Anna Galkina, Untitled, 2013. Collage courtesy of the artist

Against The Gift Of Interpretation

Written by Rebecca Lamarre, 11.06.2013

I address you all as a friend who has been burdened with the responsibility to speak above others.

I will say to you, my friends, that whoever has ambition to be heard in a crowd must press and squeeze and thrust and climb with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them.  To this end, the philosopher’s way, in all ages, has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.

Therefore, towards the just performance of this great work, there exist but three wooden machines for the use of those orators who desire to talk much without interruption. 

These are: the pulpit, the ladder and the stage.

After conversing with Jonathan Swift, I have chosen, in order to emphasize my minor short comings so that you will not notice my larger ones, to employ the use of all three of these wooden machines; the lectern being the secular cousin of the pulpit.  The purpose of this activity is to both elaborate and enact what I am calling a practice of reading.

[take out ladder and stand on it behind lectern]

 

Levinas' Call of Duty (4)

Written by Federico Campagna, 13.05.2013
The Other
 
At the basis of our relationship with the Other, according to Emmanuel Levinas and to Judaeo-Christian religion, is the injunction ‘Thou shalt not kill.’
Upon encountering the Other – any human other – his/her face communicates to us something that far exceeds the limits of our rational understanding. Through his/her face, the Other reveals him/herself as an abyss of infinite mystery, and as the place in which God shows Himself as the essence of Otherness. Such an encounter comes as a trauma to the person who is faced by the Other. The Other forces us to accept that our dreams of individual autonomy were always ill-founded, and that we always carry within ourselves an infinite responsibility towards the Other-God – a responsibility that haunts us forever, to the point of being a true persecution. We are ruptured inside by the presence and the demands of the Other, yet we cannot fully comprehend him/her. We are bound to the Other, yet this burden is always excessively heavy for us to carry. The injunction ‘though shalt not kill’ reveals our most immediate reaction in the face of the revolution that the Other brings into our lives: our desire to kill the Other, so to free ourselves from our responsibility towards him/her and to be able to pursue our dreams of perfect autonomy.
 

Rome Total Kierkegaard

Written by Federico Campagna, 09.05.2013
Fleeing
 
As my troops push their assault forward, the phalanx of the Seleucids opens its ranks. It is a matter of seconds. My camera angle is low, close to the back of my soldiers, and when the elephants charge I am as taken aback as my men. It’s pure chaos. I pull back my camera angle back towards the sky, where us Gods belong. I order the shaken Triarii cohort to fall on the right side of the elephants and to attack them from the flanks. A red square framing a white flag starts flashing next to their insignia. In vain, I order them again to flank the elephants. It’s too late. They have lost their cold Roman composure. They are fleeing, oblivious to the world and to the orders of their God.
 
I watch them running through the pixelated foliage of a nearby forest. I am no longer able to click on them to select the survivors. I forget the rest of the battle, still raging on the dry planes of inner Anatolia, and I lower my camera angle to follow the flight of my men.
They failed me, when all they were for was to obey me. What are they feeling right now?
Looking at their square calves propelling their run towards the end of the screen, I realize the truth.
They fear and tremble, but they have never been more true to me than now.
 

Abandoning Nationality and Superstition

Written by Nathan Witt, 06.05.2013
What is the logic behind trying to abandon one form of judgementalism by adopting another form of judgementalism?

If you take a city such as Salonika or Smyrna, you will find there five or six communities each of which has its own memories and which have almost nothing in common. Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common; and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew,’ or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century. There are not ten families in France that can supply proof of their Frankish origin, and any such proof would anyway be essentially flawed, as a consequence of countless unknown alliances, which are liable to disrupt any genealogical system.(1)

Ernest Renan. What is a Nation? Lecture given at the Sorbonne, 1882.

