This September, e-flux Notes has returned with a steady stream of texts that move between climate fiction and political philosophy, psychoanalysis and cinema, art history and memorials of resistance. From interviews with Kim Stanley Robinson and Lawrence Weiner to essays on Deleuze, Vicuña, and contemporary Ukraine, the season’s writings circle around the question of how art, thought, and film register the present’s intensities, whether through melancholy, revolt, or solidarity with elemental forces.
In “To Capture the Present Moment, You Either Write Historical Fiction or Science Fiction, Part 1,” Toke Lykkeberg interviews Kim Stanley Robinson about his climate fiction novel The Ministry of the Future. Don’t miss part two, coming out this Friday. William Wiebe’s “Optimal Brain Damage” offers a sharp reflection on the science fiction present of machine learning and LLMs, examining the momentous shift in our relation to language: “Whereas the twentieth century identified language with desire and repression, the twenty first wires it to neural networks and user data.” And in the wake of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee offers a philosophical meditation on the intertwining of violence and tyranny, using Plato to rethink the contemporary climate of political violence.
Recent entries in Film Notes have featured: Hugo Münsterberg’s 1915 essay “Why We Go to the Movies” discusses early cinema’s distinctive capacity to engage attention, memory, and emotion, anticipating later cognitive and phenomenological film theory. Béla Balázs’s classic text “The Close-Up” articulates how cinematic magnification transforms faces, gestures, and objects into expressive surfaces. Yoko Ono’s 1967 manifesto-like text “On Film No. 4 (In Taking the Bottoms of 365 Saints of Our Time)” combines humor and provocation to challenge patriarchal seriousness and film professionalism, envisioning participatory filmmaking as playful revolt. In “Show (&) Tell,” Lawrence Weiner speaks with Bartomeu Marí about the materialist nature and collaborative conditions of filmmaking, situating his own films at the intersection of conceptual art and cinematic experimentation. André Breton’s 1951 essay “As in a Wood” reflects on cinema’s postwar drift toward theatricality while insisting on its unique power to disorient habitual perception, comparing the cinematic experience with modern magic. Finally, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, in a conversation about their recent film Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023), discuss clouds, ghosts, and minerals as elemental and political agents, unpacking their idea of “mineral solidarity.”
Zach Gibson reviews Gilles Deleuze’s newly translated On Painting: Courses, March–June 1981, which provides fresh insight into Deleuze’s profound engagement with art. Tom Allen writes about Chilean poet, painter, and activist Cecilia Vicuña’s Saborami: Facsimile Edition, a reissue of her impassioned artistic response to the fascist overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government. In “Cosmic Melancholia: On Planetary Sadness and the Unhappy Consciousness” Alex Taek-Gwang Lee places two recent books side by side: Sad Planets by Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker, and The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel by Robyn Marasco, contrasting their Nietzschean and Hegelian approaches, respectively, to thinking through hopelessness and despair. And Isabel Jacobs, in “Wounded Futures,” reports on the Sarajevo Film Festival, exploring its films’ engagements with Serbia’s fragile politics.
For our column “The Contemporary Clinic,” Yuliia Leites writes about her experiences treating Ukrainian soliders and their family members, and advocates for the controlled use of psychedelics in psychoanalytic therapy. And Irina Zherebkina pens a powerful political memorial to artist and activist Davyd Chychkan, killed on August 10: “The exceptional Ukrainian artist Davyd Chychkan did not go to the front to defend the framing of the lives of people in the nation as unequal to its elites. He went in solidarity with the people whom nationalist ideology labels as ‘insignificant,’ as ‘non-heroic.’”
—The Editors
