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Punk’s raptures are mystical.
Punk’s raptures are mystical.

Simon Critchley

Learning to Eat Time with One’s Ears

Philology often seems concerned with tracing origins and identifying true sources as a way of sweeping away the penumbrae of cultural ornamentation and exfoliating the accumulated dead skin of the past that hardens into decadence, at once institutional and intellectual. Its spirit is Lutheran, or Nietzschean, which amounts to the same thing when you think about it a little. So can it be with punk, which is usually reduced to a series of flattened clichés about bondage trousers, dyed hair...
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About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

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The Architecture of Disaster
The Architecture of Disaster

Ines Weizman, Eyal Weizman

Before & After

History is increasingly presented as a series of catastrophes. The most common mode of this presentation is the before-and-after image—a juxtaposition of two photographs of the same place, at different times, before and after an event has taken its toll. Buildings seen intact in a “before” photograph have been destroyed in the one “after.” Neighborhoods bustling with activity in one image are in ruins or under a layer of foulwater in the next. Deforestations, contaminations, melting icebergs and drying rivers...
  • photographic images
  • photography
  • forensic science
  • History of photography
  • war
Current Texts

Zoran Terzić

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the late nineteenth century Alfred Jarry created a prototype of the modern wannabe in his pot-bellied Père Ubu, a figure that raises entitlement to a high art. Ubu doesn’t want to be king; others urge him to it. But he is also the others. And when he does become king, CEO, or US president, he doesn’t know what it means, or if it means anything at all. He just states his claim. And so he shimmies from statement to power. And having obtained power, Ubu decerebrates the world, exposing the grounds for groundlessness, to paraphrase Ortega y Gasset. Ubu is a tautomaniac, that is, he can be explained in his own terms and is thus always in the right (being in the right is all he is). He needs no proof, but on the contrary wants “to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought” (Deleuze & Guattari)....

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