A. A curious sight in Chicago: a revolving door, center outfitted with a glassed-in display of carefully arranged products, none related to the other — POM, NIKE, DIOR. That one is predisposed to a mock-circumambulation in entering and exiting testifies to the contemporary unification of market and urban spaces — that is, the introduction of [...]
"Whence the love of ruin. And the fact that the scopic pulsion, voyeurism itself, is always on the lookout for the originary ruin. A narcissistic melancholy, a memory—in mourning—of love itself. How to love anything other than the possibility of ruin? Than an impossible totality?"— Jacques Derrida “What impressive moments we’ve lived tonight! Rise up, [...]
لتارن و ريم —The ethical dilemma raised by an Israeli court's decision to sentence a Palestinian man eighteen months in prison for "rape by deception" after he lied to a Jewish woman about his race and had consensual sex with her is not one over rights or equality, but over the legitimacy of race as [...]
"They may call it the 'Land of the Pure,' but Pakistan turns out to be anything but," says Fox News correspondent Kelli Morgan in her article on Pakistan, the "world's leader," she claims, "in online searches for pornographic material." Now, this idea is far from new: such discourse is but an accent to the common tale [...]
"Boredom of the ceremonial scenes depicted in historical paintings, and boredom in general. Boredom and museum. Boredom and battle scenes." — Proust The museum is the accumulation of ruins and culture, culture in ruins, which is to say in one word, history. There, ambiguity reigns: one is at a loss as to the whether all [...]
"If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing." — Michel Foucault, What Is an Author? "In our societies, characters dominate our perceptions. Our attention tends to be arrested [...]
Cinema can have love and often at first sight. But justice is something cinema cannot frame. It is always outside the frame. Cinema is inept also in that it cannot keep up with the devaluation of time and the shrinking of space. The very industrial revolution that gave rise to cinema is destroying both. The [...]
The spectacles of shame in Ki-Yong Park's Camel(s) (2002) and Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964) are majestically constructed, animated by an aesthetic quality of restraint that deploys as its artistic technology negative space—that is, the interval between, or what the Japanese call ma (間) and Eastern philosophy understands more broadly as śūnyatā. On this basis, shame [...]
