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Visual Culture

“Halls of Narcissistic Indulgence”

4 December 2015
Gender & Sexuality, Sex & Sexuality, Visual Culture
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locker-room

 

In a column today for Salon.com, “Who’s Really Getting Naked at the Gym,” Paula Young Lee responds to a recent New York Times article about the re-design of gyms, and how millennial men evidently want more privacy in the locker room.

Working within a 30-minute deadline, Paula contacted me to get my response to the Times article (which I had just read early that morning) and my observations and opinion on the situation, as I see it, in gym locker rooms today. Like all of Paula’s articles for Salon, this one is super-smart, bitingly funny and thus a great read.

Paula is the author of the best-selling, award-winning, Deer Hunting in Paris (2013). Here’s her take on the naked millennial male body:

The naked body is vulnerable because it’s stripped of culture. Abject and ashamed, it is reduced to the visible signs of health, musculature, fitness, thinness, and other markers that determine hierarchy inside a group. It is the condition of being stripped of status that is unbearable, prompting the young to reassert the armor of their street clothing as quickly as possible. Their insecurity isn’t lodged in their bodies but in their unstable social positions, which is why more powerful men– the “old guys” who, in theory, ought to be embarrassed by the grizzle and the hoar–don’t care two figs what you think of their butt cracks or belly buttons.

And as she quotes me as saying:

“Old guys have been parading around locker rooms for decades, and younger guys have been less prone to let it all hang out,” Ricco explains. “So this homosocial dynamic of nudity isn’t anything particularly new. But I would argue that there has never been more voyeurism and exhibitionism in the locker room than there is now.” Indeed, he affirms, “I would say that male bodies—and especially young muscular male bodies—are putting themselves on display more than ever.”

Lots more in the article, including where I talk about “halls of narcissistic indulgence.” Enjoy! And see you at the gym.

Lecture: “On the Commerce of Anonymity”

1 December 2015
Anonymity, Art, Drawing, Lectures & Events, Mourning, Portrait, Social Ethics, Visual Culture
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Here is the link to the audio file on YouTube of my Lecture, On the Commerce of Anonymity, that I presented on November 20, 2015, as part of the Emerging Research in Comparative Literature Series, at the University Toronto.

I want to thank Fan Wu and Jesscia Copley for the invitation to present some of my current work, and to all those in attendance that evening for their engaging questions and responses. I also want to thank Bao Nguyen for his editing of this audio recording. Finally, my thanks to Shaan Syed, whose work—the focus of this talk—continues to be such an important provocation and inspiration for my own.

For the final section of the paper that I did not have the time to present, see my earlier post on “anonymous and neutral mourning.”

sky-blue afterimage

1 December 2015
AIDS, Art, Film, Mourning, Poetry, Queer Theory, Visual Culture
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1460.original

A blue delphinium on World AIDS Day.

I have walked behind the sky.

For what are you seeking?

The fathomless blue of Bliss.

To be an astronaut of the void, leave the comfortable house that imprisons you with reassurance.

Suffering from CMV, a virus that among other things causes a retinal infection, and without the sort of treatments developed in the past decade or so, can lead to blindness, Derek Jarman persisted in his work as an artist and in his film Blue (1993), created one of the most uncompromising visualizations of blindness and the limits of visual representation in the time of AIDS.

As an “empty sky-blue afterimage,” Blue exposes us to the empty afterimage that is the blue of the sky. Sky-blue is the nominative-adjective pairing that describes and names an emptiness and an afterimage. But only in the sense that one speaks of the city being empty, or has the undeniable sense that the blue of the sky is the ground that remains after every image.

In the middle of his book, Derek Jarman’s Garden, there is a poem, the first line of which locates the poem, the book, the garden and the gardener “under this blue sky.” Jarman’s stony Dungeness garden became a blind man’s world, as blind as “the stone in the air” in Paul Celan’s poem, “Flower.”

The stone.

The stone in the air, which I followed.

Your eye, as blind as the stone.

—

Flower—a blind man’s word.

