e-flux Notes moves between caves and cinemas, psychiatric clinics and archives, from works made tens of thousands of years ago to those produced under the pressure of war, surveillance, and financial abstraction. Across essays on prehistoric art, institutional psychotherapy, radical filmmaking, photography, politics, and philosophy, the contributions gathered here ask how visual forms—still, moving, archival, or speculative—organize perception, memory, and political life at a moment when saturation threatens to empty experience of meaning.
In a two-part essay, Jörg Heiser recounts his recent cave expeditions, exploring the mysteries of the prehistoric origins of art at a time when AI slop increasingly inundates the visual field. Janna Graham writes an extended review of Psychotherapy and Materialism, including lectures by Jean Oury and François Tosquelles, providing a rich historical contextualization of their work and arguing for its pertinence to anti-fascist practices in the present. Nadiia Bernard-Kovalchuk reviews Researching and Curating Photography from Ukraine: Reflections, Perspectives, Challenges, underlining that it “attends not only to iconic images and canonical figures that define the history of photography in Ukraine, but also to fragile infrastructures and dispersed archives … Inevitably, the war emerges as a watershed, transforming both the medium and those who engage with it.” And Tom Allen writes on Boris Lojkine’s film Souleymane’s Story, questioning the liberalism behind its representation of the life of an illegalized worker in contemporary Paris.
In Film Notes: Claire Atherton’s “The Art of Editing” discusses editing as an intuitive, open-ended process inspired by Taoist ideas of emptiness and non-control. In “Letters for Peter Watkins,” Rachael Rakes reflects on Watkins’s radical filmmaking practice through his lifelong epistolary communication and political fights with media institutions. Ethan Spigland’s experimental text “Jean-Luc Godard’s Visual Work: 28 Fragments” examines Godard’s lesser-known artistic practices, emphasizing his interest in visual art beyond cinema. In “The Camera Is a Weapon and It Can Kill You or Get You Sent to Jail,” Michel Auder speaks with Liam Gillick about his filming practice as an ethical yet provocative act of observation. Takahiko Iimura’s “On Reflected Cinema” defines cinema through the Japanese term “eiga,” which emphasizes screen reflection and its sensual affects rather than the motion of images. In “Grave Sight: Watching Radu Jude’s Sleep #2,” Pip Chodorov discusses Jude’s homage to Warhol as a meditation on surveillance, authorship, and mortality. Finally, in “Weaving Memory,” Film Notes editor Lukas Brasiskis talks to Luke Fowler about sound-image relations and his filmmaking as an archival, collaborative, and nonlinear exploration of memory.
In an excerpt from his new biography of Alexandre Kojève, Boris Groys examines Kojève’s little-known practice as a photographer. In “The Corpse of Accelerationism” Benjamin Noys returns to his seminal book on accelerationism, Malign Velocities, offering a postmortem of the term some ten years after he coined it. Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen provides a powerful account of the mass protest movements that have emerged in the twenty-first century, in an excerpt from The Refusalist International. And we published a first look at Oxana Timofeeva’s manuscript On the Soul: Notes from the Platonic Underground, where she reminds us that even a “vintage concept” like the soul can harbor surprises and new resources for critical thought: “The advantage of philosophical concepts is that they never really go completely out of date … You find some old stuff, dust it off, and bring it to the table, so that everybody can see that it is actually good, beautiful, and just what you need.”
Rose-Anne Gush and Danny Hayward report on the conference they organized at the University of Applied Arts Vienna dedicated to the work of Marina Vishmidt, taking her signature concept of “infrastructural critique” in fresh directions. “Inquiry on the Future of Revolution” presents a scintillating conversation between Jasper Bernes, M. E. O’Brien, and Andreas Petrossiants on the possibilities for a postcapitalist future. Pietro Bianchi reviews Paul Thomas Anderson’s revolutionary black comedy One Battle After Another, arguing that his cinema, on a formal level, registers the fragmentation of narrative produced by financial capitalism. And Alberto Toscano pens an incisive intellectual portrait of philosopher and militant Paolo Virno, who passed away on November 7: “For Virno, it was politically imperative to renew the infant or childlike feeling for language as something we attain to, to language as a faculty. And he did this with irreverent curiosity, polemical irony, acute insight, and inventiveness in his philosophical texts, not least through an inimitable prose style that combined combative clarity and lexical playfulness—a million miles away from the ponderous piety of so much philosophical writing.”
—Editors
