“I feel a pleasure similar to Lisa Robertson’s when I read historical fiction. Maybe Cusk is right. Maybe it is pornography; maybe that’s why I like it.”
Category: Theory
[Review] Tongue of blade ‡ Ears of mud (Cap Records) — Josh Mcloughlin
“The collection’s great achievement lies in framing conceptual questions and theoretical topoi in aesthetic terms, thus affording a critical alternative to scientific and linguistic approaches to enduring problems surrounding the relationship between language and music.”
[Essay] Empire after Empire: The Endless Desert of Settler Indigenisation in Nomadland — Patrick Turner
“Ultimately, Nomadland’s affective impact, and the sense of authenticity felt in McDormand’s performance should be understood within a colonialist standard of authenticity rooted in the indigenisation of whiteness – and the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty.”
[Essay] Tom Whyman and the Philosophy of Hope — Josh Mcloughlin
“Whyman replaces Benjamin’s pessimism with realism whilst adopting Adorno’s ‘standpoint of redemption’ to radically critique the present, situating hope firmly within the bounds of possibility without diminishing its transformative potential.”
[Essay] Like a Ghost Touched Your Heart: Burial’s Sonic Hauntology — Edward Campbell-Rowntree
“The sounding relationships between the samples of Burial’s world and the those of the hardcore continuum express many things: a sense of distance and removal from the ‘real’ world; a feeling of loneliness and melancholia inspired by urban life; a malaise at the death of rave.”
[Essay] TV Bra for Living Sculpture With(out) Charlotte Moorman — Eloise Crist
“As TV Bra is a record of Moorman’s corporeality, its reception without Moorman is burdened by the complications of mourning.”
[Essay] Boris the Katechon — Josh Mcloughlin
“Johnson, like the archetypal Pauline katechon, has been outmatched and overwhelmed by a crisis he has proved damningly incapable and incompetent to restrain, and which will further darken his already wretched political legacy.”
[Essay] Splendid Uselessness — Alexandre Leskanich
“At its best knowledge facilitates the emancipation of the human mind from narcissism, conformity, bigotry, intolerance, and hatred. All the more disturbing, then, is the grim spectacle that greets those engaged in its manufacture.”
[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] 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”
[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
“In Bacon’s hysterical painting and Proust’s literature of memory, sensation works to peel apart affects and bodies, unmooring physical entities from emotional resonances, and ensuring that Deleuze’s attempt to grasp an ‘interminable presence’ remains frustrated”
New Critique 