To stare at the sky, as a gardener might do, is to be caught up in the visual enthrallment of staring at nothing, and to find this blindness of sorts to be irreparable—simply enough. Or, if not to stare at the sky, then to stare at what the sky makes possible: “I can look at one plant for an hour” as Jarman writes, “this brings me great peace. I stand motionless and stare.” This is also the stance and regard that Blue solicits from us and asks us to endure, to sustain.

Like the flowers that close Jarman’s garden book, and the delphinium that is placed at the end of Blue, perhaps these are the few words that remain after unsparing loss, the words that are more persistent than any final word could ever be. These would be the words dedicated to the friend who did not save my life, voiced by the body of this death. These are the words that continue “to go without saying,” by a perceiving that continues to go without seeing. Blind man’s words: Flower. Blue. Adieu.

[Adapted from my book, The Logic of the Lure, 2003]

To do justice to things and each other

24 September 2015
Art, Collective Afterlife of Things, Continental Philosophy, Jean-Luc Nancy, Queer Theory, Social Ethics, Things, Time and Temporality, Visual Culture
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I recently led a discussion amongst all of the Fellows at the Jackman Humanities Institute (University of Toronto) of William Haver’s essay, “The Art of Dirty Old Men: Rembrandt, Giacometti, Genet,” published in Parallax, in a special issue that I edited on “unbecoming,” (vol. 11, no. 2, 2005). Here are my introductory remarks.

One of the principal assertions in the study of Visual Culture, including what WJT Mitchell, one of the founders of the field has elaborated as “picture theory,” entails the philosophical reclamation of “picture thinking”—the kind of thinking that Hegel had attempted to thoroughly denigrate. At the same time, such methods that for awhile comprised what was referred to as the “visual turn,” entails an embrace of Kant’s notion of the schema, precisely in order to think in non-symbolic and non-representational ways not only whatever the word “culture,” designates in “visual culture,”  but also “visuality,” of which “images” are just one of the many “things” in question. But as these names imply, “picture thinking” or “picture theory” are also ways to engage in thinking and the practice of thought, and not only through pictures (as though images were merely forms of mediation between the mind and the world), but more deeply and perhaps more philosophically, about thought “itself:” its source, its practice, its durations and its interruptions. In the wake of our reading of Deleuze, we can speak of “the image of thought,” in which that image might be a thing in addition to possibly being a conceptual personae or an affective perception or intuition. This is of serious consequence, since there is an inextricable relation between thought and things (to quote the title of Leo Bersani’s most recent book), and needless to say, it this relation that resides at the heart of our theme at the Jackman Humanities Institute this year, and our common theme of “things that matter.”

As we begin to parse the relation between thought and things, we might turn to Jean-Luc Nancy, who states—in one of his books on Hegel, in fact—that “thought sinks into things only to the extent that it sinks into itself—which is its own act of thought” (Restlessness, 15). Thus the ways in which thought sinks or penetrates into things, or simply acts in the vicinity of things, is the way in which thought thinks. This image of thought is the intuition of sense—its literality and visuality—in which the Kantian schema proves to be nothing other than an image. As Fredric Jameson has recently pointed out, this is what Einstein’s thought experiments consisted of, and, we might add, how quantum theory thinks about things. Namely: through non-representational yet still referential pictures, including diagrams. As Jameson explains, in all of these instances, it is the signifier that determines the signified, and the effect determines the cause. These are formulas that we are utterly familiar with, in our various engagements with post-structuralism and deconstruction.

This is also the inverse temporality that I am interested in, and that motivates the research project that I am pursuing here at the JHI on the collective afterlife of things. It is a temporality that does not only track the effects of the present on the past, but of the future on the present. This temporality is rendered literary and is visualized in the science fiction sub-genre of the time-travel narrative; and in fact it is in a recent review of a new theoretical study of this genre, where Jameson, in the very last sentence of his article, draws the stunning conclusion that “temporality is then nothing but a time-travel narrative.” (“In Hyperspace,” review of Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative, by David Wittenberg, Fordham; London Review of Books, 10 September 2015).

