Figuration

Updated version posted on June 1, 2024.

Posted with permission of author and publisher, Kalimát Press. Thesis topic originally recommended by Todd Lawson. Scanned by Duane Troxel. Proofread by Jonah Winters and Lynn Jaluvka, with additional proofing by Bobbi Lyons. Formatted for the web by Jonah Winters. Corrections by Shahrokh Monjazeb. Critically read, from cover-to-cover, with recommendations, including several emendations, by Sohrab Kourosh. Please support this online re-printing by ordering a copy of the book.

See also the following published, academic reviews of Symbol & Secret:

•  Moojan Momen, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Third Series) 7.2 (July 1997): 290–91. “Christopher Buck’s book represents the first book-length attempt in the English language to analyse one of the major works of Bahā’u’llāh. … One main theme that Buck explores in this book is the question of whether the text of the Īqān contains hints by Bahā’u’llāh of his future claim. Some have expressed doubt as to whether any such hints exist but Buck demonstrates, conclusively I think, that there are many covert and even overt indications of what he calls ‘Bahā’u’llāh’s messianic secret’. … Buck has created a good starting point for what one would anticipate will be a new genre: critical analyses of the writings of Bahā’u’llāh.”

•  Frank Lewis, Baha’i Studies Review 6 (1996): 76–91 [16-page extended review]. “Buck’s analysis of Bahaullah’s [sic: Baha’u’llah’s] appeal to Koran 33:44 promising attainment to the divine Presence on the Day of Resurrection (itself allegorically interpreted by Bahaullah as the advent day of a new prophet), as a counter-argument to the nearby verse (33:40) about the ‘Seal of the Prophets’ is simply brilliant.” … “Symbol and Secret is a ground-breaking study, setting a standard for and describing the agenda of the exegesis of Bahai texts for some time to come.”

•  John Hatcher, Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Bulletin 30.1 (July 1996): 70–71. “Buck offers insightful analysis of Bahā’u’llāh’s exegetical technique.”

•  Jonah Winters, Iranian Studies 32.1 (Winter 1999): 141–145. “Buck has undertaken a project that is to be commended on many fronts. This study is daring in that it is the first extended analysis of the Islamic context and content of Baha’ullah’s thought and writings. The rigor with which Buck has treated his topics is a model for anyone engaging in textual scholarship: his research is broad, his attention to detail thorough, and his coverage of the topics exhaustive. Finally, many of his conclusions, the light he throws on the Íqán and its content, and in places even his methods are frankly brilliant.” DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00210869908701948.

•  Jonah Winters, Journal of Bahá’í Studies 9.3 (September 1999): 69–75. “Christopher Buck’s Symbol and Secret: Qur’an Commentary in Bahá’u’lláh’s Kitáb-i Íqán (Studies in the Bábí and Bahá’í Religions, volume 7) can be seen as a work of genius: it is ground-breaking—daring, innovative, and even brilliant. … As Symbol and Secret is the first work written in English to examine Bahá’í scripture and hermeneutics in any analytical depth, Buck’s work can without exaggeration be declared seminal.

[…] First, this study is daring in that it is the first extended analysis of the Islamic context and content of Bahá’u’lláh’s thought and writings. Buck’s tangential self-defense on pages 260–261 indicates that he, too, is well aware of the daringness of the topic and of his academic approach to it. Second, the rigour with which Buck has treated his topics is a model for anyone engaging in textual scholarship: his research is broad, his attention to detail thorough, and his coverage of the topics exhaustive. Finally, many of his conclusions, the light he throws on the Íqán and its content, and in places even his methods are frankly brilliant.” DOI: https://doi.org/10.31581/jbs-9.3(1999).

PhD Thesis at Goldsmiths, University of London, 2019

Post-humanism is best understood as several overlapping and interrelated fields coming out of the traditions of anti-humanism, post-colonialism, and feminist discourse. But the term remains contested, both by those who wish to overturn, or even destroy, the ‘humanism’ after that decisive hyphen (post-humanists), and those engaged in the project of maximising their chance of merging with technologies, and reaching a supposed point of transition, when the current ‘human’ has been augmented, upgraded, and surpassed (transhumanists). For both those who wish to move beyond ‘humanism’, and those who wish to transcend ‘the human’, there remains a significant, shared, problem: the supposed originary separations, between information and matter, culture and nature, mankind and machine, singular and plural, that post-humanism seeks to problematise, and transhumanism often problematically ignores, lead to the delineation of ‘the human’ as a single, universalised figure. This universalism erases the pattern of difference, which post-humanists see as both the solution to, and the problem of, the human paradigm. This thesis recognises this problem as an ongoing one, and one which – for those who seek to establish posthumanism as a critical field of enquiry – can never be claimed to be finally overcome, lest the same problem of universalism rear its head again.

