culture

Paul Connerton - How Societies Remember

Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge UP, 1989.
Connerton’s main question in this book is “how the memory of groups” is “conveyed and sustained”(1) which can be explained in the dimension of both political power and psychological mechanism. For him, collective memory of society (social memory) is organized and legitimated through two social activities: commemorative ceremonies… »

Laura U. Marks - The Skin of the Film

Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film, Duke UP, 2000.
If cinema is an audiovisual medium in nature, why does Laura Marks look for nonaudiovisual sense experience in cinema? Of course, the films and videos she tries to examine are not just the general cinemas but what she calls intercultural cinemas. Why does intercultural cinema… »

Jacques Rancière - The Politics of Aesthetics

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Continuum, 2004.
For Rancière, aesthetics means “a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships”(10). It does not merely refer to… »

How to Encounter That Impossibility? Zizek’s Theory of Subject

From Zizek’s reading of Hegel, Marx, and Lacan, can we learn about Zizek, not the complex entanglement of Hegelian, Marxian, and Lacanian theories? What is Zizek’s own theory, his own philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic theory? What does Zizek want to say to us, borrowing Lacan’s (or Marx’s and Hegel’s) voice – as if he is… »

W. J. T. Mitchell’s Iconology and Picture Theory

What is an image? What is picture? Rather, what is the relationship between image and idea, image and word, the visual and the verbal, or the visible and the sayable? What is the relation of pictures and language? Is the one superior to the other, or each of them belongs to the different realm? The… »

The Big Other Operating at a Symbolic Level

(Reading: Slavoj Zizek’s How to Read Lacan; http://www.lacan.com/zizhowto.html)
At the very moment when others see the death of psychoanalysis, Zizek witnesses instead the return of it. Thus the aim of this book (How to Read Lacan) is, according to him, “to demonstrate that it is only today that the time of psychoanalysis has come”(2). Zizek wants… »

Aesthetic Conflicts in Psychoanalysis and (Novel) Education

Deborah P. Britzman, Novel Education: Psychoanalytic Studies of Learning and Not Learning
What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and education? Why does Britzman connect or arrange in parallel these two (or more) ways of presentation in terms of storytelling – whether novel or narration? Who narrates and who invites one to be a narrator? Why is the… »

Precarious Citizenship in the Late Capitalist Society

- Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, Princeton UP, 2002.
- Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Duke UP, 1999.

How do self and social identities change in a state of transition? How does the relationship between individuals and the state change in a rapid or gradual social crisis? How… »

Alain Badiou - “Sex in Crisis” in The Century

Against Subjectivation and Signification: Alain Badiou’s “Sex in Crisis”
In the book, The Century, in which this article “Sex in Crisis” is included, Alain Badiou analyzes the twentieth century by asking whether the past century has reached to the historical stage where our essential values and ideas such as humanity and freedom are fully developed and… »

[CFP]Philosophy of Photography

Philosophy of Photography
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ISSN: 20403682
First published in 2010 (forthcoming)
2 issues per volume
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Aims & Scope
Philosophy of Photography is a new peer reviewed journal devoted to the scholarly understanding of photography. It is not committed to any one notion of photography nor,… »