Can ‘Bad Subjects’ Overcome Ideology? With Freud, Althusser, Breton, Geuss and Marcuse “Why is it so hard for men to be happy[?]” Freud asks civilised society.[1] In this paper, I trace how human experience is restrained by social formations, and explore the possibility of ‘overcoming ideology’ through art. Freud submits…
go on…where dreams do not dream: a state of cultural decline “Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy,” reads the first line of TikTok’s ‘About Us’ page.[1] A cursory scroll on the platform yields a cultural wasteland of belletristic vacuity and unimpeachable vibes; micro-influencers strategically bite their lips at…
go on…Patricia Lockwood’s no one is talking about this will inevitably be read by people who are already talking about this Last December, while performing a post-mortem of my recent boyfriend with some friends, I unexpectedly fulfilled a lifelong goal: going seriously viral on Twitter (I am now at 130 thousand…
go on…The indelible first 16-minutes of Alain Resnais’1959 film Hiromshina mon amour tells its audience precisely everything it will do for the next hour-and-a-half. The film opens with the unbreaking, aggressive intimacy of entangled lovers pushing into each other’s skin like historians examining precious artefacts, as an unsettling, plaintive score wrings…
go on…Loose Narratives and Institutionalised Riot Systems Salman Rushdie is invariably invoked in conversations about the sprawling, fecund imaginary of old Bombay as a site of dreams and syncretism, where fanatical Hindu militant violence was but the stuff of magical realism. He described how, “[t]he Bombay that I grew up in,…
go on…Reviewing Shamus Rahman Khan’s ‘Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School’ Princeton University Press. 2011. 232 pages. $29.95 cloth. In 2009, Gossip Girl – a soap opera about the “obnoxious elite” in New York’s private schools – had its protagonist sermonise, “destiny’s for losers. It’s a…
go on…A critical reading of ‘The Betrothal in Santa Domingo’ Set during the Haitian revolution, Heinrich Von Kleist’s The Betrothal in Santa Domingo examines racial politics as vengeful, chaotic, and brutally gendered. Each character is wrought with suspicion of the racial ‘other,’ but the boundaries of race themselves welter into a…
go on…When History Has a Head and a Heart In the Communist Manifesto, Marx writes: “[w]hat else does the history of ideas demonstrate than that the products of the intellect are refashioned along with material ones? The ruling ideas of an age were always but the ideas of the ruling…
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style is cannibalised syntagmatic structures of meaning melt into nothingness intertextuality, interiority, depth, and the subconscious flatten into degraded effluvia and eclectic fragments hang in limbo between the outmoded bounds of high and low art
read: tiktok, totalitarianism, and the culture industry
In no one is talking about this, Lockwood floats through the themes and memes of fascism, sex, postmodernism, womanhood, and being extremely on the internet. You know, the usual.
read: my review of patricia lockwood’s ‘no one is talking about this’
“Anthony was glad he wasn’t going to work on his book. The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe his thoughts, but thoughts worthy of being clothed – the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.
Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
sanjana sheth 