“Bowers’s is an ongoing, concerted project, anchored in the basic technique of exploring ideas by rewriting over songs and themes but retaining traces and echoes. These vestiges, distilled or distorted, become detachable gestures, mobilised and reprised in later works, taken forward and upward like a Hegelian Geist in Bowers’s ongoing musical dialectic.”
Category: theory
[Essay] To You — Christopher Impiglia
“A long time, one hundred years. A long time too since this first English edition, bought by my father at auction, was published: a half-century. Fifty years of annotations illuminating it, including his and my own.”
[Essay] A Walking Skeleton: Illusions of Voice — Michael Sutton
“What is human consciousness if not the internal voice, the connotations and denotations of language, voices diseased and voices subsumed, god voices, voices of creation, from brain to page to screen to brain to page.”
[Essay] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk and the ‘Veil of Race’ — Tia Byer
“For Du Bois, the abolition of slavery may have freed black people from bondage, but the Reconstruction era that followed served only to disempower black people and perpetuate racial conflict.”
[Essay] Describing the Surface: David Foster Wallace and Postcritical Reading — Nathan Moreau
“David Foster Wallace fucked his students, fucked his audience, fucked his reader. David Foster Wallace abused women.”
[Essay] On Prefaces in Kant, Hegel & Nietzsche — Josh Mcloughlin
“Prefaces in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche construct ‘a sense of time’, a conception of the history of philosophy unfolding in the dyadic interplay of crisis and critique, in order to both ‘indicate’ and ‘intensif[y] the end of an epoch’”.
[Essay] Painting Anxiety: Berthe Morisot’s ‘Julie Daydreaming’ — Connie Sjödin
“Lit from the viewer’s direction, the painting invents a singular viewpoint and even predicts the camera flash, freezing the image against ‘time’s relentless melt’, as in Susan Sontag’s evocative phrase.”
[Essay] The Teratologists — Louis Armand
“Post-war nuclear technologies represented the first instance in which direct transformation or even control of the planetary environment came into view as a scientifically achievable proposition.”
[Essay] ‘…And now I am cast as a ghost’: Spectre(s) of India in Midnight’s Children — Seamus McGinley-Hughes
“The text delves into the recesses of primordial memory, cuts up and rearranges history and figures nation as dream; memory, history, and nation inform, antagonise, and haunt each other.”
[Essay] Boris the Ditherer: Covid-19, Sovereignty, and the State of Exception — Josh Mcloughlin
“An abject figure, Johnson will serve as an object-lesson in political impotence, a catastrophic failure of the decision-making imperative that is supposed to underpin sovereignty.”
[Essay] Metaphysical Detectives: Guilt, Grace, and Gaze in the World of Twin Peaks — Cam Scott
“Lynch and Frost are especially masterful where this feeling of estrangement is concerned.”
[Essay] Bacon’s Hysteria, van Gogh’s Shoes: Deleuze and the Problem of Affect — Josh Mcloughlin
“Bacon’s paintings insist, with some violence, that affects are not sensational properties but exist in relation to an outside—whether other bodies, as Deleuze concedes, a Barthesian ‘ongoingness’ that connects body to atmosphere, or a primordial being-in-the-world, as in Heidegger’s Dasein.”
[Essay] ‘Becoming-Animal’: Idle Bodies in Marie Darrieussecq and Lucien Freud — Susannah Farrell
“In Darrieussecq and Freud, the possibility of becoming is tied to the in-human and to nothingness, so that idleness and animality, no longer nihilistic, render affirmation.”
[Essay] Luciano Berio and Fragmentary Composition — Jack Sheen
“Music’s ontological status has always been ambiguous due its lack of materiality, in contrast to physical artworks such as paintings, sculptures, and to some extent, films, whose unique, material appearance and existence differentiates them from other artworks and copies.”
[Essay] Unamerican Fictions: All that is Solid Melts into Weird — Louis Armand
“Thor Garcia’s novel is a swan song for an amnesiac America’s ‘innocence regained’, afforded by the supposed victory over the communist USSR; a kind of ‘fear and loathing’ in the age of hyperreality.”
[Essay] On the One-Liner: Badiou, Hölderlin, and the Joke — Josh Mcloughlin
“The one-liner ‘ruptures’ language, disclosing the essentially equivocating character of the condition for the possibility of the joke itself.”
[Essay] Caché: Colonial Misappropriation or Postcolonial Masterpiece? — Joseph Barker
“Haneke provides a masterful critique of contemporary postcolonial reality.”
[Essay] On the Aesthetic, Psychoanalysis and Dasein — Josh Mcloughlin
“Like theory, Dasein emerges as the allegory of an allegory.”
