavell's subject has been the ordinary: what Ralph Waldo Emerson would call 'the near, the low, the common'. Cavell provides compelling insights into Emerson's efforts to locate philosophy within the flow of everyday life. He examines how Emerson renews common thinking, citations, and fragments from the works of others by means of his 'aversive thinking': his technique of turning writing back upon itself. While taking Cavell's Emerson readings as its point of departure, this essay switches Cavell's philosophical angle for a philological one. I suggest that Emerson's engagement with contemporary debates concerning the historical reading of sacred and secular literature (the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare) formed his own practice of reworking literatures of various origins and recasting aesthetics in major ways.
This essay examines extractivism as both a project and a process that is bolstering new forms of imperialism on a world scale. It argues that extractivism is as much grounded in material accumulation as it is in cultural extraction to create new forms of value. The writings of indigenous writers such as Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar offer an important key to understanding the work of the literary in making visible and resistant that which extractivism seeks to exploit for profit.
Figura lacrima
(2012)
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin’s article 'Figura Lacrima', which explores Pasolini's figure of Christ, consists of two interconnected parts. The part called 'Lacrima' argues that Pasolini's Christ sheds a small tear which is analogous to the salvific tear of Dante's Bonconte da Montefeltro. This heretical tear is not explicitly referred to or shown but can only be perceived through the coherent text represented by the ensemble of Pasolini's films. The part called 'Figura' argues that Pasolini invents the new concept of 'figural integration', which extends beyond Erich Auerbach's analysis of medieval figural and typological interpretation and allows him to conceptualize a kind of non-dichotomous tension between the poles structuring his thought and art. Joubert-Laurencin argues thereby that Pasolini's scandal of Christ's small tear is not the simple provocation of a sinful Christ, but the utopian image of a West that frees itself from its own closure through the promise of another world, coming not from somewhere else but from the powers of an outside that it possesses within itself.
The notion of ambivalence currently seems to be an invigorating figure with heuristic potential in political, social, and art theory. It refers to a plurality of possibilities, a paradoxical multiplicity, and a complex relationality. It foregrounds thinking in terms of indeterminacy and incommensurability, as well as in terms of the possible. Ambivalence has been deployed in positive ways, as offering political promise, while, at the same time, being regarded with suspicion.
Manuela Marchesini brings Agamben's ideas to bear on Gadda's "Pasticciaccio" and vice versa. While preserving the specificity of their different fields of operation, this mutual exposure contributes to reframing the Culture War of yore. On the one hand, we have a novel published after World War II with a tortuous gestation and convoluted publication history and reception, written by an author who happened to outlive his creative 'canto del cigno'; on the other, a philosophical and essayistic speculation on contemporary events. The function of Dante's "Comedy" in each author spans from the textual to the allegorical, but rests upon one single crucial common denominator: both Gadda and Agamben take literature seriously. [...] The present essay, part of a larger project unfolding along the same lines, attempts a 'close reading' in the spirit that Edward Said has solicited from the humanities in his lectures at Columbia - or, to put it differently, a tentative 'exercise' of critica in the wake of modern Italian Romance philology and textual criticism from Pasquali through Contini and Debenedetti (a lineage of which Agamben's approach appears to be mindful). [...] Marchesini passes over the general Dantesque infernal allegory of "Pasticciaccio" in order to expand on its final scene. Her thesis is that "Pasticciaccio's" allegorical use of Dante's "Comedy" does not just unravel its interpretive knot. It also points to a utopian overcoming of binarism that concurs with Agamben's reflections. "Pasticciaccio's" closure is neither an epiphany (in the sense of a final celebration of the missing piece that completes the puzzle of the novel), nor does it signal a collapse into ambiguity or irrationality (in the sense that everything is left undecided, wavering between one possibility and its opposite). Gadda maintains his interpellation of wholeness unequivocally throughout the novel.
Tracing the complex history of the term 'reenactment', back to R.G. Collingwood's philosophy of history, on the one hand, and popular practices of war reenactments and living history museums, on the other, a survey of its current contribution in art and museum practices highlights the importance of historicity - a category the postmodern was supposed to have vacated - in a wide range of examples, from Rod Dickinson and Jeremey Deller to Alexandra Pirici, Manuel Pelmuş, and Milo Rau. Performance reenactments, in particular, are premised on performance art having become historical, but also threaten to digest history in favour of a mere productivist mobilization for the needs of current attention economies. An alternative could be the attempt to counter historical with dramatic time in order to unlock unrealized possibilities and futures, as the term preenactment promises.
This chapter identifies two contrasting methodological reductions utilized in philosophical scepticism: withdrawal/doubt [R–]; immersion/attention [R+]. Moving toward a feminist ethics grounded in phenomenological scepticism, Aumiller explores how reduction relates to experiences of personal and global uncertainty such as a pandemic. Reduction involves our entire embodied being, challenging how we are fundamentally in touch with the world. How we respond to being disrupted makes all the difference.
A different take on knowledge, history, and totalization is presented in Jamila Mascat's essay 'Hegel and the Ad-venture of the Totality', which aims at exploring the controversial notion of the Hegelian totality. Countering Louis Althusser's critique of Hegel's 'expressive totality', where every part is thought to expresses the whole, it proposes to consider such a speculative figure as a temporalizing instance situated at the entanglement of Knowing and History. Firstly, it illustrates the paradoxical inclination of Hegel's totality to being both complete and a never-ending task. Secondly, it analyses the accomplishment of totality at the peak of the Science of Logic, focusing on the temporal circularity of the Concept ('Begriff'). Thirdly, drawing on the readings of Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève, and Jean Hyppolite, the essay illustrates the peculiar relation between becoming and eternity that is located at the heart of Hegel's conception of time. Finally, it approaches the last section of the "Phenomenology of Spirit" devoted to Absolute Knowing in order to highlight the twofold movement of seizure ('Begreifen') and release ('Entlassen') that characterizes the activity of the Spirit and that is constitutive of the contingent ad-venture of the totality as a philosophical achievement. In other words, it is by embracing contingency as its limit that Absolute Knowing reaffirms the status of its absoluteness precisely because of its capacity to sacrifice itself and let it go. Critically engaging with Catherine Malabou's reading of plasticity in Hegel, Mascat highlights that Absolute Knowing is a process of totalization that entails cuts and interruptions. The essay shows that the Hegelian totality may be interpreted and actualized as a theoretical construct densely charged with temporal and historical implications: on the one hand, totality expresses a timely standpoint for thought - the standpoint of Hegel's age, which is, as claimed by the philosopher at the end of his "Lectures on the History of Philosophy", 'for the time being completed', as well as the standpoint of the present time to be speculatively accomplished; on the other hand, Hegel's idea of a speculative totalization sets for the philosophies yet to come the never-ending task of constituting and re-constituting wholes.