This is an idea inspired by a comment about Cairo’s City of the Dead as a place where the goal is to celebrate the absence of judgment, which is to be left for God(2) and, in many other people’s case, in God’s absence. Such places are not necessarily endemic to the religious classification of death and are also not endemic to the culture of idol worship. This text is nothing but an attempt to try and encourage a similar aspiration and joy towards an abandonment of judgementalism in social spaces without discussing participation. The example of the migrancy of people from the countryside to the necropolis not being borne out of a desire to participate but out of a socio political pragmatism and human despair or other psychologically inconsistent motives.

Barbaritannia - the inhumanity of Chris Grayling's prison reform

Written by Federico Campagna, 30.04.2013
When the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling recently announced his intention to reform the British  prison system, I couldn’t have agreed more. British prisons are badly in need of reform. Since their ‘privatisation’ – that is, the wholesale of buildings and inmates to G4S, – prisons on the island have become even more overcrowded, insulting of the dignity of the inmates, and completely oblivious of any rehabilitating function that they might be supposed to have. Much like in Britain’s motherland, the US, the prison system seems to have reverted to the gruesome pantomime of a Medieval vision of hell on earth. While the British government keeps waving the supposed superiority of Western culture uber alles, its prison system has completely lost touch with those Enlightenment ideas of human dignity, that have contributed so much to the most decent aspects of our Western civilisation.
 
One would have expected Grayling to meditate cautiously on his role, possibly to read a book or two by people like Beccaria or Voltaire – Foucault might be too much for a Tory MP, – and finally to burst out in a beautiful announcement on the priority of human dignity over everything, even over the stiff rigour of the law. One would have expected Grayling to comment on the despicable regression of British prisons towards a Victorian model of workhouses, or on the highly dangerous passage of the most controversial of all State powers – the power to kidnap and enslave civilians, legally defined as ‘imprisonment’ – from the hands of the State to those of a private commercial company. In short, one would have expected Grayling to follow the claim of the Latin poet Terence that ‘I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me’ – and to act consequently.
 

Confessions of a Troll - master-slave dialectic in the times of Facebook

Written by Paolo Mossetti, 29.04.2013

1. Self-profiling.

A few days ago a friend of mine wrote to me: "I heard that you had a Facebook fight with ****, a rising star of Italian journalism. Be careful, it might be dangerous for your career."

My friend was right.  I don’t know how many times I told myself: be more cautious, post a comment only when necessary. Click "like" only when it's not compromising. Avoid acid and polemical language.

It never worked. Most often, compulsion prevailed.

My only cold comfort is to know that I am not the only one afflicted by this weak spot.  Another friend of mine once confessed: "When I read most online newspapers I get a surge of anger... Sometimes I can't help to speak out my mind, to do sharing, sometimes to insult. But for my job it's embarrassing. Sometimes I create fake profiles. Or I keep myself anonymous."

Oysters!

Written by Robert Prouse, 24.04.2013
If 'the world is our oyster' why are they so expensive? Shakespeare's formulation, that a poor man denied money may open the world like an oyster instead, takes on a very different meaning when the cheap food of the poor becomes the delicacy of the rich. Perhaps the shifting fortunes of the oyster are simply the most obvious example of a culinary and cultural refinement which has seen the pots of the many emptied on to the plates of the few. The crumbs from the master's table, 'authentic' and 'honest', have been plucked from the mouths of the poor who have been sold instead a pale imitation of the original loaf.
 
Oysters comfortably adorn the plates of the highest haute cusine and the stalls of the saltiest salt-of-the earth artisans, yet it is no secret that they were also once plentiful fare for the English poor. Originally popular with England's Roman invaders who set slaves to work collecting the delicacy from the shores of the English Channel, these native delicacies were transported as far as the empire's capital. After the Romans left oysters fell out of favour but were popular again as early as the 8th Century and by the 1400's were consumed in great numbers by both the rich and poor. For the less well-off they would appear on 'fish days', during which no meat was eaten and which fell as often as Wednesday, Friday and Saturday in order to bolster both the fishing industry and the number of seafaring men available to the royal navy.
 
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