Category: language

The future is yet to be written.

digLeave a comment

David Joselit, Pamela M. Lee; Six Propositions After Trump’s Second Victory. October 2025; (191): 3–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00542

In his important and all too timely account Late Fascism (Verso, 2024),
Alberto Toscano has diagnosed the enfeeblements of such historical analogizing
in confronting our present conjuncture. His project reads fascism not as a hard-
and-fast set of ideological contrivances, much less a coherent theory or philoso-
phy, but rather “within the totality of its process”—that is, fascism’s longue durée: a
“dynamic that precedes its naming.” If contemporary fascism retains “the racial
fantasy of national rebirth and the manic circulation of pseudo-class discourse,”
“late fascism” (like late capitalism) not only names the radically changed economic
context in which we find ourselves but also underscores how “classic fascist fixes
are out of time.”

[…]

[Lateness] is at once a warning, descriptor, and a prompt. For one, it
forces us to think horizontally about new actors implicated in fascism’s current
constitution, not as an aberration to established authoritarian patterns but as its
logical, if seemingly contradictory, expansion.

[…]

These six short propositions—there could be countless more—provide
blunt, incomplete, and yet still necessary points of departure for further reflection.
We are reminded of the words of a friend that embolden us to move in such direc-
tions, no matter the collective despair: The future is yet to be written. This is indeed
the work of lateness. Repeat: It is never too late.

[…]

it is hard to pretend that art or
the art world can have any direct effect on American politics—or, more accurately,
any effect that isn’t largely illiberal.

[…]

Why have so many who produce discourse around art lost faith in what art can do, and instead persist in asking it to do something it patently cannot achieve?”

Portable Gray, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2025. Pope.L The Chicago Years. https://doi.org/10.1086/737294

Grounded in the many meanings and ideas of “home,” This Must Be the Place is a major new exhibition showcasing works drawn from across the Walker’s dynamic collections. Walker Art Center. June 20, 2024 – April 29, 2029. Galleries 4, 5, 6.

AG2025_1056101b or to have everything

digLeave a comment
AG2025_1056101b

Joan Didion, “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” first published in Vogue, 1961.

people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.

character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.

One throbbing pulse is shaking
    All Nature’s mighty frame,— 
The child its toys retaking,
    The ember’d grate its flame; 
Love, and folly, and madness,
    Petty aims, and grand, 
And fame, and hope, and gladness—
    To each one what he plann’d.

Still, whether loving or sighing,
    In the bridal garb or pall, 
We’re only drifting, flying
    To the final goal of all: 
We all seek what is ours,—
    A lad the joys of youth, 
A bee the daintiest flowers,
    Whilst I am seeking truth!

Truth, Victor Hugo

AG2025_DSF6669a or des regards noirs

dig
AG2025_DSF6669a

Paris Noir, podcast.

Parisian syncretism – Art critic and curator Franck Hermann Ekra discusses the multiple influences of Cote d’Ivoire artist Ouattara Watts and his painting Divination, exhibited here.

A new Black Paris map – Haitian photographer Henry Roy presents the context of Regards noirs (Black Looks), a series of photographs taken in 1996.

Visite de l’exposition Paris noir avec Alicia Knock et Éva Barois de Caevel. 15min 13s. Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Haiti Inter documents performance on the last day of the show.

laser-focussed on the needs of ordinary people

dig

“If anything, it is a very effective form of antifascist economic policy. We are at a moment where the crisis of economic security, of affordability, that comes with basic questions of dignity and identity are being used by the far right in ways that fuel the return of fascist tendencies. I think that having an agenda that is laser-focussed on the needs of ordinary people is what we need, and that is basically where the Democrats fell flat last year. At the federal level and the global level, we are dealing with the consequences of that lack of vision right now.”

Isabella M. Weber, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on Zohran Mamdani electorial proposals. (New Yorker)

AG2025_1155479a