This essay is an excerpt from Jumana Emil Abboud's ongoing journal, which she started keeping in 2010. With the help of photographer Issa Freij, the artist identified spirited water spots in the topography of Palestine, based on her childhood memories and a 1922 study on "Haunted Springs and Water Demons in Palestine". The text was written as part of a performance by Abboud at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in 2016.
This essay follows the productive discussion of Giorgio Agamben's "The Open: Man and Animal" that took place as part of the 'Openness in Medieval Culture' conference at the ICI Berlin. The essay attempts to develop a speculative notion of openness within Agamben's work, in particular by connecting the question of openness to the question of the promise: the promise of the resolution of the question of man and animal ("The Open"); the promise of the Franciscans' vow, or 'sacramentum' ("The Highest Poverty"); and the promise of language ("The Sacrament of Language").
In this brief discussion, I reflect on the significance of using the category of the global south for reconfiguring the scope of the history of knowledge. While I see this as a productive paradigm shift that has already given rise to mould-breaking works, I focus here on the cross-hemispheric histories of extractive capitalism and how both colonial violence and anticolonial resistance have shaped knowledge-making. I argue that thinking through 'entangled ecologies' can be a tool for countering the existing conceptual order, which has led to the north-south division in the first place. Attending to epistemic and ontological entanglements would enable us to ask better and deeper questions about the increasingly complex interconnections across human and nonhuman worlds, especially given the planetary crises we face today.
Between 1816 and 1821, the philologist François Raynouard (1761–1836) published a "Choix des poésies originales des troubadours". His connections with Madame de Staël's cultural circle at Coppet determined the construction of the myth of courtly love as a forerunner of Romantic love. [...] Acording to this cultural tradition, Dante is an intermediate (although pre-eminent) step in the history of Western desire, a process begun in medieval Provence and revitalized by European Romanticism. When Lacan approaches Dante, it is therefore one Dante - this Dante - that he is approaching. The present essay, in which Fabio Camilletti analyses three tightly interwoven texts, explores some of the reverberations of this encounter. In 1958, Lacan published in "Critique" an article entitled 'La jeunesse d'André Gide, ou la lettre et le désir'. This text, later included in Lacan's "Écrits", was meant to be a review of a biography of the young Gide published in 1956 by Jean Delay, entitled "La jeunesse d'André Gide". In comparing Gide's life with his works of youth, Delay notably focused on Gide's novel of 1891, "Les Cahiers d'André Walter", the third text on which Camilletti focuses his inquiry. These three texts evoke in various ways the relationship between Dante and Beatrice, using it as a cultural allusion through which specific problems of sexuality (or, better, of the absence of sexuality) are conveyed. This essay aims therefore to be a study in the rhapsodic and subterranean presence of Dante and the "Vita Nova" between the end of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, as well as in the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis through the quartet Dante-Gide-Delay-Lacan.
'ici uniglory' is an installation on paper. The piece intertwines fragments of six texts by Bruno Besana, Fabio Camilletti, Antke Engel, Sara Fortuna, Laura Taler, and Andrea von Kameke, written in response to the video installation UNIGLORY, a work-in-progress exhibited at ICI Berlin. The responses are edited, fragmented, and re-assembled to reflect the way the filmmaker worked with the filmed dance footage in the original installation, essentially re-choreographing words. The subtle tensions between the different responses allow for shifts and movements within the piece. The result is a poetic intermingling of voices that rub up against one another. Tension also acts as a binding agent, holding all the fragments together and allowing them to be woven into a collective text.
Identity politics redux
(2014)
Pornography reappropriated by feminist and queer pornographers is being reimagined as a site of activist productions, be it through the reshaping of desire or engaging with wider discussions of representational politics. Here, K. Heintzman takes up Shine Louise Houston's feature length film, "The Wild Search", as a unique case study for addressing the relationship between debates of identity politics and queer activist practice.
In this fifteen-minute lecture-performance, Malin Arnell presents her dialogue with the work of French-Italian artist Gina Pane (1939–1990). Oriented around textual and visual traces of Pane and Arnell's historical intra-action, this ongoing dialogue explores performance art documentation and historical narratives. The project interrogates the operations of archives, asking: 'How do queer feminist performance archives make you vulnerable, how do they make you feel, act, react?' 'Whose bodies remain present, and which bodies are lost?' The framework of the work - its repetition with variations and its artistic and queer feminist methodologies - enables an exploration of history, documentation, and bodily epistemology as an attempt to take responsibility for what is not known by doing, through action - through performance.
'Inbuilt errans' points to the core of the concept, namely the semantic entanglement of errantry and error. Errans as the erroneous wandering or the drifting error complicates the celebration of movement, fluidity, flexibility, or even 'queering'. The rigid or stubborn aspect of errans, its erroneousness on the other hand not only accompanies but also enables its errancy. The 'rigidity' (as rigidity in flux) requires scare quotes in order to mark the ways in which these qualities might collapse when a question of 'to whom?' is posed. Through an eclectic errantry through a personal anecdote, a meme video, an ethnographic note, as well as medical history and queer theory, this text theorizes, with the help of the 'inbuild errans' of the human body, that is, its orifices, a 'radical indifference' that points to an unplanned, ambiguous, and weak while at the same time strategic, rigid, and powerful form of resistance.
Practices of rewriting and mouvance are central to medieval culture, but have been neglected by contemporary scholarship. This paper highlights how collaborative forms of writing such as religious song engage with complex theological thought, opening up a discourse from which the laity had previously been excluded. Using forms which defy conventional author-based aesthetic norms, these songs explore poetic practices which are both collective and inclusive.