This is where I think William Haver’s essay on “The Art of Dirty Old Men,” enters the discussion, and its provocation not about the history but about the historicity of thought, which is to say, thought’s sinking into things/into itself, which in turn is to speak of thought’s image. For whereas in these sci-fi  time-travel narratives there is, as Jameson explains, “the transcendental necessity of superspace in any narrative rendering of time,” Haver argues that due to the force of finitude, meaning “non-transcedence,” such narrative renderings of time are interrupted (including in the disciplinary discourses of “history” or “art history” and their own aspirations toward a transcendental perspective in the form of explanation, interpretation and understanding). Further, it is not so much that time-travel becomes impossible, but more precisely that it now must be thought as generating not temporality, but what Haver describes as “a-temporal disjunct simultaneity,” or more simply: the sense of finitude—finitude’s historicity. Yet to all of this we must ask: why is this case?

Haver’s answer is that it is because of the material impasse of existence, the fact that existence, or what he describes as the “identity and equality of sentient being” is abject in its non-transcendence. Meaning, the finitude of bodies, thoughts and things, in their incommensurable singularity and sheer exteriority: things that is, other than in terms of the instrumental, meaning or significance, the calculable or the numerable. In other words: the dirty old man whose look butted against Genet’s own non-contemplative and impersonal seeing. “Material impasse” describes the impasse or essential insufficiency of thought to its objects (in a word: materiality) and that which in its materiality is irreducible to a thing.

In “On the Solitude of Things,” a chapter of an unpublished book on Genet and the political, Haver at one point makes clear that “it is not…simply a matter of resigning or refusing one’s transcendence, of abandoning the distance of perspective. Rather it is a matter of sustaining the syncopations every historicization elides, of inhabiting the infinite yet absolutely proximate distance between evidence and experience, between interpretation and evidence, between transcendence and finitude” (Solitude, 10).

Genet speaks to this interruption of the time-travel narrative and thus of temporality, in a way that underlines how this experience—which Haver will go on to theorize as not only the conviction of the aesthetic, but also the experience of the ethical and the political—when he (Genet) writes (first block quote on page 29) about the sensuous pleasure of his hand in a boy’s hair, and how even though he (Genet) “shall die, nothing else will.”

 A little while ago I wrote that though I shall die, nothing else will. And I must make my meaning clear. Wonder at the sight of a cornflower, at a rock, at the touch of a rough hand –all the millions of emotions of which I’m made –they won’t disappear even though I shall. Other men will experience them, and they’ll still be there because of them. More and more I believe I exist in order to be the terrain and proof which show other men that life consists in the uninterrupted emotions flowing through all creation. The happiness my hand knows in a boy’s hair will be known by another hand, is already known. And although I shall die, this happiness will live on. ‘I’ may die, but what made that ‘I’ possible, what made possible the joy of being, will make the joy of being live on without me.

(Genet, The Prisoner of Love, NYRB, 2003 translated by Barbara Bray, 361)

This is not a transcendental time-travel narrative, in which one travels back to (or from) the future, but is instead what I wish to theorize as the collective afterlife of things, in which the abject non-transcendence of our finitude is what we share between us (the fact and condition of “social ontology”), and not in some future end of times, but here, now when we see a clothespin left behind on a line, or look at a Rembrandt, a Giacometti, or in our encounters with any number of other things. As Haver argues, the “thing” of painting or of seeing provokes an accidental intuition of the identity and equality of sentient being as that which is predicated upon nothing (no sufficient principle or reason) and thus is absolutely unjustifiable. To give ourselves over to this unjustifiable existence, would be to begin to do justice to things and each other.

Tom McDonough’s review of The Decision Between Us

21 September 2015
Art, Continental Philosophy, Gender & Sexuality, Jean-Luc Nancy, Mourning, Queer Theory, Reviews, Roland Barthes, Social Ethics, The Decision Between Us, Visual Culture
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I am very pleased to receive this review of my book by art historian Tom McDonough, that was recently published in the journal Critical Inquiry. Click on the link below to access the complete review.

