“I’ve invented nothing; I’ve simply been the secretary of my sensations” — Emil Cioran
Category Archives: Art
ambivalence, flirting games, translating, seeing you seeing me
Gayatri Spivak on J.M. Coetzee:
“It is this particular ambivalence in poems that seems exciting for this translator to access, as she makes the mistake of thinking the named subject is she. Thus the ambivalence seems to offer a codicil to that bit in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians that she had so liked: how does the other see me? Identity’s last secret. Coetzee describes the Magistrate describing his deciphering effort thus:
‘So I continue to swoop and circle around the irreducible figure of the girl, casting one net of meaning after another over her… What doe she see? The protecting wings of a guardian albatross or the black shape of a coward crow afraid to strike when its prey yet breathes?’ ”
An Aesthetic Education In The Era of Globalization, pg. 273
2017 ASPECT Conference Call for Papers
My doctoral program has released the call for papers for its annual conference — see below:
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Across disciplinary boundaries, the 2017 ASPECT graduate conference seeks to address articulations of aesthetics, politics, and ethics within contested temporalities. Graduate students of any level and irrespective of disciplinary affiliation are encouraged to submit abstracts of approximately 300 words based on papers that engage topics related to artistic, aesthetic, social, political, philosophical, cultural, theoretical, ethical, and critical concerns. Trajectories of inquiry may include theoretical, critical, empirical, policy-oriented, and performative explorations of the conference theme. Particularly, we invite papers that engage issues of interdisciplinarity.
Possible paper topics may include but are not limited to: the body and politics; critical approaches to technology and aesthetics; ecological and environmental issues; gender and sexuality; geopolitics and international relations; identity politics; time and the city; marginalized knowledges; moral and political philosophy; new materialities; writing and history; postcolonialism; post-Marxism and ideology; race; religion and secularity; critical security studies; and violence and representation.
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Confirmed Plenary Speaker:
Dr. Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Abstracts of 300 words are due by Friday, December 2, 2016. We are using the OCS system which will require you to create an account and upload your abstract to this website.
For more information, email aspect@vt.edu.
masking
“Magic is bloody untruth, but in it domination is not yet disclaimed by transforming itself into a pure truth underlying the world which it enslaves. The magician imitates demons; to frighten or placate them he makes intimidating or appeasing gestures. Although his task was impersonation he did not claim to be made in the image of the invisible power, as does civilized man, whose modest hunting ground then shrinks to the unified cosmos, in which nothing exists but prey. Only when made in such an image does man attain the identity of the self which cannot be lost in identification with the other but takes possession of itself once and for all as an impenetrable mask.” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment)
“Whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable. Might not nothing less than the opposite , be the proper disguise for the shame of a god? A questionable question: it would be odd if some mystic had not risked something to that effect in his mind…A man whose sense of shame has some profundity encounters his destinies and delicate decisions, too, on paths which few ever reach and of whose mere existence his closest intimates must not know: his mortal danger is concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life. Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and for burial in silence and who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends. And supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there – and that this is well. Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow , interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.” — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
(image by Aldous Massie)
“To Those Born Later,” Bertolt Brecht
[I]
Truly, I live in dark times!
The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead
suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs
has simply not yet had
The terrible news.
What kind of times are they, when
a talk about trees is almost a crime
because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
who are in need?
It is true I still earn my keep
but, believe me, that is only an accident. Nothing
I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
by chance I’ve been spared. (If my luck breaks, I am lost).
They say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad you have it!
but how can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat
from the starving, and
my glass of water belongs to one dying of thirst?
And yet I eat and drink.
I would also like to be wise.
in the old books it says what wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and to live out
your brief time without fear
also to get along without violence
to return good for evil
not to fulfill your desires but to forget them
is accounted wise.
All this I cannot do:
truly, I live in dark times.
[II]
To the cities I came in a time of disorder
that was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
and then I joined in their rebellion.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn’t care for much for love
and for nature’s beauties I had little patience.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
my speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
but without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That’s what I hoped.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
that’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
[III]
You who will come to the surface
from the flood that’s overwhelmed us and drowned us all
must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
that you’ve not had to face:
Days when we were used to changing countries
more often than shoes,
through the war of the classes despairing
that there was only injustice and no outrage.
Even so we realised
hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
could never be friendly ourselves.
And in the future when no longer
do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
look back on us with indulgence.