Blogs
1 April, 2024
Description: What life experience could be necessary for translating a poem? Is it possible for white translators to translate Black poetry? I argue that while, certainly, lived experience is important for poetry, this does not render translators incapable simply in virtue of their social location.
23 January, 2023
Description: If activist slogans are forms of direct action, then their meaning is prefigurative. Their meaning refers to a future beyond capitalism. One slogan in particular thereby seems to become an ontological proof; an argument like those aiming to prove the existence of God.
11 August, 2022
Description: Norbert Davis’ dime store detective novel The Mouse in the Mountain (1943) is surprisingly good. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s favourite novel was, perhaps, ahead of its time.
19 June, 2020
Description: Infinity, as such, is unrepresentable because representations are, by definition, finite. So how do you make a film About Endlessness (2020, dir. Roy Andersson)? Precisely by representing the fragments.
9 March, 2020
Description: Rainer Maria Rilke has a famous, and famously misunderstood sonnet. A catalyst of misunderstanding is German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who took this final line and made it the title of one of his books. This post hopes to show that Sloterdijk’s interpretation of the poem, the departure point of the entire book, is a blatant misreading.
31 March, 2019
Description: Moondog, the protagonist from Harmony Korine’s new comedy The Beach Bum (2019), is a true Nietzschean superhuman.
21 September, 2018
Description: Light, for any cinematographer, is first and foremost a technical problem: how do you make sure that the scene’s action is adequately perceptible? At what point does the light’s brightness block out the detail of the shot? Beyond the technicalities, light exerted on Robby Müller a positively metaphysical attraction.
24 May, 2018
Description: Weekend is not an activist film. But the film’s protagonist are remarkably like the protest generation of ‘68: youths seeking, violently, to liberate themselves from the yoke of capitalism. And in so doing, they reach for remarkably aesthetic means.
5 January, 2018
Description: Do we separate author and work? No. Should we? Why? I argue that, more often than not, the maker of a work plays a strong role in our aesthetic reflections. The separation of a work from its maker simply does not make sense in these cases.
24 August, 2017
Description: While officially about the evacuation of British soldiers from France during the opening stages of the Second World War in 1940, Dunkirk is not really a war film. It barely even classifies as cinema. Rather, it is more akin to an episode of confabulation.