For How To Sleep Faster we were looking for contributions that focused on The Body in Pain. The title is taken from the book by Elaine Scarry, which examines pain with regard to ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ the world. Thinking about Guantanamo Bay as the emblem of the time we’ve come of age, thinking about the political use and the political meaning of pain inflicted: war, torture, natural disaster and disaster ...
Andreas Petrossiants talks to author Ciarán Finlayson about his book, Perpetual Slavery, published by Floating Opera Press in 2023.
In Perpetual Slavery, Ciarán Finlayson investigates the relationship of art to freedom in the work of Cameron Rowland and Ralph Lemon, who both utilize imagery of labor haunted and structured by the historical experience of slavery. Finlayson suggests that these two artists’ work overcomes the dichotomy between the recording of history and ...
In Duppies, D.S. Marriott writes a poetry of grime, the London street music, one that is “late shift, zero hour.” Mixing lyric tonality with grime’s aggression, grit, and speed, this is a coruscating study of the racial politics of austerity. And it is an erudite lyric, one attentive to the continuing legacies of slavery, how this history shapes and defines everything from the law to the understanding of who or what is human.
In Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1992 dark comedy Hyènes, an extravagantly wealthy woman returns to her poor village seeking revenge. Her target is the man who humiliated her in her youth by getting her pregnant and abandoning her. It is not only death that she wants, but also justice. She will not murder the man by her own hand, as Charles Tonderai Mudede explains in this issue, but instead asks the ...
Division is the characteristic habit of humanity: ēthos anthropōi daimōn, as Heraclitus had it. Demons for division, we divide and are divided. Taken over by divisions within ourselves, the demonic appears as the divided self. Wherever the self realizes an apparent struggle, whenever one is possessed by another, the demon is present. Possession dramatizes self-production as a fight for local control. Demonology is the science of these heteronomous selves, these ...
As we study the foundations of what we think we know, we might ask: What do we truly know? Mussolini’s regime banned not only words but five entire letters of the alphabet. In 2018, both “immortality” and “migration” were blocked indefinitely in web searches in China. How many letters or words, or even numbers, have been banned in the past? And among those, how many were never remembered again?
In this ...
The interview with Rolando Vázquez published in this Quadern Portàtil, Decolonial Aesthesis and the Museum, takes as its starting point a central plank of decolonial thinking: the fact that there is no history of Western civilization without slavery. Based on this premise, Vázquez distinguishes decolonial aesthesis from modern aesthetics, modern aesthetics being understood as the order governing the senses and the arts in modern times, and decolonial aesthesis as the ...
Humanity now faces the possibility that it will become extinct over the next few decades or so. This is not simply a reality about the biological fate of the species; it also raises the prospect of thought’s own extinction. But what does it mean for thought that it, too, might disappear?
Thought’s possible disappearance shatters the assumption, at work across all the institutions and disciplines of the West, that one version ...
The essays “Ancestral Claims” (2022), “The Glitter Within” (2022) and “An Earthquake is Coming” (2023), by the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and the filmmaker Arjuna Neuman and now translated for the first time into Spanish, share a common background: decolonisation as the only relevant ethical principle of our time. This principle is reflected in their way of making films, for example, questioning the eye – a privileged organ for ...
This newspaper was produced as part of the exhibition Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum, 2021, and continues the exploration of the film on how structures of power (colonial, capital, patriarchal etc) utilise and perpetuate categorisation and difference to break inter-subjective bonds and modes of collectivity, as well as authorize violence against the earth.
This website collects anonymized analytics data only. No personal information is recorded, stored, or transferred to third parties. Read our privacy policy to learn more. Accept