Dissent – Art
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? 2009 Author: Mark FisherThe book analyses the development and principal features of capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. Traumatic Realism 2000 Author: Michael RothbergAnalyzes the impact of historical …
Continue reading “Rethinking Realism in times of Trauma and Capitalism”
Living in the post-traumatic age – after Auschwitz – and still witnessing on a daily basis various forms of barbarism ranging from local wars, nationalisms, to classism, racism, sexism and numerous other yet-to-be-named ‘-isms’, we have reached the point when awareness of our own being has been radically shaken. Self-doubt prompted many academics to depressively …
People who have experienced the proximity of war or of the horrors of war have quickly realized that there is something in their experience which rejects thought, which rejects uttering. War is a true epistemological minefield. It is a frowning, terrifying, tyrannical Absolute swallowing and devouring all meaning. The horror given ‘by itself’ and ‘for …
Poem as witness, as transmitter of multiple meanings, coming from an unknown space, remaining beyond the reach of universal language and aesthetic forms and norms, is conditioned as an act of resistance and struggle, a protest against violence and political order – carrying the ghost of witness through time. Celan calls upon his readers to …
A public lecture on poetry by Alain Badiou at Théâtre de Vidy in Lausanne, Switzerland. For the philosopher, “poetry has always been a place of thought, a procedure of truth”, but unlike philosophy, poetry is a thought in action, which realizes in language, the singularity of the presence of sensibility.
Writing about poetry is at the same time a difficult and interesting endeavour because it requires complete freedom from the constraints of both form and methodology. Following the rules of traditional theoretical research, writing within the field of poetics often seems pretentious and somehow forced, similar to how aesthetic writing about music, dance or theatrical arts usually considers it impossible to penetrate the unknown ‘creative zone’ and to translate that moment even into simple language, let alone into an academic explanation of something that does not have the power or desire to directly address and contemplate the inexplicable.