To tackle this problem, this thesis also enters into the complex liminal space where the terms ‘human’ and ‘humanism’ confuse and interrupt one another, but rather than delineate the same boundaries (as transhumanists have done), or lay claim over certain territories of the discourse (as post-humanists have done), this thesis implicates itself, myself, and yourself in the relational becoming posthuman of which we, and it, are co-constituted. My claim being, that critical posthumanism must be the action it infers onto the world of which it is not only part, but in mutual co-constitution with.

The Practice of Posthumanism claims that critical posthumanism must be enacted in practice, and stages itself as an example of that process, through a hybrid theoretical and practice-based becoming. It argues that posthumanism is necessarily a vibrant, lively process being undergone, and as such, that it cannot be narrativized or referred to discursively without collapsing that process back into a static, universalised delineation once again. It must remain in practice, and as such, this thesis enacts the process of which it itself is a principle paradigm.

After establishing the critical field termed ‘posthumanism’ through analyses of associated discourses such as humanism and transhumanism, each of the four written chapters and hybrid conclusion/portfolio of work is enacted through a ‘figure’ which speaks to certain monstrous dilemmas posed by thinkers of the posthuman. These five figures are: The Phantom Zone, Crusoe’s Island, The Thing, The Collapse of The Hoard, and The 3D Printer (#Additivism). Each figure – echoing Donna Haraway – ‘resets the stage for possible pasts and futures’ by calling into question the fictional/theoretical ground upon which it is predicated. Considered together, the dissertation and conclusion/portfolio of work, position critical posthumanism as a hybrid ‘other’, my claim being that only through representing the human as and through an ongoing process (ontogenesis rather than ontology) can posthumanism re-conceptualise the ‘norms’ deeply embedded within the fields it confronts.

The practice of critical posthumanism this thesis undertakes is inherently a political project, displacing and disrupting the power dynamics which are co-opted in the hierarchical structuring of individuals within ‘society’, of categories within ‘nature’, of differences which are universalised in the name of the ‘human’, as well as the ways in which theory delineates itself into rigid fields of study. By confounding articulations of the human in fiction, theory, science, media, and art, this practice in practice enacts its own ongoing, ontogenetic becoming; the continual changing of itself, necessary to avoid a collapse into new absolutes and universals.

To perpetuate itself in time, tradition makes recourse to figures that convey it. This study takes as its object the vampire figure that, in transmitting important aspects of the cultural tradition, takes the form of its own tradition, manifesting itself in a series of narrative and cultural works. As this study maintains, the vampire figure possesses its own literary and cinematographic tradition, even as it provides an understanding of transmission, tradition, and education.

In order to persist through time, traditions need to retain a static core, while also being malleable enough to allow for the transformation of the secondary features. The vampire is a malleable cultural figure, making it the perfect emblem of the concept of tradition. Moreover, five recurring traditional constellations are present, in various degrees, in vampire-centric narratives. The victim choice, the vampiric bite and the transformative blood exchange – with its undeniable relation to “perverse” sexuality, the training process, the desire to belong to a family or a community, and the search for one’s origins all illustrate the link between the vampire and the concept of tradition.

This thesis explores the impact of the vampire figure as an emblem of tradition through the most classic – the most traditional – narrative, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and through the first three installments of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles – Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned – as well as through their film adaptations.

'SOCIAL 'WORK' AT BIJLMERMEER, AMSTERDAM
CONTENTS @Catch-22.net
Copycats, me too?(1)
Territorial instinct(2)
Kyrie eleison(5)
Look-alikes, figurations and interest-groups(6)
Charisma(8)
Freud vs. Marx((8)
Back to business(10)
The Mosq(12)
Knowledge or power(13)
Reification or verification to identification(13)
Theses: political correctness(14)
The long-term process(22)
Dichotomies(22)
ADDENDA:
A. Freud (1933-5) The ego and the Mechanisms of Defense(25)
M. Klein (1932) Childrens' analysis(32)
S. Freud (1930) Civilization and its Discontents(33)
S.freud (1916) The uncanny
A Mitscherlich (1956-8) Society without the Father
Bibliography(35)
E.T.hall (1959) The Silent Language

