“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.”
Category: Theory
[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.”
[Essay] Politics, Ideology and Comedy: John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera — Josh Mcloughlin
“Gay’s joke engages the ‘liberating’ and ‘rebellious’ potential of Freud’s theory of humour to present a radically egalitarian politics.”
[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] Foucault, Sexuality and the ‘Confessing Animal’ — Josh Mcloughlin
“Perhaps most important is not the obligation or the frequency of confession, but what Foucault calls its ‘exhaustive’ quality.”
[Essay] Flat Affect as Deconstruction: Berlant, Derrida and Tilda Swinton — Josh Mcloughlin
“Swinton’s flat affect reiterates Butler’s always-already inscribed gendered body.”
[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] Elizabethan Travel Writing and The Merchant of Venice — Josh Mcloughlin
“In the same way Edward Said describes orientalism as regulating otherness by ‘making statements about it, authorizing views about it, describing it,’ Shakespeare and Coryat fix Jewish visual and linguistic difference, the one theatrically, the other through ‘observation’”.
[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] Power, Possession and Monstrous Femininity — Victoria Griffin
“While the narrative ostensibly turns on a tale of demons, it symbolically reveals a social commentary on the state of female empowerment.”
