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Skin marks us in the world
Skin marks us in the world

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira

Invented Skins

You never know how many skins you have had by having a single skin. However, this skin has an inseparable memory of the future. Its vital movement depends on this dynamic that inserts it in a specific present. Thus, if skin makes us human, it is also a set of points that mark different ways of feeling. We feel the world through the fragility of our skin. Microorganisms exist in this skin. The most human portion also contains inhuman matter...
  • aesthetics
  • Think Art
  • Brazil
  • avant-garde
  • intertextuality
Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result in a circularity that leaves the drawing of boundaries and raising of barriers solely to programming, instead of restoring them to our ethical conscience and understanding of what the social could mean today. The machine, by contrast, remains alien to any mechanical limitation—just as its inability to decide lies in the impossibility of self-calculation. The nucleus of digital culture should instead be sought where the cultural of culture is located:...

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Current Texts

Mengia Tschalaer

The sexual asylum story

Successful asylum claims generally require generating a racialist, colonialist discourse that impugns the nation-state from which the asylum seeker comes. While to impugn the asylum seeker’s place of origin may well be a necessity for the purpose of asylum, it is problematic if it serves to confirm the moral and political superiority of the West through the myth of the ideal victim. In order to avoid the cookie-cutter victimhood framework that refers to idealizations around “Us” and “Them,” Europe must adopt a reflexive approach to queer asylum that allows for recognizing its own stereotypes in regard to homosexuality, race, and gender, so as not to reproduce colonial and imperialistic narratives of vulnerability, sex, and desire through Eurocentric asylum regimes.

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  • queer theory
  • gender
  • performativity
  • migration
  • identity

 

Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics
Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics

Marie-Luise Angerer (ed.), Bernd Bösel (ed.), ...

Timing of Affect

For many years now, the time of affect has been a major issue in the humanities, sciences, art and media. Affect stands here for feelings, emotions, processes of affection, for movements of the bodies, for a missing time – with one word: for a broad range of ideas and discursive contexts and histories. Timing of Affect assembles contributions from different disciplines – from philosophy to film, music, sound, media and art, through to technology, computation and neurology – to explore...
  • affects
  • media theory
  • body
  • epistemology
  • aesthetics
Current Texts

Andreas L. Hofbauer

The yoke of being, noteworthy dis-position

It wasn’t nature and its dangers that forced domestication and enabled the economic shrine. Temple and funerary cult, sacrifice and distribution of the meat—for Homer all sacrificial animals were still hieria, holy creatures—and the containment of wildness led to symbolic and socio-cultural change, which became the vector and motor of sedentary, food-producing communities. It wasn’t sheep, goats, or cattle that were domesticated first; it was the zoon logon echon itself that bowed to the self-created yoke of the cult. Why, we don’t know. Beyond this it’s important that unlike plants only very few species of animal can be domesticated, and that this shouldn’t be confused with taming. Economic significance develops as an epiphenomenon. It transforms from possible human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to the distribution of meat in early “Greek” antiquity, then to the obeloi (skewers with varying amounts of meat, as tokens for the priests’ or judges’ portion; even...

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  • economization
  • money
  • ethnology
  • anthropology