Tom McDonough review in Critical Inquiry

Forms as Scenes

20 August 2015
Art, Continental Philosophy, Scenes, Social Ethics, The Decision Between Us, Visual Culture
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The other day I read Michael Wood’s review of Caroline Levine’s new book, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, 2015) in the London Review of Books (27 August 2015), and now I am curious to read Levine. Not because the four principal forms that she focuses on (listed as the book’s subtitle), are the kind of forms that I am interested in, but primarily for two other reasons.

The first, as Wood describes it, is Levine’s “suggestion that forms are never alone, that they get in each other’s way.” To think about forms as non-autonomous, is of course to completely re-define what we mean when we speak of forms. Here, forms are less stable, self-contained, and isolated entities, than they are understood to be  mobile, touching, overlapping, colliding and contaminating formative and “de-formative” forces. Their boundaries and limits are permeable or fluid, extending and overflowing. Contrary to conventional meaning and understanding, forms are not closed, but open. In a sense, we might say that it is at the place, zone, line or contour of the formative force of collision (for instance), that form is formed—as always singular plural. This leads me to want to make the claim not that there is (or are) a form of co-existence or being-with (formalism of the social and of form), but that the spacing of the “with” is what form means—both form’s source and sense.

Which leads to the second, equally if not more so, provocative and enticing theoretical approach of Levine’s, the one that Wood thinks “it’s worth pausing over…since it’s quite rare, and very promising.” At which point he hands the floor over to the author, who he quotes as stating:

The point here is less to use formalist methods to read Dickens than to use Dickens to throw light on the operations of social form. If this seems like literary criticism turned upside down, that is certainly part of my purpose. I have not understood literary texts in this book as reflections or expressions of prior social forms, but rather as sites, like social situations, where multiple forms cross and collide.

I too regard this as an extremely promising critical/theoretical approach to works of art, in no small part because in Levine’s self-description of it, I see something that closely resembles the approach that I have taken in my writing on contemporary art, literature and theory, most recently in my book, The Decision Between Us: art and ethics in the time of scenes. Whether this makes Wood’s sense of its rarity any more or less the case, I am heartened to encounter his estimation of it, and what appears to be a very compelling deployment. One that does not read the social back into the work of literature or art, or even reads the work outward onto the social, but that understands works of art—their forms—as social sites, or what, in my book, I mean by “scenes.”

In their attempts to think the relation of art and the social, aesthetics and the ethical, formalist methods operate with the assumption that one or the other exists prior to the other, and as a form separate from the other holds the potential to shape or inform the other. Whereas a non-formalist approach distinguishes itself by asserting that any notion of literary, artistic or social form is only possible to the extent that one attends to the scene where as Levine writes: “forms cross and collide.” To which I would go on to argue that it is “in” or “at” the coming-together and apart where forms are formed—where and how form happens—and neither before nor after.

Forms are thus re-conceived as needing to be sustained as the open and extended spaces that they are, in order to “remain” or persist as forms. Forms are incredibly fragile things, if not always, then often. Such that we might conclude that it is precisely such impermanent scenes that are the most worth trying to sustain, in and as the impossibility of their obdurate formal permanence. Therein lies the inseparability of aesthetics and ethics.

Preface to “The Existence of the World is Always Unexpected: Jean-Luc Nancy in conversation with John Paul Ricco”

21 July 2015
Art, Collective Afterlife of Things, Continental Philosophy, Futurity, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Social Ethics, Visual Culture
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Published in: Art in the Anthropocene, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (Open Humanities Press, 2015). The entire interview (included all references and notes), along with the rest of the 400+ page book, can be read and downloaded here: Art in the Anthropocene

