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Modern Transit: A History of Feeling in the Polish People’s Republic
Oct 12, 2021
I’m sitting on my parents’ couch, working on the translation of an archival text by the Polish sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, who is most famous, perhaps, for his work on “liquid modernity” and globalization. Though much of his writing was in English, this is one of his earlier works, entitled On Frustration and Conjurers , about the events that took place in Poland in March, 1968—the student uprisings and anti-Semitic propaganda campaign—and there is a discussion of the situation of...
Simone Weil and the Text as Organ of Perception
Oct 7, 2021
Literature is a protean phenomenon. Nobody seems quite sure how to classify it. Is it an object, immutable and self-contained? Or is it an event that happens when a self makes contact with a line of letters on a page? Nowadays, critics regard the text primarily as a resource. “There’s a lot of useful knowledge here,” we say, and our job is to show how this knowledge can help us in real life. Recently, I have come upon a fourth option. What if the text were an organ of perception, an...
Adverse Possessions: Legal Representation and the Settler-Colonial Image
Sep 20, 2021
What do images have to do with the law? A lot, as it turns out. To make sense of an image requires the viewer to imagine a form of life. To imagine a form of life is to imagine a form of law. So law owes its existence to images; they clothe its abstract existence in sensible form. Think of the picture of sovereignty in the famous frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan...
Scaling Modernism Otherwise in the Dalit Graphic Novel
Aug 26, 2021
My final words of advice to you are educate, agitate and organize; have faith in yourself. With justice on our side I do not see how we can lose our battle. The battle to me is a matter of joy. The battle is in the fullest sense spiritual. There is nothing material or social in it. For ours is a battle not for wealth or for power. It is battle for freedom. It is the battle of reclamation of human personality. [1] ...