In the present article we propose the existence, in the Derrida of the book Dissemination, a certain thought about the bio-politics. Including the animal figure, this thought is also the thought of a sovereignty beyond the instance of power and dominion. The Seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, published posthumously, seems to be his most finished expression. In the first place, we follow the indications made by Derrida about painting as zôgraphia in Dissemination. The Derridian deconstruction of what we call “the sovereign sequence”, allows us to analyze the relationship between the problem of “the animality of writing” and of sovereignty as a corollary of the thought of a certain bio-politics or zoo-politics, early discerned. Secondly, in the discussion of Derrida with Agamben and with Foucault on the concept of life, we explore the terms of a certain politicity of life that includes animality and that is susceptible of being situated beyond power and domain. Finally, and thirdly, after confronting the concepts of sovereignty of Foucault and Derrida with Hobbes's Leviathan, we conclude with the initial problem about zôgraphia in relation to which we seek to interpret “the double and contradictory figuration”, of which Derrida speaks at the Seminar The Beast and the Sovereign.

This article explores the nexus of sovereignty, violence, and transitional justice through an analysis of the public exhibitions of the faces of communist-era secret service officers in Poland. During the rule of right-wing government from 2005 to 2007, the state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) organized exhibitions in public squares across Poland, which stirred much contention. Was it a pursuit of justice or a call for public lynching? Was it a means to ensure public transparency and identify the “faceless” evil of communism, or instead a political instrument of anti-communist nationalists? In some places, like the deindustrialized city of Katowice, the exhibition even met with devastating attacks. Focusing on this event in Katowice, I use media reports, interviews, and other ethnographic material to explore what the IPN-led state spectacles of justice, particularly the figure of the face and the defacement practices they employ, reveal about tensions and contradictions of “post-socialist” sovereignty; how the figure of the (secret) communist agent has come to facialize both the unfinished reckoning with communist-era state violence and the “normalized” violence of capitalist transformation. I argue that past violence, which is the typical object of transitional justice, needs to be approached in a dynamic and relational manner, with a focus on the conjunctures—how different forms of violence become transformed, reproduced, or entangled across time and space. My comparative perspective on transitional justice highlights the problems caused when its nationalist appropriation becomes entangled with capital's violence.

4 Begriff als Abgrenzungskategorie verwendet wird, kaum systematisch versucht zu bestimmen, was Popliteratur überhaupt sein soll. 3 Seit den 1990er Jahren entwickelt sich ein starkes, etwas verspätet ab Ende der 1990er auch literaturwissenschaftliches Interesse 4 an Popliteratur in Deutschland, da Verlage Texte und Autoren offensiv anhand des Labels 'Pop' vermarkteten und diese auch demnach besprochen wurden. Christian Kracht gilt mit seinem 1995 veröffentlichen Debütroman Faserland 5 bald als "Gründungsphänomen" 6 dieser Popliteratur und mitunter auch als ihr "Totengräber". 78 Als Wolfgang Herrndorf 2002 mit In Plüschgewittern 9 debütierte, war der Begriff und das Phänomen Popliteratur tatsächlich bereits mehrfach für nichtssagend und tot erklärt worden und galt nicht mehr als Verkaufsargument, sondern eher als negative Abgrenzungskategorie der Kritik. 10

To understand applications of Rem Koolhaas’ concept of “Bigness”, I place it alongside concepts from science fiction criticism and Gestalt perception theory. There are multiple connections between methods used by OMA and means employed in science fiction: collection of diverse programs within ambiguous figures, overwhelming of critical faculties with wonder and scale, extrapolation of complications from first order technological change, and the proliferation of new forms of independent existences in the world. The history of the use, in architecture of the figure-ground drawing, first popularized by Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin, and Danish architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen, provides a backstory for the political effects of both “Bigness” and the science fictional Big Dumb Object. I show that there is an isomorphism between the way OMA’s work is presented, in S,M,L,XL and subsequent books, and in the presentation and reception of the book itself.

Trisha Brown’s early choreographic work deals intrinsically with the relationship between dance and urban space. Performed on rooftops, park benches or exterior house walls, some of her most famous pieces of Postmodern Dance investigate how choreography can interact with the topography of a city. Dance here does not merely react to the city as a stage, but rather creates and transforms its own surrounding space by leaving ephemeral inscriptions within the network of urban structures.
But how does a dance piece performed outside the walls of a theatre or gymnasium read and even change the social structure of a city? To which ways of urban cartography – such as street maps and traffic signs – can choreography refer by copying systems of city-communication and developing them into an undecipherable form of body calligraphy? And finally: when dancing is far more than an ornamental addition to an urban landscape, to what extent can it be described as a form of architecture in itself?
I will address these questions in regard to Trisha Brown’s „Roof and Fire Piece” originally performed on rooftops in SoHo in 1973 and recreated on the High-Line in Chelsea in 2011. By focusing in particular on the figuration and de-figuration of the bodily shapes of the dancers – who are dressed in scarlet-red costumes – I will argue that their movements, blended with an urban topography, create a synesthetic and kinesthetic vision of dance as an embodied form of fluid architecture and semaphore-like writing in the city.