The present essay engages with the short story 'The Burrow', written by Franz Kafka between 1923 and 1924, a few months before his death. The ambiguity of the original title, 'Der Bau', which defies translation by pointing at the same time at a construction and an excavation work, anticipates the multilayered image of the burrow itself. While both nature and function of the burrow are hard to pinpoint (is it a dwelling, a shelter, a fortress, a labyrinth, a ruin?), the initially reported success of its construction is revealed as illusory, thus prompting the ongoing first-person narration of the incessant builder's work. Similarly unsuccessful is any attempt of the reader to attain metaphorical closure. In the light of other impossible, i.e., unfinished, bound-to-fail, ruinous, or selfdismantling structures portrayed by Kafka, as well as on the background of coeval texts by Paul Valéry and Georg Simmel, the essay investigates the wide and deep significance of the burrow’s countering the classical ideal of architectural wholeness.
Inner world and milieu : art, madness, and Brazilian psychiatry in the work of Nise da Silveira
(2024)
This short essay focuses on the work of Brazilian doctor Nise da Silveira, a pioneer in psychiatry who introduced artistic tools to work with psychiatric patients, especially those diagnosed as psychotic. She founded the Museum of Images from the Unconscious in 1952 inside an asylum in Rio de Janeiro to assemble and exhibit the works produced by her patients. As an iconoclast who did not systematize her theory, she engaged with several European psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and thinkers to produce a very innovative reflection and practical clinical work. Her work resonates in particular with French Institutional Psychotherapy, as well as with Frantz Fanon's psychiatric work in Algeria, but, differently from the former, places art at the core of its clinical method and proposes a radical positioning against every form of medicalized approach.
Gilles Deleuze, borrowing from Maurice Blanchot's distinctive vocabulary in "The Space of Literature", offers death as the ultimate example of the event. In this paper, I propose reversing the current of concept-metaphor against a certain performance theory of sovereignty and ask, not what the concept-metaphor death does for the thought of the event, but what the concept-metaphor event does for the thought of death on the hunger strike in order to explore the divide between the space of dying and the space of politics, which are incompatibly distinct and yet inextricably linked. Revealing an irreducible anachrony between two deaths - the passage of time that separates dying as pure potentiality from death as a radically contingent event that comes either too early or too late - I argue that the political efficacy of hunger striking depends less on the consummation of death in the immediacy of an ecstatic moment than on the prolongation of this interval of time by potentially endless repetitive enactments, which imply both finality and incompletion.
Introduction
(2014)
The experience of multistable figures or so-called Kippbilder - the sudden and repeated 'kippen' of perception as the same object is seen under different aspects - is fascinating in its own right. However, what animated the year-long discussion leading to this volume was a critical exploration of the proposition that such figures may offer a helpful model for thinking through the intercultural and interdisciplinary effort of productively negotiating between conflicting positions.
The essays in this volume seek to understand manifold kinds of medieval openness that become visible when one refrains from modern assumptions, and are also interested in how articulations of openness in the Middle Ages often stand in creative tension with forms of closure and can even be empowered by them. The chapters highlight the complex relationship between author, work, and text, but also explore several, often paradoxical, ways in which medieval culture mobilizes forms, practices, and experiences of openness without having a single abstract concept for it.
Invitation, to exi(s)t
(2024)
This joint piece aspires to be a dialogue. In a dialogue, people speak and, most importantly, listen, from their respective positions. Drawing from Trinh T. Minh-ha's notion of speaking nearby, Dulley and Streva reflect on the relationship between authorship, authority, and authoritarianism; the parallel between listening and reading, on the one hand, and speaking and writing, on the other hand; the entanglement between disciplinary systems of knowledge and colonial structures of power; the opacity of others and the imperialistic drive to reduce them to transparency; the supposed subject of knowledge and the void. As they converse on these matters, they speak nearby authors from both the so-called Global South and the so-called Global North who are thus juxtaposed, further developed, and displaced towards a politics and ethics of fugitivity. What follows is an invitation to exi(s)t.
'Dante and Ireland', or 'Dante and Irish Writers', is an extremely vast topic, and to cover it a book rather than an essay would be necessary. If the relationship between the poet and Ireland did not begin in the fourteenth century - when Dante himself may have had some knowledge of, and been inspired by, the "Vision of Adamnán", the "Vision of Tungdal", and the "Tractatus de purgatorio Sancti Patricii" - the story certainly had started by the eighteenth, when the Irish man of letters Henry Boyd was the first to produce a complete English translation of the "Comedy", published in 1802. Even if one restricts the field to twentieth-century literature alone, which is the aim in the present piece, the list of authors who are influenced by Dante includes Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Heaney - that is to say, four of the major writers not only of Ireland, but of Europe and the entire West. To these should then be added other Irish poets of the first magnitude, such as Louis MacNeice, Ciaran Carson, Eiléan Ní Cuilleanáin, and Thomas Kinsella. Therefore Piero Boitani treats this theme in a somewhat cursory manner, privileging the episodes he considers most relevant and the themes which he thinks form a coherent and intricate pattern of literary history, where every author is not only metamorphosing Dante but also rewriting his predecessor, or predecessors, who had rewritten Dante. Distinct from the English and American Dante of Pound and Eliot, an 'Irish Dante', whom Joyce was to call 'ersed irredent', slowly grows out of this pattern.
The following think piece explores what it means to exist in a culture of idols by questioning the universalistic practice of canonization. By rejecting homogenous Eurocentric thinking, this piece makes room for the voices of plurality and collective thinking with each other. To this end, it relies on feminist praxis to criticize the genius-based, self-contained understanding of creativity and success perpetuating within contemporary scientific research. Indeed, it presents a case for cultivating cultures of failure within academia and demonstrates with its own stylistic development how cultivating a stream of thoughts can speak to the fragmented and collective nature of the entangled process of thinking and writing.
