Chercher, trouver

Christian Bobin : la beauté simple du quotidien.

An Interview, 2007.


Skeptical, often deserving; a purgative; a seasoner; give live-
liness, pungency; a preservative; create a false impression;
is stored away … O, definitions, holding–for nothing–
our black hands … tassels, tassels .. the words come, and
the words come, trailing like dew upon the world’s wet
wounds, O salt!

Charles Wright, Salt

I thought how, with the glory of its bloom,
I should the darkness of my life illume

Paul Laurence Dunbar, Promise

Diane Enns on Thinking Through Loneliness

Q: Thinking Through Loneliness also draws on artistic and literary works. How did working with these texts help you in thinking through loneliness?

I wouldn’t know how to discuss any intense experience of suffering without reference to artistic and literary works. To be moved by a work is as essential, in my view, as to be inspired or provoked intellectually. I was struck by the longing for intimacy conveyed in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved decades ago on my first of many reads, which has stayed with me. And who can read Franz Kafka’s story ‘The Metamorphosis’ without shuddering over the terrifying alienation and loneliness of Gregor Samsa, understanding our own alienation through an encounter with his?

It would be difficult to analyse loneliness by referring exclusively to philosophical texts that engage with the subject, since there are so few. And in general, aside from Fromm-Reichmann’s 1959 essay, ‘Loneliness’, and a handful of other works, I found the social science literature to be rather too scholarly for understanding such a complex experience. Many of the categorisations of this or that type of loneliness landed too far from the original experience and as a result glossed over the vicissitudes of loneliness.

The most poignant descriptions of human experience always come from artists and writers. Given their intent is not to settle the rich complexity of an experience into something more systematised and palatable, we really must look to them for understanding.

Q and A with Professor Diane Enns on Thinking Through Loneliness (2022)

Transfiguration gestures toward freedom

The abolition of chattel slavery and the emergence of man, however laudable, long awaited, and cherished, did not yield such absolute distinctions; instead fleeting, disabled, and short-lived practices stand for freedom and its failure. Everyday practices, rather than traditional political activity like the abolition movement, black conventions, the struggle for suffrage, and electoral activities, are the focus of my examination because I believe that these pedestrian practices illuminate inchoate and utopian expressions of freedom that are not and perhaps cannot be actualized elsewhere. The desires and longings that exceed the frame of civil rights and political emancipation find expression in quotidian acts labeled “fanciful,” “exorbitant,” and “excessive” primarily because they express an understanding or imagination of freedom quite at odds with bourgeois expectations. Paul Gilroy, after Seyla Benhabib, refers to these utopian invocations and the incipient modes of friendship and solidarity they conjure up as “the politics of transfiguration.”21 He notes that, in contrast to the politics of fulfillment, which operate within the framework of bourgeois civil society and occidental rationality, “The politics of transfiguration strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable. Its rather different hermeneutic focus pushes towards the mimetic, dramatic and performative.” From this perspective, stealing away, the breakdown, moving about, pilfering, and other everyday practices that occur below the threshold of formal equality and rights gesture toward an unrealized freedom and emphasize the stranglehold of slavery and the limits of emancipation. In this and in other ways, these practices reveal much about the aspirations of the dominated and the contestations over the meaning of abolition and emancipation.

Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, 1993), 37; and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), 13, 41.

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America.

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Berlant, back in 2012.

Lauren Berlant on the Critical Lede, August 25, 2012. They introduced Cruel Optimism (2011).

“… forms of optimism, I’m very interested in, are the kind with which you attached your endurance in the world, with which you attached your continuity in the world

… what it means to have a life […] there’s so many people but one normative model of having a life […] it’s the job of politically engaged critical work to try to imagine other ways of having a life”

all of that is about the way that the labor of the reproduction of life in the historical present is sustain by the fantasy of the good life but is lived as an ongoingness

 you make your political claim in the present

 the present […] as a place where people are figuring out life

affect works in the present, it’s the bodies response to the world

attempts to change people’s political consciousness, not by changing their ideology, but by changing their affective relation to inhabiting the public

what ought to be in the collective imaginary for flourishing”


… optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.

via Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms

[NAME] opens

via mailchimp

[NAME] is opening up a storefront at 6572 SW 40th Street. We’re having a little party to celebrate this milestone this Saturday, February 12th, from 2-5pm.  Though we’ll officially start celebrating at 2pm, the shop will be open from 11am on, showcasing the books and editions that [NAME] has produced since 2009, with artists such as Christy Gast, Adler Guerrier, Beatriz Monteavaro, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Nathan Carter, Brian Kennon, and Cristina Lei Rodriguez, among so many others. We will also have some of the scholarly publications that we have worked on, including Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System; Practice Space; Dark Nights of the Universe, and more.

If you’re unable to join us on Saturday, visit us soon. Starting February 16th, we’ll be open from 11–5pm.


The appearance of black lives matter, 2017.

Lyric form

Marjorie Levinson – Lyric: the Idea of This Invention, 2015. And as a chapter in Thinking Through Poetry: Field Notes on the Romantic Lyric (Oxford University Press, 2018). 330 pp. (Hdbk., $82; ISBN 9780198810315). A review.

About her project, Professor Levinson writes:


“Borrowing frameworks from one discipline for use in another” is how Jonathan Culler describes one of theory’s traditional agendas and it gives a good general account of my procedures in this essay. Although the frameworks I borrow come from several disciplines (e.g., neurophysiology, post-classical physics, evolutionary biology, 19th-c morphology, developmental systems theory), they share a common paradigm (self-organization) and a common process (recursion). That paradigm and that process are the connect with lyric form, one of my core topics. The other topic is method, and there too I take a leaf from the sciences, arguing for an epistemic pluralism and, more radically, an ontic pluralism as well, such that we can allow not just different kinds of explanations for different levels of study, but different kinds of objects emerging at different scales and through different techniques of inquiry and display. The validity of my contribution is therefore tied to its level of analysis, which I characterize, via Culler once again, as “theory of the middle range, or what used to be called poetics” (as distinct from “high theory” on the one hand, and “literary criticism” on the other). By adapting some modeling moves from scientific discourses that target this middle range, I hope to circumvent the tired historicist/formalist standoff, and more important, to generate language for describing deep structure effects in the absence of deep structure causes and origins.

Event announcement at Stanford.

Marjorie Levinson reviews The Calamity Form, 2020.

Lauren Berlant

An appreciation in newyorker (2019). Supervalent Thought (their blog).

The Hundreds, co-written with Kathleen Stewart. (Form and Explanation by
Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian is referenced.)

Duke U Press obit.

Critical Inquiry.

On Citizenship And Optimism: Lauren Berlant, interviewed by David Seitz (2013).

Without Exception: On the Ordinariness of Violence by Brad Evans (2018).

Artforum (2014).

Cruel Optimism (2011) introduction; excerpt.

Genre Flailing (2018).

On Liberation –

Haiti’s participation in extending the notion of liberation is still relevant to our understanding of freedom and of being free, to being a citizen, sovereign and a subject.  Liberation moved from the conceptual and was situated in the corporeal.


Sort of related:

“I never let a statue tell me how nice I am”

Phife Dawg, “Award Tour,” from Midnight Marauders.