On Infinity in Miranda July’s ‘Me and You and Everyone We Know’
In a strange kind of way, Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know is about two competing notions of "forever" in relation to love.
philosophy
First Tragedy, Then Farce, Then What?
Riffing off Marx's riff on Hegel on history, art historian and critic Hal Foster contemplates political culture and cultural politics in the age of Donald Trump in What Comes After Farce?
We Must Not Mean What We Say: On Godard’s ‘Le Petit Soldat’
While philosopher Stanley Cavell endeavors to show that we must mean what we say, Godard’s Bruno Forestier of Le Petit Soldat suggests that we simply cannot and must not mean what we say.
Stepping into the Phantasmagoric Otherwise with Karel Zeman
While all films project a world that might be, certain films and certain filmmakers, like Karel Zeman, come closer than others in bringing to the surface the underlying phantasmagoric essence of cinema.
Shahidha Bari’s ‘Dressed’ Is a Well-packed Suitcase
Reading Dressed is rather like the experience of wandering through a department store or a friend's well-curated closet.
Parasites: Montesquieu on the End of Civic Virtue in a Republic
Bong Joon-ho's scathing Parasite reflects Montesquieu's critique that the decline of civic virtue causes great social inequality, which then incurs greed, envy, and violence.
Defragmenting Bodies: Yoko Ono’s ‘Fly’ at 50
In her 1970 avant-garde short Fly, Yoko Ono works within the same parameters as directors like Alfred Hitchcock or Takashi Miike. Yet, she posits the intermixture of her celluloid images as reconstructive effort, not a destructive one.
“I’ll See You Later”: Repetition and Time in Almodóvar’s ‘All About My Mother’
There are mythical moments in Almodóvar's All About My Mother. We are meant to register repetition in the story as something wonderfully strange, a connection across the chasm of impossibility.
Does Inclusivity Mean That Everyone Does the Same Thing?
What is the meaning of diversity in today's world? Russell Jacoby raises and addresses some pertinent questions in his latest work, On Diversity.
‘Egress’ Mourns and Celebrates the Life and Work of Theorist Mark Fisher
Mark Fisher's insights are often obscured in Matt Colquhoun's personal/academic hybrid, Egress, which ranges far and wide over philosophy and pop culture.
Love at a Socially-Isolating Distance
In one sense, life in the time of Coronavirus clarifies an essential element of love: love always occurs at an ontological distance.
Nazism Repackaged? A Closer Look at the “Fascist Subtext” of ‘Attack on Titan’
Many fantasy writers have incorporated the visual footprint of the Third Reich into their fictional worlds. Few, however, have done so as extensively as the creator of Attack on Titan, who revisited this terrible chapter of history not to find inspiration for a fearsome antagonist, but to excavate the divisive ideas that lay buried there.