To perpetuate itself in time, tradition makes recourse to figures that convey it. This proposal takes as its object the vampire figure that, in transmitting important aspects of the cultural tradition, takes the form of its own tradition, manifesting itself in a series of narrative and cultural works. As this article maintains, the vampire figure possesses its own literary and cinematographic tradition, even as it provides an understanding of transmission, tradition, and education.

In order to persist through time, traditions need to retain a static core, while also being malleable enough to allow for the transformation of the secondary features. The vampire is a malleable cultural figure, making it the perfect emblem of the concept of tradition. Moreover, five recurring traditional constellations are present, in various degrees, in vampire-centric narratives. The victim choice, the vampiric bite and the transformative blood exchange – with its undeniable relation to “perverse” sexuality (in psychoanalytic terms), the training process, the desire to belong to a family or a community, and the search for one’s origins all illustrate the link between the vampire and the concept of tradition.

This paper will explore the impact of the vampire figure as an emblem of tradition through the first three installments of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles – Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned.

This paper addresses issues related to graphic thinking providing parallels between textual language and graphic language on the one hand, and between graphics –as produced objects- and their authors –as the active subjects- on the other. Thus, it explores the two poles of the graphic language -abstraction and figurativeness- in a pictorial context to subsequently extrapolate them to the field of architecture. To a certain extent, it tries to answer some of the issues raised by the organization of this Conference proposing a debate on the nuclear issues of graphic thought: a deeper knowledge regarding all graphic activity as an intellectual endeavour and, consequently, point out how these principles may be affected by the emergence of new graphic processing technologies. Concerning parallels between articulated language considered as the structure of thought itself and graphic language we highlight certain contrasts between the concrete, the generic and abstract. Drawing is much more effective than textual language describing anything that is material in as much it may be a particular reality. On the contrary, given that words are constructed from universal concepts their difficulty in establishing a precise relationship with materiality is quite evident; any drawing or image describes much more accurately the geometry of a building that a written text. In relation to figurative and abstract painting, we bring into the debate issues such as the distinction between image and shape or between illusion and reality. Regarding the precision of an architectural drawing as either a faithful account of what is built or as a means of developing the architectural design, sketches and surveys, on the one hand, and plans and perspectives on the other, may give a good account. All of them, considered as descriptions of other realities, have become the basic tools of the architect in order to learn out of built architecture or to achieve architectural design. Beyond the pertinence of Boudon’s disquisition concerning the presentation or the representation of architecture, the fact is that all of these pictures are examples of graphic figurativeness. However, in the realm of inventiveness, the more self-absorbed and germinal may the architect’s sketches be the closer to abstraction they will dwell; being this understood, according to Worringer, as the seek towards a pattern or an inner order of the object itself. This search for the relationships that define the object must be subject to rigorous demands that language itself, as noted by Stravinsky, imposes. This polarity determines the conflict between figuration and abstraction, between mimesis and evocation, and, to some extent, between tradition and modernity. It inevitably leads to the relationship between the work and the author, between the drawing and the draughtsman; eventually, between Kant’s noumenon and phenomenon. In our field of knowledge, this dialectic emphasizes the distinction between the kind of drawing we do for others and the one we make for ourselves when we design, that is: between the narrative of the project considered as an object and the inventiveness produced by the subject. However, the structure of graphic thinking has 264 CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL EGA been disrupted by the emergence of virtual space. The three-dimensional modelling of the architectural object itself constitutes a remarkable achievement, although rather more constructive than properly graphic. On the other hand, renders drafted from such models as the projection of non-existent buildings often derive in architectural illusionism. Nevertheless, this alteration we refer to is particularly significant regarding the design of architectural form itself: the use of complex geometries, the surfacing parameterized drawing or algorithmic architecture as powerful new non-graphical architectural design tools are only possible through the use of computer devices.
XIII Congreso Internacional EGA, Valencia; 05/2010