KippCity
(2014)
On 28 April 2011, on the Rathausplatz of Neukölln, Christine Hentschel's puzzlement vis-à-vis Neukölln's liberation met the neighbourhood's flickering urbanity, which she seeks to capture in a project called KippCity. KippCity is an experiment in tracing urban change while it happens. If space is the 'event of place', as Doreen Massey holds, the space of KippCity is the transformation of Neukölln. This chapter explores the potentials of multistable figures (Kippbilder) for conceptualizing urban change. This potential, Hentschel argues, lies in the flip-moment itself, in the space-time of urban transformation. In Berlin-Neukölln, a neighbourhood long branded as poor and failing, multiple and partly conflicting flip-scenarios have begun to inspire and haunt the neighbourhood and its self-reflective talk. KippCity Neukölln is thus a flickering figure. But unlike an artefact Kippbild, which flickers between duck and rabbit, for example, KippCity Neukölln does not simply tip into a new pre-fabricated form, but rather wavers between different future scenarios. Neukölln's flickering urbanity is thus nervous, full of uncertainty, frustration and enthusiasm. The article shows how the neighbourhood seeks escape from the dystopia of two dominant flip scenarios of ghettoization and gentrification by digging its claws into its 'Now'.
This edited transcript of a presentation by filmmaker/choreographer Laura Taler responds to Heinrich von Kleist's text by taking him on as a dancing partner. It follows a simple structure of proposal and response similar to that found in the movements between leader and follower in Argentine tango. Engaging Kleist's text in the double form of a speech and a tango performance, this critical contribution follows a twofold direction: it questions Kleist's representation of dance as a mechanical activity deprived of any form of intelligence and it refuses his attempt to force the aesthetic experience of dance into a framework that privileges theory over bodily experience. These two classical philosophical positions are questioned and provocatively opposed to the dynamic, situated, and dialogic thought performed within a witty tango interaction.
Law is other wor(l)ds
(2022)
This paper turns to the thought of Yan Thomas to address the way of constructing categories and operating through them that is typical of law. The art of law displays a special quality: the reduction of the 'things' of the social world through the construction of categories, and the use of these same categories to conduct legal operations. The paper argues that the quintessential legal performance is instituting, and it finally asks how to exercise a legal imagination for Gaia.
Through various cases and instances, this essay opens with the question of biography and the demands of its form: that is, biography's attempt to reduce historical totalities to the page in moments of sudden condensation. It then introduces the figure of Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986), a doctor and later hand reader and sexologist, who appears on a diagram, constructed by Walter Benjamin in 1932, to map his life through his 'Urbekanntschaften' (primal acquaintances). It then seeks to transpose Benjamin's diagram into other linear forms, such as a family tree, a diagram of chemical affinity, and an astral chart, to add one: the diagram as a map of the hand. This opens up a number of temporal, historical, and epistemic reductions, or cases of reduction, in Wolff's work and beyond. It concludes with a particular moment in Wolff's biography - her arrest in 1933 and her escape to Paris - as a final instance of the line, as border.
During the Black Revolution, LeRoi Jones used a radical adaptation of Dante to express a new militant identity, turning himself into a new man with a new name, Amiri Baraka, whose experimental literary project culminated in "The System of Dante's Hell" in 1965. Dante’s poem (specifically, John Sinclair's translation) provides a grid for the narrative of Baraka's autobiographical novel; at the same time, the Italian poet's description of hell functions for Baraka as a gloss on many of his own experiences. Whereas for Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, Dante marks a way into the world of European culture, Baraka uses Dante first to measure the growing distance between himself and European literature and then, paradoxically, to separate himself totally from it. Baraka's response to the poet at once confirms and belies Edward Said's claim that Dante's "Divine Comedy" is essentially an imperial text that is foundational to the imperial discipline of comparative literature. That Baraka can found his struggle against imperialist culture, as he sees it, on none other than this specific poem suggests the extent to which it is a richer and more complex text than even Said imagined. To see exactly how Baraka does this, Dennis Looney proposes to read several extended passages from "The System of Dante's Hell" to take stock of its allusiveness to the Italian model. For all the critical attention to Baraka, surprisingly no one has undertaken the necessary work of sorting out his allusions to Dante in any systematic way.
The Neoplastic Room at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź was originally designed in 1948 by the avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński. Destroyed in 1950 and reconstructed in 1960, it became the focal point of the museum, with the 'International Collection of Modern Art' by the a.r. group being exhibited there. At the same time, it became a point of reference for contemporary artists and a strategy for building a permanent collection for the museum, as well as a reflection on how the past can give a vision of the future. This essay focuses on the gesture of 're-curating' the Neoplastic Room in relation to the performative practice of the artists involved (e.g., Daniel Buren, Elżbieta Jabłońska).
For thirty years, Berlin was the metropole of the German colonial empire. For most German citizens, however, this statement is relatively unknown. Even though there is an increased interest in decolonial praxis within Berlin-based cultural and educational settings, the persistence of such efforts and their implications within larger society is hard to assess in advance. In response, this text proposes a walking tour through Berlin, highlighting places related to this part of German history. In doing so, it demonstrates the presence of many references to colonialism spread through the city and, more significantly, many initiatives and projects seeking to make this past more visible. By offering an overview of four specific locations within the city, this chapter hopes to critically reflect on the extensive trajectory of the ongoing struggles for historical reparations.
'Perhaps the sodomites should be written out of Dante's "Inferno"', Jarman wrote in his journal on 1 August 1990: 'I'll offer myself as the ghostwriter.' What does he mean by 'ghostwriter' here? How queer is this odd speech-act? What is he offering to do to the homophobic landscape of the "Inferno", that forbiddingly sealed textual prison, with his Hollywood pitchman's casual bid to 'write out' the sodomites as if they were a slight embarrassment to the divine justice system? Is he speaking in jest as a writer of gay satires and sacrilegious memoirs, or in deadly earnest as an activist who had renounced the middle-class pretensions and frivolities of the pre-AIDS gay world? [...] Jarman counters the trope of homosexual theft visually with the triumphant figure of Man with Snake. The Dantesque merging of snake and thief is replaced by an erotic dance in which the gilded youth raises his phallic partner above his head and seductively kisses it on the mouth. Whereas Dante would have us notice the grotesque parody of the Trinity played out in the seventh bolgia - with the unchanging Puccio as God the Father, the two-natured Agnello-Cianfa as Christ, and the fume-veiled Buoso receiving his forked tongue from the serpent Francesco in a demonic replay of the gift of tongues from the Spirit - Jarman clears away all overdetermined theological meanings to revel in the purely aesthetic impact of the phallic dancer. All the ghosts from Dante's snakepit are conjured away in the film and replaced with the solid presence of a single gorgeously spotlit male body. Ghostwriting Dante, for Jarman, meant more than a mere appropriation of homoerotic scenes from the "Inferno" into his screenplay. It meant a complete reimagining of their aesthetic significance within the filmscape of his Dantean transformations.