In a recent article in The New York Times titled “Learning How to Die in the
Anthropocene,” Roy Scranton argues that the current geological, technological,
and climatic global situation has shifted the classic philosophical problem
from how to die as individuals to how to die as a civilization. Scranton
served in the United States Army from 2002 to 2006 and was stationed
in Iraq following the US invasion in 2003. A couple of years later, when
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Scranton realized that he was witnessing
“the same chaos and urban collapse I’d seen in Baghdad, the same failure of
planning and the same tide of anarchy.” It is precisely this inextricable interdependence—
and therefore the always potentially catastrophic destructive
effects—of the natural and technological that Jean-Luc Nancy refers to as
“eco-technology.” For, as Nancy is keen to remind us, “nature always contains
and offers the prime matter for technology, whereas technology alters, transforms,
and converts natural resources towards its own ends.” With “this
eco-technology that our ecologies and economies have already become,”
we are confronted with the geopolitical logic of globalization today. What is
new about the eco-technical logic currently operating is that the reciprocal
relations between the economic and ecological wed technology and nihilism
at an unprecedented worldwide scale, one that may prove to encompass the
human species. But proof for whom in that case?

As Nancy goes on to argue, “whereas until now one used to describe ends
(values, ideals, and senses) as being destitute, today ends are multiplying
indefinitely at the same time as they are showing themselves more and more
to be substitutable and of equal value.” It is based upon this understanding
of the equivalency of ends constructed by the eco-technical, that Nancy has
provided ways in which to think about the connections between the Iraq invasion
and Hurricane Katrina as at once military, geopolitical, technological,
natural catastrophes, and environmental disasters. Which is not to cast them
as equivalent catastrophes, but rather to understand them as events entirely
caught up in the catastrophic logic of general equivalence in which every
moment has become economized, as every single thing has been monetized.
In response to this, Nancy has put forth the notion of the “condition of an
ever-renewed present,” which he goes on to define as “not an immobile present
but a present within historical mobility, a living sense of each moment,
each life, each hic et nunc [here and now]. A sense that is characterized by
exposure to its own infinity, to its incompleteness”—and thus, we might add,
to its in-equivalence to every other moment and thing.

So perhaps it is not only a matter, as Roy Scranton argues, of learning to see
each day as the death of what came before, but in doing so, of seeing that
day as the birth of the present in and as its own—ever-renewed—finitude.

Meaning: no longer the projection of a future or as part of the project of
future ends. Instead, as Nancy has recently argued, “what would be decisive,
then, would be to think in the present and to think the present.” That is,
of the present not as absolute and final presence, but as appearing near,
proximate, close to, and in rapport with. As he goes on to explain, if one
wants to speak of “end” it is necessary to say that the present has its end in
itself, in both senses of goal and cessation. The finitude of each singularity
is thus incommensurable to every other, and therein exists the equality of
all singularities—their in-equivalence. It is in this way that Nancy calls for
an adoration of—or esteem for—the inestimable singularity of living beings
and things, and the equality that lies in their in-equivalence to any general
schema, measure, principle, or horizon. This is a matter of attending to the
inestimable worth of things as opposed to the appropriation of each and
every priceless experience. Therefore Nancy closes his recent book After
Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, with the following claim: “To
demand equality for tomorrow is first of all to assert it today, and by the
same gesture to reject the catastrophic equivalence. It is to assert common
equality, common incommensurability: a communism of nonequivalence.”
For Nancy, the proliferation of so many common ordinary things today is
not only the obvious evidence of capitalist production and accumulation,
but also the fact that (as quoted above) “ends are multiplying indefinitely,”
and precisely for this reason offer “more and more motives and reasons to
discern what is incomparable and nonequivalent among ‘us.’”

Therefore, as Maurice Blanchot contended in 1959, when philosophy lays
claim to its end “it is to a measureless end,” such that “measurelessness is the
measure of all philosophical wisdom,” so too in our reading and engagement
with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy today do we come to realize that when
philosophy (or more modestly, thought) confronts the prospect of the end
of humanity, that the incommensurable remains the measure of eco-technical
wisdom. Furthermore, given the ways in which Nancy has enabled us to
understand art as “the privileged domain for an interrogation of finality,”
aesthetic praxis is one of the principle means by which we confront the
problematic of ends. It is in this way that his comments below will prove
indispensible to ongoing considerations of the interconnections between
art, aesthetics, politics, and environments in what has come to be called the
Anthropocene.

