An Eclipse of the Screen

The film script is a challenging entity for criticism. Its destiny is to disappear, its function to contribute to the production of a screen of image, music, and voice, behind which it dissolves and is forgotten. Film scripts are in principle not meant to be read. Nor are they meant to be inscribed directly into our archives and libraries. They are transient and ‘functional’.

The Innate Plasticity of Bodies and Minds

In recent years, concepts of plasticity and epigenetics have gained currency in different areas of the life sciences. In this article, we wish to ask primarily how plasticity and epigenetics relate to some notions in biology that they are often taken to oppose, such as genetic determination, genetic programme, and innateness.

Pumping Honey

For the duration of the one hundred days of the documenta 6 in 1977, Joseph Beuys made honey flow from this slightly awkward pit, the well of a destructive esprit d’escalier, this site of a sovereignty evacuated many times over. Beuys, that is, installed his fable of the bees at a purposefully vacuous palace where courtly culture had surrendered to the modern museum, but more specifically even, at the supplemental, feigned, then bombed-out site of popular sovereignty.

Warburg’s Ghost

One of the most striking paradigm shifts of the last decades in the humanities has been the replacement of a method of knowledge rooted in historicist temporal constructions with one based on spatial models. There is perhaps no better example of this movement from the temporalization to the spatialization of knowledge than the adoption of the atlas as a taxonomic term in cultural criticism.

Claims of Existence between Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics

I will focus on the story of Ali, a transgender activist friend, who was fighting against transphobia, his illness, and eventual death — during the 2013 public uprisings in Istanbul. Focusing on both the historic moment and this personal story, I ask: what happens when bodies assemble to protest, resist, and lay claim to an-other vision of liveable death, as well as life?

Hegel and the Ad-venture of the Totality

Althusser’s criticism of Hegel’s conception of totality can be traced throughout all his works, starting from his early dissertation, written in 1947 and entitled Du contenu dans la pensée de G.W.F. Hegel. The Hegelian totality, understood here mainly as a historical achievement, is analyzed and questioned with the purpose of disclosing the peculiar relationship established between its form and content.

Beginnings

Wholes are said to be more than the sum of their parts. This ‘more’ contains both a promise and a threat. When different elements — which might be individuals, cultures, disciplines, or methods — form a whole, they not only join forces but also generate a surplus from which the parts can benefit. Being part of a whole is a way to acquire meaning; and having a part in the whole is to have an enlarged agency. But wholes are also more powerful than the sum of their parts.

[Backmatter]

Bibliography / Notes on Contributors / Index / Volumes in the Series Cultural Inquiry

Differently Queer

This article explores the relationship between temporality, aesthetics, and sexuality in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Petrolio and Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli. Both novels mobilize a form of temporality that resists a sense of linear and teleological development and that instead appears contorted, inverted, suspended and thereby allows for the articulation of queer desires and pleasures that cannot be inscribed in normative logics of completion, progression, or productivity.

Sexual Ghosts and the Whole of History

There is a complex historical dimension to desire. Desire can never be isolated from history, nor can history be isolated from desire. Yet for Fredric Jameson, who urges us to ‘always historicize’, desire is of little help when we want to historicize. A historiography that draws on the fascination with history is therefore always suspect of giving a false account of history in its totality. Could an entanglement of pleasure and pain be a way to come to terms with desire in historiography?