“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.”
Category: Theory
[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”
[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] Caché: Colonial Misappropriation or Postcolonial Masterpiece? — Joseph Barker
“Haneke provides a masterful critique of contemporary postcolonial reality.”
[Essay] Race, Ethnicity and Queer Theology — Tom Hillsdon
“The theology of queer black scholars has moved the voices and experiences of queer black people from the margins to the centre.”
[Essay] On Affinity — Charles Bliss
“Neither animate nor inanimate, we vitalise these abstract forms like Dr Frankenstein.”
[Essay] Madness and Jouissance: Hölderlin, Benjamin and Hopkins — Josh Mcloughlin
“In Hopkins, the caesura constitutes the relationship between utterances, gives form to Gedichte, and reveals the intimate link between madness and jouissance.”
[Essay] Subversive Cinema from Waters to Carax — Louis Armand
“Where cinema was, ego will be.”
[Essay] Queer Time in Woolf and Wilde — Josh Mcloughlin
“Muñoz’s theory is based on a flawed understanding of Heideggerian philosophy, because a truly ‘unbounded’ ontology would reject the very ‘equipmental’ being Heidegger attacks – and the utopianism Muñoz mistakenly celebrates.”
[Essay] Fade to Black: Film Noir and The Fatality of Genre — Louis Armand
“Reminiscent of Hemingway’s assault on overwritten, adjectival prose, noir is short on metaphysics and restricts its action to the surface of the image.”
[Essay] In Suspense of the Real: Cronenberg, Gilliam and Lynch — Louis Armand
“Concerned with the status of the ‘Real,’ these films are necessarily both self-reflexive and projective, folding the transcendental loop back on itself – from a dialectics of the ‘fable’ to the entropic spiral of the ‘image'”.
[Essay] Marooned Between Dreams and Reality: Surrealist Satire on Film — Jacob Bernard-Banton
“Surrealism’s preoccupation with the subconscious, and the gulf between dreams and reality, is writ large in Barton Fink’s implied insomnia.”
[Essay] Floyd Mayweather: The Willing ‘Bastard’ of Boxing — Michael McGinley-Hughes
“His unmarked face, a benefit of his unparalleled defence, became the symbol of the audience’s disdain.”
[Essay] Pornoentropia — Louis Armand
“The nakedness of the image is always an interstice – something into which the visualization of desire is constantly projected in a type of pornographic monomania.”
[Essay] The Mythology of Starbucks — Maddy Howard
“Just as Barthes says the texture of steak, its sanguine juiciness, seem to be magically health-giving, the foamy, insubstantial milkiness of a cappuccino or latte has its own special sublimity.”
New Critique 