With reference to the Marx Seminars at the University of São Paulo, this chapter discusses the creation of a specific tradition in the social sciences that marks a crucial moment in the history of postcolonial and decolonial studies. By means of the concept of periphery, I reconstruct how this tradition refuted temporal and stadial dualisms. Moreover, I argue that the development of this new perspective in the social sciences must be understood in terms of its efforts to rethink Marx but also, and more importantly, by the need to rethink Brazil's place in the world. Following this thread, I analyse Roberto Schwarz's work as paradigmatic for a proper understanding of the centrality of the concept of periphery in these discussions.
How can the Armenian genocide be considered in terms of its ecological roots and remnants? Umut Yıldırım explores the more-than-human flora and fauna indigenous to the banks of the Tigris river in Upper Mesopotamia - in particular, centenarian mulberry trees - as resistant roots that register the evidentiary ecologies of the Armenian genocide through the Turkish state's denialist present and its ongoing war against the Kurds.
In 1989 the triumphant discourse on the 'end of history' brought the death of socialism and the expansion of liberal democracy. The proclamation of the end of history could also be read literally, as the death of 'history' as a discipline with a homogenized narrative. It is in the same year that Pierra Nora wrote a groundbreaking article, which disentangled the fundamental opposition between history and memory, and at the end assumed the standpoint of memory. The article departs from the diagnosis of post-Yugoslav contemporary accounts of Yugoslav and partisan events. The critique of nationalist and Yugonostalgic discourses discloses shared assumptions that are based on the 'romantic' temporality of Nation and on history as a closed process. In the main part of the article the author works on the special, multiple temporality of partisan poetry that emerged during the WWII partisan struggle. The special temporality hinges on the productive and tensed relationship between the 'not yet existing' - the position of the new society free of foreign occupation, but also in a radically transformed society - and the contemporary struggle within war, which is also marked by the fear that the rupture of the struggle might not be remembered rightly, if at all. The memory of the present struggle remains to be the task to be realized not only for poets, but for everyone participating in the struggle. This is where the revolutionary temporality of the unfinished process comes to its fore, relating poetry to struggle, but again producing a form of poetry in the struggle.
Mafrouza is a twelve-hour-long documentary by French director Emanuelle Demoris, shot in a now-demolished neighbourhood in Alexandria, Egypt. Demoris is one of a long chain of western filmmakers who appeal to some form of 'taking one's time' as an instrument for - morally, politically, epistemologically - adequate representation. Based on the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha, Eduard Glissant, and Poor Theory, this chapter evaluates what happens when a film adopts a strategy of deferral in cases in which it is not clear how questions of 'doing justice' could be resolved. Using long duration and an insistence on the quotidian, Demoris's film forces us to think about the conditions that make pronouncements about character, situation, and narrative possible, continuously postponing the moment when it will become possible to say: 'this film is about …'. By setting itself up for failure, the film proposes one possible approach to the ethics and politics of visibility.
A series of creative non-fiction short stories based on ethnographic interviews and participant observation in Iraq from 2014–2022, Kali Rubaii's reflection asks: what is a toxic affect? In these stories, war-torn ecologies are packed with living and non-living beings that emerge in the floor of a mosque, in a graveyard, from a pillow, a toilet, and construction sites in Iraq.
Nothing beyond the name : towards an eclipse of listening in the psychotherapeutic enterprise
(2022)
What are the different kinds of reduction that take place in a psychotherapeutic discipline? This article looks at the agonistic relations between the two types of reduction that fundamentally constitute a psychotherapeutic paradigm: naming and listening. At any given moment in the history of psychological theory, various schools and theories are in contention with each other over an institutional and state legitimation that will only be granted to one or some of them. It is argued that these disciplinary contentions for a dominant status subordinate the names and concepts that populate a particular psychotherapeutic paradigm to a property regime, thereby obscuring or compromising the attention paid to forms of listening that occur on the edge of naming and meaning.
Starting from the editorial committee's proposal concerning strategies for the recognition of Global South researches, in this letter I indicate a number of broader impasses related to neoliberal academia in a context in which ecological crisis emerges as a major crisis of capital. To do so, I resort to concepts drawn from feminist, decolonial, and post-structuralist literature and bring them into dialogue with a Marxist framework of analysis.
The article compares the aesthetic notions of the "je ne sais quoi" (as it emerges in the Renaissance and is widely debated in the eighteenth century) and of the 'uncanny' as theorized by Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century. Its hypothesis is that both notions, in situating aesthetic experience in a liminal space between pleasure and trouble, can be considered after-images of non-aesthetical notions - notions that belong to the domain of the sacred and have metamorphosed as forms of aesthetic undecidability through the paradigmatic fracture of early modernity. The article focuses on depictions of female figures directing their gaze upward - in the iconography of Sade's Justine, in popular imagery connected with Lourdes apparitions (1858), in medium photography, and in the images taken by Charcot of his hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière - and argues that they become a Warburgian Pathosformel indicating a space of undecidability and 'nonsense' between the subject and otherness.
Goats remain the most viable livestock in the warzone of South Lebanon because of their compatibility with wartime environments and ordnance. They can survive periods of scarcity during active war, occupations, or invasions by foraging for food and eating almost anything. Most crucially, goats are small and light and can graze in the borderland's many minefields without setting off the hidden explosives designed to kill humans, who are not as light-footed. In this essay, Munira Khayyat explores how an enduring, explosive military technology is both domesticated and resisted by a homegrown, anti-mine survival assemblage.
