In my third and last essay I would like to discuss the figure of the writer. Since there was no occasion in my essay to link it to a geograpichal place, I would like to use this space to do just that. I have tried not to stick to one view of the writer in particular, but instead set out to apply a kind of flowing, never permanently anchoring, method of discussing three distinct, but not necessarily, views. Therefore, I have chosen to link this essay not to a particular, fixed place, but to a place that is never the same, and flows all the time. A place somewhere, wherever, in the Pacific Ocean.
Walking, Dancing, Flying
In this post I will try to read Michel de Certeau’s ‘art of theory’ with the help of two images of the tightrope walker: the one used by De Certeau himself, and the other taken from Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’. Is the way of thinking proposed by De Certeau enough or do we need a small addition to make it even more complete?
Doppelgangerland
Lolita vs ‘Lolita’: a heavyweight fight between ethics and aesthetics in the space between intertextuality and plagiarism.
Utopia: the imperfect paradise
An oxymoron can never be just one word yet ‘utopia’ is constructed out of mutually exclusive concepts. Homer’s Odyssey provides us with an example: the island of Ogygia.
The Photography of Nan Goldin: the Intersubjective, Aesthetic and Intertextual Space
This last essay will go into the photography of Nan Goldin. What I will do is emphasizing and scrutinizing spaces in relation to intersubjectivity, aesthetics and intertextuality. This will be done by way of looking at some of her photographs mainly depicting love relations. Primarily, I will be arguing that Goldin’s photographs might be interesting from a political and social point of view, but are so much richer when seen as aesthetic documents recording the drama of human relations in general.
What a Waste! Give waste no place or move to space
What is the relationship between waste and (the production of) space? In this short essay I briefly try to show that waste can be a useful concept to think about space, on several different levels.
A Birth into Discourse
Jill Scott´s poem ‘Space‘ deals with women, black women, oppression through spatial designation and bodily birth as a way out of this confining spatial category. With the help of Judith Butler and the concepts of discourse, subject and body I will try to make clear how space functions within the poem.
Rereading Caribbean Literature
This post is about getting more out of reading Caribbean literature by rereading it with the help of Michel Serres and Antonio Benitez-Rojo. Caribbean literature is hard to grasp for a Western reader, as the Caribbean way of being is hard to grasp for Western Epistemology. This post attempts to find an attitude to enter the Caribbean space.
The Ocean
It all begins with the plankton-paradox and the unpredictable fluctuations of plankton populations. How can we get hold of such elusive organisms, such to our ears “silent” creatures? This essay deals with the attempt of science to explain these microscopic species. It deals with the human drive to theorise the unknown, to predict the unexplainable and to perceive the imperceptible, through models and the specific link between technology and prediction, when confronted with the inaudible noiseuse that make out our seas and oceans.
Dark Matter, the Shadow, Silence, The Unknown, Doubt
In my presentation I discussed a dance piece called Frontier, choreographed by the Canadian choreographer and dancer Crystal Pite. An important theme in Frontier is the unknown and the border between the known and the unknown. Another important theme in Frontier is what Crystal calls: ‘silence that isn’t really silence,’ which I have linked to Serres’ notion of noise. In this essay I would like to expand on these notions and the way they are represented in Crystal’s work.