Esta investigación es un análisis en el marco de la teoría queer de relaciones internacionales sobre las acciones ejecutivas federales relativas a la diversidad sexual en México. Se postula que formas particulares de entender quién es el “homosexual” se trasladaron a una agenda doble entre lo que se predica a nivel internacional y lo que
se hace en la esfera local. Se concluye que México construyó por medio de su diplomacia queer una figuración del “homosexual normal” que era incompatible
con la diversidad de la comunidad LGBT del país

In the following pages I explore a chapter in Slovak visual art of the 1960s, post-informal figuration, focusing on the first and crucial stage in the work of the Bratislava sculptor Mira Haberernová. The time frame ranges from the period of her involvement in the Bratislava Confrontations (2,4,5) to her expulsion from the Union of Slovak Visual Artists in 1972, followed by an effective ban on activities abroad after 1975. I have highlighted a number of essential progressions in her art during those years. I also outline the context: the young art student, the female among male sculptors, the artist in a golden age of contemporary culture, the 1960s, with their unrepeatable range of possibilities. We may follow the evolution of her career from her unofficial atelier presentation, through involvement in Danubius ’68, exhibition at the Wiener Sezesion, and participation in the Paris Youth Biennale (1969), up to her solo exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1971, where Pierre Restany performed the introduction. My aim here is to provide a more general art-historical survey, preparatory to a monographic treatment of this artist’s work in written and pictorial form. In the present work I gradually narrow the focus: from a general review of the given period, through Haberernová‘s contextual links with a circle of like-minded artists, to initial interpretations of her work.

S’il y a malaise dans l’esprit littéraire, c’est qu’il cherche de manière à trouver la névrose, c’est qu’il n’accepte pas d’exister dans la béance castratrice du réel. Et si c’était précisément cette théorie de l’espace béant qui était vecteur d’angoisse ?

What role should students take in shaping their education, their university, and the wider society? These questions have assumed new importance in recent years as universities are reformed to become more competitive in the “global knowledge economy.” With Denmark as the prism, this book shows how negotiations over student participation — influenced by demands for efficiency, flexibility, and student-centered education — reflect broader concerns about democracy and citizen participation in increasingly neoliberalised states. Combining anthropological and historical research, Gritt B. Nielsen develops a novel approach to the study of policy processes and opens a timely discussion about the kinds of future citizens who will emerge from current reforms.

“Figuring Terminal Crisis” tracks a problem that emerges from Steven Amsterdam’s post-apocalyptic novel Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010), though is certainly not limited to it. The formal limit to imagining a post-catastrophic future remains a historical one: how can a novel bent on representing an after, bent on imagining the movement of history as such, do so “in an age,” as Fredric Jameson puts it, “that has forgotten to think historically in the first place.”  My claim is that Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010) struggles to represent the present historically and that in doing so it strikes at the very limits of post-apocalyptic narrative form. Despite its formal innovation it still suffers from a host of ideological setbacks precisely because it is post-apocalyptic fiction.

En Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015), el deseo entre Therese y Carol viene marcado por su separación, por la asunción de una distancia. El siguiente artículo se pregunta alrededor de la figuración del gesto que se construye entre la mirada de ambas heroínas a partir del plano/contraplano con el que Haynes abre y cierra el film. Tomando prestadas las posibilidades del melodrama clásico para ello, Haynes sitúa al espectador frente a una idea renovada del plano/contraplano en la que no hay una mirada que someta a la otra, sino que cada una posee su propia subjetividad. Mirar se convierte en Carol en un «cara a cara» en términos de Emmanuel Levinas, donde el Otro toma la significancia y la infinitud del discurso del yo. Mirada, deseo, cara a cara, rostro, caricia. Los conceptos con los que Levinas define la fenomenología de Eros emergen en Carol como las figuras que permiten una relectura del sistema construido por Hollywood a partir del deseo y la invención de un gesto erótico forjado en el tiempo de la visibilidad del Otro.

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In Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015), the desire that Therese and Carol feel for each other arouses in the events of separation, whenever there is a (physical) distance between them. The following paper addresses the figuration of the gesture that is built between the gaze of both heroines in the shot/reverse-shot, which Haynes draws upon at the beginning and at the end of the film. Borrowing the possibilities of classic melodrama for this purpose, Haynes confronts the viewer with a renewed idea of the shot/reverse-shot in which there is no look that submits to the other, but each one possesses its own subjectivity. The act of looking becomes in Carol a «face to face», in terms of Emmanuel Levinas, where the Other takes the significance and infinity of the discourse of the self. Gaze, desire, face to face, face, caress. The concepts with which Levinas defines the phenomenology of Eros emerge in Carol as the figures that allow a rereading of Hollywood system concerning desire and the invention of an erotic gesture wrought in the time of the visibility of the other.

