The sheer absurdities and mind-numbing lunacies of contemporary politics—lately, and conspicuously, in the US—have occasioned many and varied reflections on fascism, authoritarianism, and the social symptoms of a political-economic system at an evident impasse. e-flux Notes continues its coverage of cinema, new books, psychoanalysis, and the art world while addressing, from multiple perspectives and through different histories, our daunting political environment. Here is a roundup of recent essays:
Pietro Bianchi, in “Nosferatu, or the Orgasm of the Tyrant,” writes that Robert Eggers’s film raises the all-too-pertinent question of how we relate to despotic leaders who shamelessly exhibit their “uncastrated jouissance.” Maria José de Abreu reviews Tiago Rodrigues’s provocative play Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, discussing the specificities of Portuguese fascism and resisting the appeal of a too-easy anti-fascist catharsis. The English translation of the third volume of Peter Weiss’s groundbreaking historical novel The Aesthetics of Resistance recently appeared; Tom Allen discusses its account of anti-fascist resistance and the rise and fall of workers’ movements, arguing that “at times this book comes close to a literary demonstration of the transformability of the world.” Franco “Bifo” Berardi returns to his 2015 book Heroes in “New Heroes,” analyzing the cases of Natalie Rupnow and Luigi Mangione, the latter exemplifying a contemporary “desire for revenge.” Jason Read makes a plea for creating “our own myths of solidarity, generosity, and joy” against the far-right mythocracy that has come to dominate American politics and beyond. And in “Whose Passions?” Dominique Routhier gives a penetrating critical response to T. J. Clark’s major new book, Those Passions: On Art and Politics: while celebrating Clark’s sweeping material history of the imagination and its entwinement with politics, he condemns his “inability, or unwillingness, to think the world beyond the infinite loop of its increasingly deranged self-representations.”
In Film Notes: Drawn from Eisenstein’s extensive notebooks and newly edited by Elena Vogman and translated by Michael Kunichika, Capital Diaries gives further access to Eisenstein’s attempt to develop a cinematic adaptation of Marx’s Capital, drawing on montage theory, psychoanalysis, linguistic experimentation, and Marxist philosophy. In his notes on Querelle, Rainer Werner Fassbinder rejects literary fidelity as a cinematic goal, arguing instead for a singular, subjective interpretation that confronts Genet’s mythic language through stylized mise-en-scène and a consciously artificial visual world. In “Woman’s Place in Photoplay Production,” a seminal feminist text written in 1914, Alice Guy-Blaché argues that women are not only equally capable of mastering the technical and artistic demands of filmmaking, but possess distinct sensibilities that make them especially well suited to directing films. In a conversation on Voyage of Jeanette, Svetlana Romanova reflects on the film’s participatory approach to Indigenous self-archiving, its dual critique of Russian and Western colonial narratives in the Arctic, and the challenges of filmmaking in exile amid geopolitical repression and cultural displacement. In “Painterly Laws in the Problems of Cinema” (1929), Kazimir Malevich argues that cinema must break from theatrical and painterly conventions to realize its potential as a dynamic, nonrepresentational art form. In conversation with Soyoung Yoon, Carmen Amengual discusses A Non-Coincidental Mirror (2024) as a filmic meditation on intergenerational memory, archival rupture, and the unrealized promises of Third Worldist cultural solidarities. Shigeko Kubota’s Video Poem (1974) articulates a feminist poetics of video art as embodied labor and personal resistance to societal norms. Discussing his early film Blind Chance (1981), Krzysztof Kieślowski recounts a shift from social realism to metaphysical inquiry in his filmmaking, describing the film as an exploration of fate, chance, and ethical consistency across divergent political paths. In a conversation with Film Notes editor Lukas Brasiskis, artist Ericka Beckman reflects on her decades-long exploration of games, economic systems, and performance-based filmmaking, discussing how her formally inventive and musically structured films use choreographed motion, allegorical imagery, and layered sound to critique structures of control. Sarah Maldoror discusses the political and personal stakes in the production of Sambizanga (1972), emphasizing her commitment to portraying anti-colonial struggle from a woman’s perspective, rejecting reductive nationalist or racial categories in favor of a materialist view of oppression, and calling for a truly autonomous African cinema. And in “Early 20th Century Abstract Cinema Immersive Environments,” Cindy Keefer reconstructs the experimental multimedia environments pioneered by Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson, highlighting their radical innovations in projection, sound, and spatial perception as foundational precedents to expanded cinema.
In an excerpt from their important new book Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity, Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak document insurgent acts of care outside the framework of the state that defy the increasing criminalization of “simple acts of nourishing, protecting, and informing others.” Andreas Petrossiants writes about Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary, highlighting the generative tools it provides for understanding, and resisting, the contemporary conjuction of financial capital and aesthetics. In “Facticity, Today,” Alexei Penzin provides an incisive revaluation of this key philosophical concept, central to phenomenology, existentialism, and Marxist criticism. Ilan Manouach proposes a new pan-European publishing initiative in “Federating Publishers: From Conceptual Comics to a Creative Europe Initiative.” And in “Trans Fem Literary Springtime,” McKenzie Wark surveys new trans literature published this winter and spring, including Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event, Jamie Hood’s Trauma Plot, Aurora Mattia’s Unsex Me Here, Harron Walker’s Aggregated Discontents, Niko Stratis’s The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, Vera Blossom’s How To Fuck Like a Girl, and more.
Kateryna Iakovlenko discusses the show she curated by Stanislav Turina, “A Few Kilograms of Exhibitions,” in Kyiv last December, exploring themes of memory, loss, the fragile experience of the body, and the raw realities of life during wartime. Thotti writes a touching memorial to Carlito Carvalhosa on the occasion of two retrospective exhibitions in Sao Paolo: “The drip of his waxes, the touch of his encaustics, the swallowing of all things through the grease of his mirrors, what his white fabrics lay bare of my body in the here and now of space.” And in “Purchase Nothing by Moonlight: Eight Postcards from Utopia and Sleep #2,” Isabel Jacobs reviews the capitalist phastamagoria on display in the postcommunist Romanian advertisements assembled by Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz (many filmed by Jude himself).
Our column on psychoanalysis, The Contemporay Clinic, continues with Leslie Chapman’s exploration of AI, “Artificial Analysis?”: “The real danger is that human beings start to mimic AI entities. And in fact I would argue that we are already pretty far down that road—including within the field of talk therapy itself.” And Jamieson Webster pens two articles connected with her newly published book On Breathing: “Pollutions,” about different kinds of waste, defilements, exhausts, and emissions, and “Silences,” a personal reflection on parenthood, desire, and art.
Finally, in “David Lynch as a Pre-Raphaelite,” Slavoj Žižek commemorates the visionary filmmaker, who passed away on January 16: “Lynch’s films defy understanding; herein resides their greatness. And this is also why, although Lynch has died, he will continue to haunt us for a long time as the living dead.”
—e-flux Notes editors
