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Why the Backwards Smile?
Why the Backwards Smile?

Slavs and Tatars

Reverse Joy

Reverse Joy looks at the role of mysticism in the perpetual protest movement at the heart of the Shi’a faith for its radical reconsideration of history and justice. Inserting oneself, flesh and faith, into the events that transpired thirteen centuries ago; the collapse of traditional understandings of time; the reversal of the roles of men and women; and joy through mourning are only some of the topics discussed in this essay. Though each one of them demands an equally elastic...
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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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Topics
Current Texts
Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

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  • ceremony
  • performance
  • colonialism
  • spiritism
  • Africa
  • ritual
  • feminism
  • body

 

Marking the passage from misfortune to good luck
Marking the passage from misfortune to good luck

Elisabeth Bronfen

The Elevator—A Heteropia

An even more strikingly risky moment, which for Don anticipates both a personal and a professional crisis, occurs at the open door of an elevator in the fifth season. After Megan has confessed to him that she wants to stop working at the agency so as to fully concentrate on her acting career, he accompanies her to the elevator, where he takes leave of her by demonstratively giving her a passionate kiss before the door closes. Then, as though this...
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  • everyday life
  • America
  • 1960s
  • Labor
  • architecture
Current Texts
About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

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  • contemporary art
  • migration
  • political aesthetics
  • concentration camp
  • ethics
  • documenta
  • Poland
  • propaganda
  • National Socialism
  • gift
Current Texts
On Gestational Communism

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

On Gestational Communism

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  • communism
  • family
  • motherhood
  • critique of neoliberalism
  • birth
  • social movements
  • community