This paper explores contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu’s collage works as a means of exploring female identity and cultural stereotypes. Shenk compares Mutu’s works to those of early-20th century collage artist Hannah Höch in order to extract the specific properties of collage which lend themselves to these discussions of identity and gender. Through this comparison and specific analyses of Mutu’s works, Shenk contends that Mutu’s use of collage allows her to directly manipulate iconographic forms and create commentaries on gender and cultural binaries within Western society.

Si, d'après Maurice Blanchot, le quotidien résiste à la représentation, plusieurs démarches littéraires, artistiques ou scientifiques tentent, au XXe siècle, de rendre sensible l'ordinaire de la vie quotidienne. Certaines œuvres de Chantal Akerman, réalisatrice belge, et de Annie Ernaux, auteure française, participent de cette démarche.
Dans cette communication, nous explorerons plus précisément le quotidien au prisme de la figure de la femme au foyer, qui apparaît notamment dans Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) de Chantal Akerman et dans La femme gelée (1981) de Annie Ernaux. Pour ce faire, nous nous appuyons sur les notions de figure et de figural, afin d'étudier la façon dont les œuvres (dé)construisent cette figure topique, et ce non sans effet sur la figuration du quotidien. En effet, nous faisons l'hypothèse que le surgissement ponctuel du figural dans ces œuvres constitue l'une des manière de rendre sensible, tout en la dépassant, la résistance du quotidien à la représentation.

Il saggio indaga aspetti della "anti-prospettiva" - cioè, del disegno che cerca di figurare gli spazi intrinseci delle cose, di tradurli graficamente sul piano con effetti di spazialità ambigua, reversibile, riflessa, invertendo il senso (topologico) di interno/esterno, centro/ periferia, inglobato/inglobante - nelle formulazioni opposte del tema che convissero nell'ambiente dei VchuTeMas moscoviti. Si studia la differenza che sussiste tra l'anti-prospettiva "figurativa" (di Florenskij) e quella "astrattista" (dei costruttivisti) attraverso un confronto tra grafici coevi, emblematici delle due opposte estetiche. Da un lato (astrattista) si tratta specialmente del genere grafico dell'assonometria svolta e rovesciata, sviluppato coi progetti per gli allestimenti dei Proun spaziali di El Lissitzky, poi diffuso come tema visuale nell'internazionale astrattista degli anni Venti e nella sua successiva diaspora americana. Dal lato opposto (realista) si tratta della teoria anti-prospettica di Florenskij, nonché di esempi che la testimoniano: le copertine xilografiche di Vladimir Favorskij (istruite da Florenskij) nelle quali si evidenziano le tecniche della riflessione e dell'inversione. Traducendo l'opposizione tra "astrattisti" e "figurativisti" in quella tra "palingenici e anacronici", chiariamo la differenza tra le due opposte "anti-prospettive" come differenza tre due modelli di significazione visiva: il primo esclude la dimensione figurativa e allegorica dalle quali muove il secondo.

"The work of Columbian artist Oscar Munoz brings to bear a causal chain of events, an unfolding series of linked transitions between the concrete image and its gradual dissolution into material residue. While not self-consciously bound up in the conventional oppositional terms “figuration” or “abstraction”, (which one might recognize as appropriate in his work at their extremities), his work instead carefully considers the fugitive nature of “the image” and its in/ability to hold form and meaning. This lecture will explore the instance of Munoz’s work along with other contemporary artists for whom association, meaning and metaphor is won and lost through the material instability of a medium.

This lecture will look at the terms “figuration” and “abstraction”, so closely aligned with 20th C. formalist painting and sculpture, and shift their emphasis toward that of “the material image” and its fugitive nature within a culture of reproducibility. Less a unique, self-defining visual language than a causal-temporal language of convergence, accumulation, and dissolution. The artists discussed here will be shown how their use of conceptual and process-based strategies have also reconsidered and problematised “figuration” and “abstraction”, and the relationship between the art object and its meaning. How does a material become language? And conversely, how does it betray language’s communicative function: Here, the image moves between these two not so extreme poles. It is like a face becoming unlike itself."

