This isn't content. Nor is it personal branding. It's a blog. Like in 2007. But without pretending it's for someone else and not for me.
Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Représentation d'Armide de Lully à l'Académie royale de musique, 1761. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Translations from the French are my own unless otherwise noted. Paris, 1752. Jean-Philippe Rameau is nearly seventy years old and has spent two decades as France's most important composer. He has tried to found harmonic theory on scientific grounds, written operas that fill…
René Magritte, The Human Condition (1933). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. I think: capitalism built the modern subject around the idea of productivity. Modern subject = productive subject (of value, labor, work, discourse, knowledge). Now that same capitalism, through its own development, generated the technology that puts that foundation in crisis. Hegel likes this. Freud would have…
Andy Warhol, Heart (1979). The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “Writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers—painters too, even chance readers—may find that they are Spinozists; indeed, such a thing is more likely for them than for professional philosophers. It is a matter of one's practical conception of the 'plan.' It is not that one may be a Spinozist without knowing it. Rather, there is a…
Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918). MoMA, New York. In Red Pill: A novel ( Knopf, 2020 ), Hari Kunzru composes a particularly sharp image of one of the possible futures most consistent with trends already underway. The diagnosis is filtered through the gaze of the novel's narrator-protagonist, a New York–based writer who arrives on a fellowship at a residency at the…
M. C. Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. I. We live in the age of algorithmic recommendation. Systems that filter and rank the information we consume daily are constantly present. Digital platforms such as social networks, streaming services, or online stores offer personalized content based on our data and previous behaviors. This omnipresence…
I. In 2017, the studio Kinema Citrus adapted Made in Abyss , Akihito Tsukushi's manga, into an anime. The story follows the descent of a young girl (Riko) and an android (Reg) into the Abyss, a vast, enigmatic place filled with secrets. As each episode unfolds, the series begins to resonate with other images and figures. From Virgil to Freud, from Dante's Inferno to the Underground of Undertale ,…
Caspar David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea (1808-10). Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. (These notes share a common thread that could be described as a crossing between Lacan and Lefort. I didn't intend it that way, but while preparing some thoughts for a recent talk on democracy, I realized my writing kept circling around those two references. From Lacan, the notion of constitutive lack. From…
Frank Cadogan Cowper, Lucrezia Borgia Reigns in the Vatican in the Absence of Pope Alexander VI (ca. 1910). Tate Gallery, London. I. Pierre Legendre writes that the taboo of incest is the founding prohibition and the structural condition of the necessary division between the private and the political, without which neither law nor State can exist. 1 When that boundary becomes blurred, there is no…
Caravaggio, Narcissus (1597-1599). Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome. We live in a time saturated with exposure, where the self is a product. How we present ourselves, what we represent, how visible and opinable our identity is. If the 1920s were les années folles , the 2020s might well be called les années moi-moi : the me-me years. Let's pretend we're writing for the Oxford Dictionary:…
Power of the Almsivi, official illustration of The Elder Scrolls: Legends (Bethesda Softworks, 2018). Шитое белыми нитками (Sewn with white thread), poster from the Soviet transition (ca. 1985-1991). In Russian, the phrase refers to something poorly made, crude, clumsy, fraudulent, fake. In the lore of The Elder Scrolls , “ mantling ” is the process by which someone takes on the role (or the…