L.A. Book Launch

28 February 2015
Art, Continental Philosophy, Juergen Mayer H., Lectures & Events, Scenes, The Decision Between Us, Visual Culture
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THESE SCENES OF UNBECOMING

A conversation with John Paul Ricco, Nasrin Himada and Etienne Turpin

Tuesday, the 31st of March 2015

6-8PM

Poetic Research Bureau

951 Chung King Road

Los Angeles, CA 90012

To celebrate the release of our recent respective publications, I will join Nasrin Himada and Etienne Turpin in a discussion of the ethics and politics of unbecoming. Within this theoretical framework, and in relation to various scenes, topics for engagement will include: violence, sex, death, brutality, sharing, extinction, pleasure, animality, mourning, confinement, and bodies. Copies of the publications will be available for purchase.

Nasrin Himada currently holds a post-doctoral research fellowship in Communications at the Université de Montréal, and is a visiting scholar in the Aesthetics and Politics program at Cal Arts. She is co-editor (with Chris Lee) of issue number 7 (Fall/Winter 2014 of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy, on the theme of “Incarceration.”

Etienne Turpin is a philosopher living and working in Jakarta, Indonesia, where is the director of anexact office. He is the co-editor (with Anna-Sophie Springer) of the two-volume Intercalations: Volume 1 Fantasies of the Library; and Volume 2 Land & Animal & Nonanimal; both published by K. Verlag and Haus der Kulturen Welt, 2015.

Interview with The Medium (a student newspaper at the University of Toronto)

1 October 2014
Art, Continental Philosophy, Jean-Luc Nancy, Queer Theory, Roland Barthes, Scenes, Social Ethics, Teaching, The Decision Between Us, Visual Culture
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U of T’s John Ricco is an associate professor of contemporary art, media theory, and criticism. His work focuses on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophies of politics, among other things, as discussed in his latest monograph, The Decision Between Us. His latest work is billed as an “exploration of the spaces between us”, including “scenes of passionate, erotic pleasure as well as deep loss and mourning”. Ricco took some time to talk to The Medium about his new monograph and his inspiration to write it, and provided a preview of his current project.

The Medium: What inspired this desire to conceptualize the staging of the space of decision in 20th-century art?

John Ricco: I have always been interested in thinking about social relations, and the spaces and forms of being together. In my first book, The Logic of the Lure, I focused on scenes of social sexual attraction. In the new book, I was interested in moving from questions of attraction and what lures one out toward other places and people, to the spaces that are shared between us in our social relations and encounters—spaces that are ones of separation. I argue that the extent to which we partake in the social pleasures is the extent to which we sustain this separated spacing. “Decision” is one name for how we participate in this space of shared separation. In the six chapters of my book, I look at works by various late-20th-century artists, writers, and theorists as examples of such scenes of decision in drawing, photography, and installation art, amongst other art forms and genres. One might argue that such staging of the scene of decision is present in art across the centuries, but my study is limited to examples from 1953 to the present, in part because this is the art historical period that I specialize in, but also because many of the works from this period foreground the participatory role of the audience or reader in his or her encounter with works of art, texts, etc. To decide to partake in the work, and thus immediately to be confronted with questions as to how and why to partake, is another way in which I think of these as scenes of aesthetic and ethical decisions.

TM: What was it about Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories specifically that drew you to his works more than anyone else’s?

JR: There are so many things about Nancy’s work that I find compelling and useful for my own. First and foremost is the way in which he is committed to conceiving such essential philosophical questions of existence and being, not in terms of the individual subject or ego, but as always shared. For Nancy, being is always “being with”. If that is so—and I completely think it is—then obviously the ethical is inseparable from the ontological because the ethical is the question of how to be and coexist with others.

TM: How long did this book take to complete considering your busy academic schedule?

