This month’s e-flux Notes brings a focus on new books and radical cinema, with interventions on the multiplicity of Buddhist philosophy, trance-inflected shamanic materialism, the discreet cruelty of the bourgeoisie, and feminist reconfigurations of film. Across other essays, aspects of contemporary ideology are crystallized in a series of revealing figures: an alien “happiness” virus, a techno-Antichrist, and the colonial racism of a farcical Père Ubu.
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s “For Another Buddhism, Against Byung-Chul Han” presents a powerful criticism of the noted critic of neoliberalism, while sketching an alternative path to understanding the significance of Buddhist philosophy: “not ‘Zen versus German philosophy,’ but the transformative exchanges, uneven circulations, and multiple world-formations through which traditions travel, fracture, and recompose, across many worlds, not two.” Thomas Waller reviews Henrike Kohpeiß’s Bourgeois Coldness, a caustic critique of bourgeois complacency and the structures that enable it. Mustafa Uzuner writes about Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Far Calls, a history and philosophy of omens, slips, and other loaded linguistic accidents. In “A Non-Aspirational Justice,” Elena Loizidou dives into Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s book Hydrojustice, descending to the depths of its post-humanist abyss. And Jason Read writes on Alberto Toscano’s Communism in Philosophy: Essays on Alain Badiou and Toni Negri, arguing that, for Toscano, “the part of Badiou and Negri we need most right now is not their revolutionary optimism, but the way in which they struggled to understand the full nature of the reaction they lived through.”
In Film Notes: Colectivo Los Ingravidos, in their “Shamanic Materialism: 77 Theses on the Audiovisual,” outlines a cosmopolitical way of making and thinking the audiovisual, advocating for an “aesthetics of trance.” In “Manifesto for a Radical Femininity for an Other Cinema” (1977), Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki call for a feminist break with dominant languages and image regimes, arguing for a “cinema of the body” grounded in double-portrait and self-invented forms of representation. Tiago de Luca’s essay reconstructs the background as a technical and political category in film history, showing how figure-ground relations distribute visibility and power and how cinema’s environments register social hierarchy and ecological crisis. And Salomé Lamas reflects on working under extreme material conditions and argues for a parafictional cinema that foregrounds temporal presence and ethical friction over narrative spectacle.
Slavoj Žižek reviews Vince Gilligan’s new sci-fi television series Pluribus, appreciating its original variation on the end-of-the-world theme, and reading its Others in light of the Lacanian big Other. In “The Antichrist Today: Russian Conservative and Techno-Enlightenment Versions,” Ilya Budraitskis provides an incisive comparative study of contemporary reactionary thought. And Branislav Jakovljević delves into Ambroise Vollard’s Ubu plays, particularly The Colonial Politics of Pa Ubu, showing its relevance for grasping the link between Trump’s recent imperial adventures and repression in American cities: “The point that Vollard’s play makes so clearly is that imperialism is not, and can never be, unidirectional: expansionism abroad is inseparable from total domination in the metropole. In other words, imperialism always begins at home.”
—The Editors
