We’re happy to announce that philosopher, writer, and long-time e-flux contributor Aaron Schuster has joined us as the editor of Notes. In July we launched a new column on “The Contemporary Clinic,” which invites psychoanalysts from around the world to reflect on the major developments and challenges in their practices today. What are the psychopathologies of the contemporary clinic? How are these new discontents intertwined with culture, economy, and politics? Evan Malater and Celeste Pietrusza write about the pervasiveness of imposter syndrome as a self-diagnosis and its transformation from a malady of outsiders (traditionally affecting women and minorities) to a pathology of the privileged. What if imposter syndrome were itself a kind of imposture, a piece of quasi-scientific psychological self-knowledge to cling to in times of social and economic precarity? Drawing on case histories of activists and militants from the Brazilian context, Gabriel Tupinambá looks for ways to overcome feelings of political impotence and despair, pointing towards new vocabularies for expressing the contradictions that cross the personal and the political. Future installments of “The Contemporary Clinic” will include essays by Patricia Gherovici, Nadia Abou Ali, Mohamed Tal, Sergio Benvenuto, Gleb Napreenko, Fabrice Bourlez, and others.
Notes continues its coverage of documenta, with an open letter from ruangrupa, artists, and the artistic team repudiating the recommendation from the supervisory board for an official consultation on the question of anti-Semitism, as a cover for control and censorship, while calling attention to multiple incidents of abuse and harassment that artists have suffered during and in the run-up to the exhibition. São Paulo Jewish organization Casa do Povo sets the record straight about rumors published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of a Brazilian Jewish collective supposedly being disinvited from documenta, and denounces the instrumentalization of anti-Semitism accusations for right-wing politics. And Franco “Bifo” Berardi writes a powerful personal response to the charge of being an anti-Semite.
On its one-year anniversary, Coco Fusco provides a highly informative and engaged account of the “11J” (July 11, 2021) uprising, the largest mass protest in Cuba since the beginning of the revolution in 1959, and criticizes the coverage of the protests in progressive media.
Irina Zherebkina intervenes into cultural polemics in Ukraine, arguing against calls for an absolute ban on Russian culture and literature, in favor of cultivating the countertradition of what she calls minor Russian literature. In an interview first published in Polish in Krytyka Polityczna, Oleksiy Radynski foresees the eventual demise of the Russian Federation, and demands a deconstruction of Russian culture as a punishment more severe than boycott. And Michał Murawski proposes “trans-socialism” as an intersectional mode of socialist politics, economy, sexuality, ecology, and aesthetics, opposing the reactionary notion of human nature—“human nature, go fuck yourself”—in both Putinism and liberal capitalism.
Finally, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee reflects on the politics of this summer’s blockbuster sequel to Top Gun, as a potent exercise in nostalgia for an American greatness that never was.