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the appropriateness of ‘the human figure’ has been increasingly interrogated. Considering Narcissister and Jaamil Olawale Kosoko performances, this article is intended to wrest the understanding of theatre and performance from the implicit privilege of figuration upon disfiguration. Paying attention to the sociality of this peculiar type of situation, this article aims to embrace a broad perspective in which visibility, shape and form are important aspects, but are not sufficient to express the interplay of figuration and disfiguration. Unlike the ‘rebellion’ strategies of disfiguration of the twentieth century, Kosoko’s and Narcissister’s disfiguration strategies don’t seek to reveal, to make visible, any ‘real’ ‘self’, any ‘authenticity’ oppressed by the authority of a normative human figure. In their work, disfiguration doesn’t challenge figuration on its own territory. Beyond a grammar of figuration and disfiguration that consists in shallowness and visibilities, Kosoko and Narcissister orchestrate a wider interplay, in which figuration and disfiguration are equivalent features of shallowness and visibilities. In the framework of algebra, the zero, or cipher, is the ‘inner outside’ of the order of figures. In theatre, the peculiar sociality of performance might underwrite a similar function of uncountable operator. This theoretical apparatus invites to think about theatre and performance in a way that tends to consider the gesture of formalization with the distance that our onto-epistemological context seems to reclaim. Without calling for the collapse of the ordering through a science of visible shapes, the standpoint of this apparatus aims to expand the spectrum of theatre and performance’s theoretical toolbox. This updated spectrum redistributes the space of spectacle, underlining its social dimension, and introducing the possibility for it to not be limited to the domain of visibility, figures and forms.

An analysis of artist Kushana Bush's investigation of narrative structures and visual devices, particularly with reference to historical influences including medieval book illumination, Persian miniatures, and 20th century painting traditions. Also expands upon Bush's relationship to topical news and events of war and conflict and how these references are incorporated within her pictorial compositions.

This article is a study of aspects of the criticism, and critical methodology, of Nicole Brenez, taking her book Abel Ferrara (2007) as its primary text. Abel Ferrara was translated by Adrian Martin, who has done a great deal to champion Brenez's work in the English-speaking world. I am fully in agreement with Martin about Brenez's significance, but I find that he sometimes appears to overstate the distinctiveness of her methodology. He has written that she practices 'a mode of film criticism that calls itself figural analysis' (Martin 2015); in what follows I shall argue that, rather than representing a wholly distinct 'mode of film criticism', Brenez's work has affinities with that of critics in the tradition associated with Movie, specifically V.F. Perkins (affinities that I have not seen commented upon elsewhere). But, though both Brenez and Perkins give a central role to notions of synthesis, their critical priorities are somewhat different, and I shall also indicate some areas of divergence, which could be said to hinge around ideas of credibility and the importance of the viewer's uninterrupted immersion in the fictional world.

Le masque sxwó:yxwey (swaihwé) des peuples de l’île de Vancouver et de la vallée du Fraser a fait l’objet d’analyses virtuoses de la part d’anthropologues de renom (Claude Lévi-Strauss et Wayne Suttles). Pourtant, dans les deux cas, la structure plastique du masque est appréhendée comme un agencement ne représentant rien en soi. Nous cherchons, au contraire, à montrer que la morphologie du masque représente des non-humains surnaturels des origines, dont la nature est profondément hybride et soumise à un schème ontologique de transformation. À partir de ce changement de paradigme, nous montrons que le masque sxwó:yxwey des Salish côtiers cherche à fi gurer – quoique
d’une manière différente de leurs voisins septentrionaux – les transformations incessantes des êtres surnaturels à partir de représentations plastiques de saillances et de constructions chimériques.
Ces saillances visuelles et leur agencement particulier placent l’observateur du masque dans un état d’incertitude ontologique quand
à la nature de l’existant représenté. Cet état de dissonance cognitive est le propre de l’état visionnaire chez les Salish côtiers.

The representation of other arts in cinema can be regarded as a different semiotic system revealing what is hidden in the narrative, as a site of cultural meanings inherent to the cinematic apparatus addressing a pensive spectator, or a discourse on cinema born in the space of intermediality. In the post-1989 films of Romanian director Lucian Pintilie, painterly and sculptural references, as well as miniatures become figurations of cultural identity inside allegories about a society torn between East and West. I argue that art references are liberating these films from provincialism by transforming them into a discourse lamenting over the loss of Western, Christian and local values,
endangered or forgotten in the post-communist era. In the films under analysis – An Unforgettable Summer (1994), Too Late (1996) and Tertium Non Datur (2006) – images reminding of Byzantine iconography, together with direct references and remediations of sculptures by Romanian-born Constantin Brâncuşi, participate in historico-political allegories as expressions of social crisis and the transient nature of values. They also reveal the tension between
an external and internal image of Romania, the aspiration of the “other Europe” to connect with the European cultural tradition, in a complex demonstration of a “self-othering” process. I will also argue that, contrary to the existing criticism, this generalizing, allegorical tendency can also be detected in some of the films of the generation of filmmakers representing the New Romanian Cinema, for example in Radu Jude’s Aferim! (2015).