This essay restages Arendt's 'Auseinandersetzung' with Heidegger regarding 'political beginnings'. Sketching Heidegger's exceptionalist account of 'new beginnings' and Arendt's dispute with him in relation to the tension between the spheres of 'philosophy' and 'politics', I trace her position about 'political founding'. I claim that Arendt invites us to recognize the 'principle of an-archy' innate to 'political beginnings', which cannot be absorbed by exceptionalist invocations of the 'history of Being'.
This article conceptualizes tension as a relation between elements in which at least two forces with different directions are involved. How can this concept of tension be applied to the analysis of the peculiar logic of life in common? The article offers a reading, inspired by the method of conceptual history, of the use of the concept of 'force' in three models of society: Hobbes's political model, the economic model proposed by the thinkers of commercial society, and Durkheim's social theory. The analysis sheds some light on the ways in which the presence of contradictory forces can be taken to be constitutive of the social itself. This observation is then used to suggest that the puzzling fascination exerted by the notion of tension can be better understood if we see it pointing to some fundamental features of our way of collectively inhabiting the world.
On the list
(2022)
This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction - as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction - as a form of condensation to the most salient data.
By focusing on Pasolini's uncompleted film project "San Paolo", Luca Di Blasi's article 'One Divided by Another: Split and Conversion in Pasolini's "San Paolo"' analyzes the notion of split (the split in the structure of time and, above all, the split of the figure of Paul) and concentrates especially on the very moment of Paul's Damascene conversion. Di Blasi refers to the "Kippbild" as a model that can be used to understand better certain ambivalences in Pasolini's Paul. Locating Pasolini's reading of the founder of the Church in a triangulation with two major contemporary philosophers, Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, Di Blasi shows that two opposing possibilities of interpreting Paul - as militant subject of a universal event and its necessary consequences (Badiou) and as representative of softness, weakness, poverty, "homo sacer" (Agamben) - fit perfectly with the two aspects of Pasolini's Paul. Pasolini's profoundly split Paul thus represents a dichotomy which disunites two major figures of contemporary leftist thought.
Openness and intensity : Petrarch's becoming laurel in "Rerum vulgarium fragmenta" 23 and 228
(2022)
Our paper offers a comparative reading of Rvf 23 and 228, which describe the poetic subject's transformation into (23), or implantation with (228), the laurel tree that normally represents the poet's beloved, Laura. Bringing Petrarch's poems into dialogue with philosophical works that consider the nature of plant existence as a form of interconnectedness and porosity to the outside, we argue that the becoming tree these poems stage is a form of desire to be understood not as lack but as intensity.
The children's book "Duck! Rabbit!" dramatizes the lesson that just because one is right, others don’t have to be wrong. An endless dispute is quickly settled once the quarrellers experience an aspect change or gestalt switch and thereby realize that the same picture can be seen in different ways. This simple scenario offers an intriguing model for arbitrating between conflicting positions by going back and forth between different aspects and thereby realizing that conflicting accounts can be equally valid.
Francesca Cadel's paper 'Outside Italy: Pasolini's Transnational Visions of the Sacred and Tradition' points out that in the 1940s and 1950s Pasolini's themes were all related to the specificity of Italian society, history, and traditions, while, beginning with the 1960s, Pasolini started travelling around the world, widening his perspectives on a rapidly changing world. Hence he developed new critical patterns, combining an increasing interest in sprawling transnational post-colonial economies with his strenuous defence of tradition and the sacred within human societies. Cadel uses different examples - including Pasolini's Indian travelogues - to show how his initial devotion to Italian millenary traditions and peasant cultures finally led to an open vision and understanding of human behaviours and mores, beyond any national boundary.
Pasolini's first visit to a Third World country dates to 1960-61. His impressions and experiences during this journey are told in the collection of articles "L'odore dell'India", which, in Silvia Mazzini's opinion, also reveals his (perhaps characteristic) tension between being up-to-date and being out of time. This essay can thus be understood as a small journey through the author's travels in and relations with India. It argues that while in the 1960s the myth of India became a veritable spiritual fashion, for Pasolini this fashion trivialized the sharp contradictions of a country at once poor and splendid, full of traditions and subversive, rich with mysticism and pragmatic vitality. The collection of journalistic articles "L'odore dell' India" (1961) and the documentary "Appunti per un film sull'India" (1968), which originate from Pasolini's first journeys to the so-called 'Third World', intertwine sharp sociological analyses with instinctual observations and remarks. Mazzini shows that between the effluvia of incense and the adventures of a tiger, one can catch a glimpse of the Pasolinian vision of a humanity which is at once disruptive, archaic, and subversive, and which represents an alternative to the standardization of the consumerist society and its tendency to suppress and absorb any cultural difference.
Robert S. C. Gordon's article 'Pasolini as Jew, Between Israel and Europe' examines a remarkable trope in Pasolini's encounter with the cultures and geographies of Europe and its beyond: his imaginary identification with the figure of the Jew. Gordon examines in turn the site of Israel and its Jewish citizens; the 'Lager' and the Jews as victims of genocide; and finally the figure of Saint Paul and his earlier Jewish identity as Saul, both sacred and a figure of the Law, as a model for the twentieth-century Church and its ambiguous response to Nazism. In all three of these threads, Pasolini's Jew is a 'queer' and destabilizing trope for exploring the border of the European and the non-European, the self and the other.
In the 1990s, the question of the legacy of historical performance was posed with a particular sense of urgency. In the context of most pioneers of the art form having retired from live performance, reenactments not only reproduced past works but positioned artists within the genealogy of performance. The sense of the passage of a generation and the transmission of the memory of past performances were made explicit by Marina Abramović in "The Biography" (1992), a theatre piece in which she stages the very process of accounting for her past, as well as by Takashi Murakami and Oleg Kulik, who emerged on the art scene in the 1990s and mimicked live works from the past.
This essay approaches the problem of untying the mother tongue using Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's critique of onto-typology, along with the concept of the 'outre-mère' (the 'beyond-mother'), a limit-figure he and Jean-Luc Nancy devised in their critical assessments of psychoanalysis and its relationship to politics and the problem of mimesis. The essay argues that it will not be possible to deconstruct the figure of the mother tongue, or to untie ourselves from it, as long as we leave unquestioned both the theoretical dependence on figuration and our affective tie ('Gefühlsbindung') to theory.
