Vertigo has been scrutinized under the rubric of scopophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, the sadistic male gaze, objectification of the female body, “a dream substrate of waking life,” Pygmalion fantasies, the “symptomology of trauma,” the “phenomenology of falling,” “death-drive pulsations,” the “psychoanalytic object-relations theory,” and the triple threat of the imaginary Real, the symbolic Real, and the “Real Real.”
Read MoreMartin Johnson Heade, Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury Marshes, c. 1875 (detail) by Ryan Chang Green Girl: A Novel (P.S.), by Kate Zambreno, Emergency Press, 268 pp. When I’m trying to think about Lacan’s jouissance, I think of how my friends describe their trips on dimethyltriptamine, or DMT. DMT, naturally produced by our brains in…
Read MoreAnthony Weiner and Huma Abedin by Legacy Russell Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman / Giving all your love to just one man / You’ll have bad times / And he’ll have good times / Doing things that you don’t understand / But if you love him you’ll forgive him / Even though he’s…
Read MoreI call myself an anarchist. You might not use that word. But if you are skeptical of hierarchies, and are used to organising politically in more autonomous or horizontal groups, you too may have struggled with one of the most glaring contradictions we face in a capitalist society: Jobs.
Read Moreby Justin E. H. Smith Herb and Harry were the names of our two steers, the one a Hereford, the other a Holstein. They did not do much but stand, bovine and stoic, from one day to the next. They sculpted strange rolling shapes into the salt lick with their fat blue tongues, and delighted,…
Read MoreAndrola in Labyrinth, Shusei Nagaoka, 1984. Image via by Carolyn Guertin For many the term postfeminist might call to mind the vanilla pleasures of metrosexuality, webcams, online soaps, and blog culture, but, for me, a 40-something cyberfeminist scholar, curator and some time activist, the politically-minded feminist texts I work with are in fact dyed-in-the-wool postfeminist…
Read MoreOne of the points I want to bring forward today is that any reputably “global” system is open to being incorporated into uncommon usage, and that by repurposing, its own claims become examinable in a new light…
Read MoreStuart Hall has died. The enormity of the loss cannot be exaggerated. There is little point trying to measure Hall’s importance against other significant figures: he himself would have abhorred the macho individualism of such a gesture. But it has been a long time since the intellectual Left in the UK has experienced such a loss, or one more keenly feared by those who may have anticipated it.
Read MoreSacrifice of Isaac, Caravaggio, c. 1603 by Clayton Eshleman When I lived in Kyoto, I would ride my motorcycle downtown in the afternoon and work on my translations of César Vallejo’s Poemas humanos in the Yorunomado (“Night Window”) coffee shop. I had determined that a publishable version of this 1989 poem collection would constitute my…
Read MoreDelivered between January and March 1973, La société punitive was Foucault’s third annual course at the Collège de France. It is the eleventh of his thirteen courses there to be published, in what have been uniformly excellent editions under the general editorship of François Ewald and the recently deceased Alessandro Fontana.
Read MoreAmbystomas, Regina Kolyanovska, 2013 by Stephen T. Asma In his 1790 Critique of Judgment, Kant famously predicted that there would never be a “Newton for a blade of grass.” Biology, he thought, would never be unified and reduced down to a handful of mechanical laws, as in the case of physics. This, he argued, is…
Read Moreby Nadia Sels Mythology and Psychoanalysis: Uncanny Doubles “It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology?”[1] These words, addressed to Albert Einstein,[2] were written…
Read Moreby Joanna Walsh I started the Twitter hashtag #readwomen2014 around some Cartes de Voeux I made, linking the French tradition of sending New Year’s Cards with the word Voeux which mean good wishes, and also ‘vow’. I’d followed a couple of recent projects in which readers vowed to spend a period of time reading books…
Read MoreFollowing a map for a driving tour along Palm Spring’s mid-twentieth century Modernist homes and buildings, I had just peeked at Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House, the rebellious sibling from 1947 of Frank Lloyds Wright’s Fallingwater House in Pennsylvania, which was begun for the same client in 1935.
Read MoreRarely do scholars of Žižek speak of themselves or their work as Žižekian…
Read MoreI understand why Freud at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents said that he couldn’t preach an alternative to the social order as it was, even as he saw it heading for total disaster. Once he jettisons the idea of the good, it becomes almost impossible to envisage political struggle. The political thinker smuggles it back in, even when she or he accepts its explicit rejection, because some idea of the good seems to be a necessary condition for the possibility of politics. But I wrote the book believing that the abandonment of the good still left a small opening for thinking politics. And I don’t see any other way of doing it than focusing on the opposition between the good and enjoyment. Once we accept that the good is antithetical to our enjoyment, is a barrier to our enjoyment, it becomes possible to think politics beyond the good.
Read MoreJames Joyce. Photograph by C. Ruf, Zurich, c. 1918 by Eike Kronshage Gerhart Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang The German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946) wrote his first drama Vor Sonnenaufgang at the age of 27. Hauptmann, though living in the small town of Erkner, a couple of miles southeast from Berlin, was in lively exchange with the…
Read MoreFrom Dreamaphage, Jason Nelson, 2004 by Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs [W]riting is indeed an act in league with the past and the future, but it also requires that a body move through the space of the now. The gestures of writing can make the body present as well as absent; they do more than…
Read Moreby Rauan Klassnik *** anyone familiar with Penny Goring (her work, her Tumblr, her Tweets) will understand why I’m chuffed to be featuring her here in the 3rd installment of my UK Author’s Spotlight. anyone not familiar with Penny should check her out. most every link in this post will be to her Tumblr or…
Read MoreWhat your money can buy $25,000 Another year of Berfrois, free of advertisements. $25,005 Some biscuits. $24,420 Lots of biscuits, bro. $30,000 A website revamp. $35,000 A major website revamp. $76,000 Puppies for all our readers.
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