Klassismus und Sozialprotektionismus sind als soziale Phänomene von der Soziologie zur Genüge untersucht worden. Auf die Frage, wie sich die Angehörigen einer vermeintlich gleichen „Klasse“, eines ähnlichen „Sozialmilieus“ oder eines gemeinsamen „Lebensstils“ gegenseitig „riechen" oder identifizieren, antworten die „Klassiker" der Soziologie wie der deutsche Soziologe Norbert Elias und sein französischer Kollege Pierre Bourdieu: am (sozialen) Habitus. Elias definiert den „sozialen Habitus“ als gemeinsame Gewohnheiten im Denken, Fühlen und Handeln, die Mitgliedern einer Figuration (ein Abhängigskeitsgeflecht aufgrund von gedachter und vermuteter Zugehörigkeit und Solidarität) eigen sind und dadurch eine ähnliche „soziale Persönlichkeitsstruktur“ aufweisen. Bourdieu geht stärker ins „plastische“ Detail und definiert den „Habitus“ als Gesamtpaket einer Person: ihr gesamtes Auftreten, ihr Lebensstil, ihre Sprache (Sprachcode), ihre Kleidung und ihren Geschmack. Die Klasse und somit auch der Habitus wird nicht selten als unveränderbares „Sozialmakel“ angesehen und aktiviert bewusst oder unbewusst „sozialrassistische“ oder klassistische Strategien des „Sozial-Protektionismus“ zum Erhalt der vermeintlich eigenen „Klasse“. Ein soziales Dilemma, das noch mal dadurch verstärkt wird, dass Fehltritte oder abweichendes Verhalten rasch zum Sozialstigma werden, das man praktisch nicht mehr abstreifen kann.

Cette thèse examine l’œuvre et la vie de Pierre Klossowski en les considérant comme figure du phénomène littéraire. S’intéressant à l’œuvre de ce dernier en ce que celle-ci, traversant les genres, les médias et les techniques du XXe siècle et véhiculant une pensée des plus singulière, exemplifie de façon à la fois concrète et abstraite une économie du littéraire qui est le fond épistémo-critique de cette thèse. Articulant une conception du littéraire en tant que rencontre se refusant à la simple dualité, la thèse propose une réflexion épistémologique sur le phénomène littéraire et sur l’exemplarité de la figure de Klossowski dans un tel contexte, figure dont la thèse, par le fait même, déploie la formation et la façon dont celle-ci agit sur le littéraire. En prenant en considération la formation historiquement tardive des institutions actuelles du savoir et leur effet sur la conception moderne des disciplines, la thèse permet de briser les schèmes actuels des catégorisations disciplinaires et de repenser la puissance épistémologique du littéraire selon une économie de la rencontre qu’elle analyse dans les productions transdisciplinaires de Pierre Klossowski.

This thesis examines the work and life of Pierre Klossowski as a figure of the literary phenomenon. Klossowski’s work exemplifies, both concretely and abstractly, a particular economy of the literary which is the epistemocritical basis of this thesis, for it crosses the boundaries between genres, medias and techniques of the 20th century. Articulating a conception of the literary as an encounter that refuses to be confined to simple duality, the thesis proposes an epistemological reflection on the literary phenomenon and on the exemplarity of Klossowski’s figure in such a context, a figure whose formation and the way in which it acts on the literary itself are also deployed in the thesis. By taking into consideration the historically late formation of current knowledge institutions and their effect on the modern conception of disciplines, the thesis breaks down the current schemas of disciplinary categorizations and rethinks the epistemological power of the literary according to an economy of the encounter that is analyzed through Pierre Klossowski’s transdisciplinary productions.

Cet article propose de considérer Cassandre en tant que figure de lectrice dans l’Agamemnon d’Eschyle et le poème Alexandra de Lycophron. En retournant vers ces tragédies antiques, il est possible de penser, dès celles-ci, une conceptualisation du rôle de la lectrice dans une simultanéité entre dire et lire, redonnant à Cassandre une puissance langagière dont elle semble, en apparence, dépourvue.

This article proposes to consider the figure of Cassandra as a reader figure in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Lycophron’s poem Alexandra. By returning to these ancient tragedies, this essay offers a conceptualization of the role of the reader in a simultaneity between saying and reading, thus giving back to Cassandra the potency of language of which she seems, in appearance, to be deprived.