Giovanna Trento's article 'Pier Paolo Pasolini and Panmeridional Italianness' engages Pasolini's aesthetic, poetic, and political approach in terms of the complementary dichotomy of national and 'local' issues, on the one hand, and transnational and panmeridional topoi, on the other. Trento argues that despite his 'Third World' and Marxist sympathies, Pasolini showed strong poetic and political attention to national narratives and the building of Italianness. But Pasolini's 'desperate love' for Italy and Italianness, Trento argues, can be fully grasped only if we read it in the light of his fluid, transnational and panmeridional approach marked by different - and at times antithetical - factors, such as the pan-Africanist perspective and the colonial memory. Pasolini was indeed able to build a deterritorialized and idealized never-ending South: the Pan-South (Panmeridione) - that is, a fluid, non-geographical topos where 'traditional' values are used in non-traditional and subversive ways with the goal of resisting industrialization, mass media, and late-capitalist alienation.
Feminist, queer, and trans studies are all influenced significantly by anti-identitarian thought. Yet, contemporary gender and sexual identities only seem to be proliferating: nonbinary, graysexual, demigender, and more. This chapter focuses on a series of reference guides that schematize this recent expansion. Often miming reductive reference forms (the dictionary, the A-Z list), these texts and the questions they raise help to rethink the place of 'identity' across gender and sexuality studies.
Preface
(2020)
The intensifying ecological devastation of the planet is being registered across scientific disciplines and activist, artistic, or more broadly cultural endeavours in ways that rethink the temporal dimensions of a catastrophe that can no longer be considered 'looming'. In many political contexts - trying to get scientists heard, mobilizing state power and international agreements to curb the extractivist rapaciousness of global capitalism - it might still seem essential to create a sense of urgency, of a rapidly closing interval, last chance, now or never. Yet taking stock not only of the planetary sum totals of global climate change but its present local manifestations, the devastations of neocolonial extractivism, the irreversible extinctions of countless species, destruction of ecotopes on land and in the sea, has produced a growing awareness that in many crucial senses, it is 'too late' - that the time can no longer be given as 'five minutes to midnight' but has moved a lot closer to the dead of night, whether this is being regarded primarily as a question of the cumulative loss of biodiversity as part of what is now known as the 'sixth mass extinction' or as the approach of several 'tipping points' of global climate change, such as the current ice sheet disintegrations in the polar regions, the greenhouse gas release triggered by the loss of permafrost, and irreversible desertifications. The complexion of ecology, over these last years, has turned from juicy green to dark and brittle. The most decisive recent interventions, while acknowledging the overwhelming pessimist thrust of ecological thought, have tried to use a more complex, more differentiated account of the temporality of environmental ruination in order to reflect on the diminished possibilities for life in these ruins while avoiding familiar registers both of science fiction dystopias and self-healing planets.
Preface
(2019)
What's in a prefix? How to read a prefix as short as 're-'? Does 're-' really signify? Can it point into a specific direction? Can it reverse? Can it become the shibboleth of a 'postcritical' reboot? At first glance transparent and directional, 're-' complicates the linear and teleological models commonly accepted as structuring the relations between past, present, and future, opening onto errant temporalities.
Proust list impulse
(2022)
Lists litter Marcel Proust's pages of "À la recherche du temps perdu" ("In Search of Lost Time"), but also the works about it. This short contribution collects together a number of those lists, and offers some reflection on the list's place and function within the work, on the level of the sentence and as a form in its own right.
Arnd Wedemeyer's article focuses on the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–86), who did not shy away from describing the social order with traditional organic metaphors, such as the notion of a 'central organ'. However, it is above all the - plastic - relationship between society and art that is at issue in Wedemeyer's article, entitled 'Pumping Honey: Joseph Beuys at the documenta 6'. Using the term 'Soziale Plastik', Beuys not only classified his own artistic practice as essentially sculptural but, more importantly, thematized its heterogeneous yet anything but passive relationship to art market, exhibition, museum, and various modes of reception, as well as staked its political claim. Wedemeyer looks at Beuys's contribution to the 1977 documenta, 'Honey Pump at the Workplace', in order to argue that the layered invocation of plasticity characteristic of Beuys's practice and theorizing ought not be historicized, as is commonly done, as an instantiation of the excessive, transgressive - and quite possibly disingenuous - zeal of the neo-avant-garde. Beuys's 'Plastik' should not be confused with anti-aesthetic formlessness, base materialism, a post-Duchampian ruination of the 'objet trouvé', and least of all a Neoromantic or Wagnerian projection or hypostatization of the autonomous work of art. The avant-gardes of the twentieth century have rendered the relationship of art and aesthetics tenuous at best, their artistic 'innovations' straining against the supratemporally or anthropologically defined characteristics of aesthetic valuation, play, or force. While many have sought to address this problem by tethering art to society in a shared 'contemporaneity', the article explores the implications of recasting this relation as one of plasticity, using the conceptual richness harvested by Catherine Malabou.
Radiating exposures
(2020)
The brief explorations of radiation exposures presented within this essay draw primarily from nuclear art and culture and contribute to the field of nuclear aesthetics, which has long been fixated on the problem of visibility and the representation of nuclear residues. The examples draw primarily from photographic technologies and other aesthetic registers that capture visual residues of radiation. The challenges of nuclear aesthetics are also political and social. This constellation of objects and inquiries is meant to explore the fraught political, environmental, and social relations between radiation, visibility, toxicity, through the concept of exposure. They offer feminist glimpses into other ways of thinking exposure, as it develops in relation to (often imperceptible) toxicity that is not inscribed into a logic that partitions the passive victim of suffering from some pure or unaffected subject. They are examples that are both forms of exposure specific to the nuclear while also, perhaps, helping to expose more nuanced and complex ways of understanding forms of exposure that extend beyond nuclearity.