JR: A book like this is almost always a long time in the making. It requires several years of reading, research, and conceptualization, along with many stages of writing and rewriting. Along the way, I presented parts of it at academic conferences, workshops, and public lectures, and/or as articles in journals. I finished the first draft of the complete manuscript and submitted it to the press right around the end of 2011. It then took a little more than two years for it to be proofread and edited, and for it to go from manuscript to a fully designed, formatted, indexed, and printed book. This entire process from conception to publication took about five years to complete and many hands were involved in addition to my own.

In terms of my academic work, essentially whatever time is not allocated for my teaching or administrative duties is devoted to my research and writing. I try to strike a balance between all three aspects of my job, and to set aside time nearly every day to work on whatever research or writing projects I am currently engaged in. It is easier during the summer, when I am not teaching, to make significant progress on my own work—and, of course, sabbaticals, such as the one I am on right now, provide incredibly valuable uninterrupted time to focus on a long-term project.

TM: Tim Dean called you “one of our most brilliant philosophers of visuality”. Does praise like that influence how you write?

JR: Well, I can easily return the compliment and say, unequivocally, that Tim Dean is one of our most brilliant philosophers of sexuality. Everyone should read his book Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, which is hands-down the best book on sex and sexuality out there. So when someone whose work you admire and have learned so much from says something like that about you, you cannot help but be completely honored and deeply humbled at once. As far as influencing the way I write… well, it certainly raises the stakes, doesn’t it!

TM: Can you tell me a little more about Non-Consensual Futures? How do you feel the use of violence has altered neo-liberalism?

JR: You are referring to my current research and book project, which I had been calling Non-Consensual Futures, but which now carries the title The Outside Not Beyond: Pornographic Faith and the Economy of the Eve. It is the third book in a trilogy, following upon The Logic of the Lure and The Decision Between Us. As I mentioned earlier, the first book was about attraction and the second was about decision, and now the third is about departure and abandonment. It grows out of two areas of research: one on the images of bodies falling from the World Trade Centre towers on 9/11, and the other on various instances of excess and the overflowing of corporeal limits. What ties them together are the ways in which bodies come to be defined in terms of their exposure to the outside, a spacing that does not lie in some abstract or transcendent realm “beyond”, but rather is right there in such ordinary and everyday instances as the step of a foot, or the partial opening of the mouth. “Pornographic faith” is my way of naming the thoroughly corporeal comportment and exposure to this radical uncertainty, the pleasure, and of abandoning the sense of one possessing a secure ground from which to act, or a definite end toward which one will eventually reach. I argue that another name for this is “freedom”.

Much of my work on neo-liberalism’s use of violence originally emerged from two undergraduate visual culture seminars that I regularly teach in the Department of Visual Studies at UTM, one called “Capital, Spectacle, War” and the other “Architectures of Vision”. In my classes, we are interested in the ways in which images and visual spectacle are deployed by the militarized neo-liberal state to shock its subjects into states of fear and anxiety, as evidenced, for example, in the Bush administration’s use of such images of violence as part of its “war on terror”.

This interview has been edited for length.

Published: Monday, September 29th, 2014

Lecture & Seminar at Rice University’s Humanities Center

2 March 2013
Architecture, Continental Philosophy, Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lectures & Events, Mourning, Religion, Social Ethics, Time and Temporality, Uncategorized, Visual Culture
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On March 7 & 8, 2013 I will give a lecture and lead a seminar based upon my current book project: Non-consensual futures: pornographic faith and the economy of the eve. I am honored by the invitation extended by Professor Deborah Harter and her graduate students in the Mellon Seminar:

Frames of the Beautiful, the Criminal, and the Mad: The Art and the Science of Excess

Faculty leader: Deborah Harter, associate professor of French studies

Student participants: Sarah Seewoester Cain (linguistics), Linda Ceriello (religious studies), Kristen Ray (English), Nathaniel Vlachos (anthropology), and Rachel Schneider Vlachos (religious studies).

Seminar Description
Reflecting on representations of the “excessive” in science and in art of the modern period – madness, genius, criminal, eccentric, beautiful, and pathological – this seminar welcomes students from all fields in the humanities and social sciences. We will consider the aesthetic with scientific, the ethical with the historical, and play havoc with all usual boundaries of disciplines, period, and genre.