Can reenactment both as reactivation of images and restaging of exhibitions be considered an alternative way of tackling the critical task to re-present art history (i.e., to present it anew) in the here and now, over and over and over again? The gesture of restoring visibility to something no longer present, reactivating or reembodying it as an object/image in and for the present, is here proposed as a (political) act of restitution and historical recontextualization. Examining the boundaries between past and present, original and copy (as well as originality and copyright), repetition and variation, authenticity and auraticity, presence and absence, canon and appropriation, durée and transience, the paper focuses on remediation, reinterpretation, and reconstruction as creative gestures and cultural promises in contemporary art practice, curatorship, and museology.
Kinetic and programmed art has been a trend of contemporary arts that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s. Kinetic artworks often incorporated technology, at that time still immature, and involved the audience in the production of visual, sound, and somatic effects. Gruppo T was the pioneering group at the forefront of this groundbreaking vision of art as reproducible, participatory, and interactive. Through an action research project and the methodological tool of reenactment, a group of researchers, designers, and artists has proposed an alternative way to conserve Gruppo T artworks. The project 'Re-programmed Art: An Open Manifesto' originated from the ephemeral and experimental features, as well as fragility, of the works by Gruppo T - that is, from the difficulties of practice, conservation, technology, and market that have confined them for far too long to the margins of mainstream art history. We conceive reenactment not just a mere restaging but as re-designing, re-thinking, updating, and reprogramming a series of works by Gruppo T.
"Nel regno oscuro" is the first part of a planned trilogy inspired by the "Divine Comedy", integrating the Middle European style of Giorgio Pressburger's previous works with the attempt to engage with the first part of Dante's poem. The role of Virgil, Dante's guide in the "Inferno", is taken by Sigmund Freud, and the journey of the melancholic protagonist begins as psychoanalytic therapy to enable him to come to terms with the loss of his father and his twin brother, but soon turns into a journey through the realm of the dead which, like the "Divine Comedy", takes the shape of a series of encounters with the shades of historical figures. Thus Dante's descent to hell metamorphoses into a phantasmagoric voyage to the most intimate and obscure dimensions of the human psyche as well as a journey through the tragic events of history in the twentieth century - and the Shoah in particular. The combination of the personal, the collective, and even the universal is one of the most interesting aspects Pressburger takes from Dante's poem. In the following analysis Manuele Gragnolati explores how both Dante's "Divine Comedy" and Pressburger's "Nel regno oscuro" place personal and collective suffering at the centre of their own narratives and stage writing as a political, ethical, and possibly 'salvific' way to deal with this dual suffering, even as they differ in their concepts of identity and selfhood on the one hand and in their models of history on the other.
Recherche I
(2019)
Recherche, (re-)search: do I research to find something not yet found or do I re-search back to find something that has been lost? These two directionalities structure Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu" and are reflected in its reception. But what if they only seem mutually exclusive, yet really are one and the same thing?
Recherche II : anamnesis
(2019)
The temporal loop of Proust's "Recherche" complicates the unidirectional understanding of anamnesis in psychoanalysis, which, in turn, allows for a renewed reading of the temporality of the "Recherche", highlighting the intrinsic link between artistic 'research' and unconscious affect - at the same time origin, motif, and destination.
The text considers recirculation as a process through which both visual and cultural imagery are put in motion over and over again in the current information age, especially in the context of post-Internet art. Hito Steyerl's writings and thoughts on the 'poor image', namely the low-resolution digital image bound to a perpetual wandering or 'circulationism', here serve as major reference points for the development of the argument.
Recitation : lyric time(s) I
(2019)
What is the time of the lyric? For Augustine, the recitation of a hymn illustrates the workings of time in the human mind; for Giorgio Agamben, the poem itself exemplifies the structure of what he defines as 'messianic time'. By focusing on Dante's sonnet 'Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare' and looking at the double act of the recitation of the poem and the "re-citation" of prior gestures, the temporality of both the single poem and lyric discourse will come into focus.
The 'fortuna di Dante' among English and American poets of the twentieth century is a rich story that continues on into this millennium with new permutations and undiminished energies. Pound and Eliot canonized Dante for more than one generation of poets and readers. It was "Purgatorio" rather than "Inferno" that both Pound and Eliot valorized, its charged and affectionate poetic encounters serving as a model for key moments in both their works. [...] Yet it was two American poets, James Merrill and Charles Wright, who focused their attention and delight specifically on the "Paradiso", a much less common predilection for both poets and general readers. [...] Wright says that he writes for the dead; sometimes he seems to write as the dead. It is this premature identification with the dead, even if sporadic, which makes Wright so different from both Dante and Merrill, for whom the afterlife is ultimately an affirmation of life. Both Dante and Merrill make us understand the usefulness of the fiction of the afterlife as a way of staging a dialogue with the dead - which is what much of poetry, perhaps much of life, is about. What all three poets share is a dream of paradise as a site that emboldens the imagination.
Pasolini's literature, film, theatre, and essays engaged with Classical tragedy from the mid-1960s onwards. As Bernhard Groß shows in his paper 'Reconciliation and Stark Incompatibility: Pasolini's "Africa" and Greek Tragedy', this engagement forms a modality in Pasolini's politics of aesthetics that seeks to grasp the fundamental transformation from a rural-proletarian to a petit-bourgeois Italy. Since the mid-'60s, Pasolini was concerned with the bourgeoisie and its utopian potentials, which he sought to make productive by reading Classical tragedy as a possibility to make contradictions visible. Pasolini realized his reading of the Classical tragedy by having 'Africa' and 'Europe' - as he understood them - confront one another without mediation. By means of film analyses and film theory, Groß argues that this confrontation, especially in the films on the ancient world, generates an aesthetic place where the incompatible can unfold in the spectators' experience.
Locating authenticity in artworks that are remade (all or in part) or re-performed over time presents a unique challenge for art conservators, whose activities have traditionally been oriented toward caring for the material aspects of art objects. The paper offers a brief overview of perspectives on authenticity and discusses various theoretical models that have been developed to conceptualize how media, installation, and performance artworks are displayed and cared for over time. These include the score/performance model, the concepts of autographicity and allographicity, the concept of iteration, and authenticity as a practice. The author proposes a theoretical model based on the ritual aspects of presenting artworks, arguing that authenticity, repetition, and community participation can be reconciled within a ritual context.