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The author, Editor of Critical Inquiry, discusses our new website and the changing face of criticism in the age of terror.

On the representation of the Nakba in regional literature and film.

The topic of my essay is Palestinian morgue photography in the wake of the Israeli air strikes and the ground invasion of Gaza, during Operation Cast Lead. I especially focus on a fashionable angle that is prevalent among the local Palestinian press-photographers.  I term it the acrobatic gaze: from the heights of the fridges in the morgue the photographers try to be omniscient absently-present witnesses that are capable of combining in a single composition both the faces of the standing relatives and the faces of the supine bodies. These photographs raise ethical, aesthetical, and political questions about the representation of the dead who are displayed to their families and to the photographers for propaganda reasons as well.  

In this interview, Jacques Rancière describes the character of the aesthetic regime and the relationship between politics and aesthetics in his work, along with the role of artistic practices, technological innovations, and the institution of the museum in the redistribution of the sensible and the similarities and differences between his theories and Walter Benjamin’s work on modernity.  Rancière argues that the aesthetic regime entails both a rupture with what came before it and the possibility of recycling and reinterpreting works of the past, what Benjamin described as the surrealist practice of evoking the outmoded.  While emphasizing the political and military preconditions to the aesthetic regime over technological or economic considerations, Rancière also warns against drawing strict parallels between aesthetic regimes and political presuppositions of equality or inequality.  Furthermore, Rancière refuses to privilege Marcel Duchamp’s readymades in the aesthetic regime’s redistribution of the sensible, pointing, instead, to Emile Zola’s Le ventre de Paris and the creation of the modern institution of the museum as key moments that broke with preexisting distributions of the sensible.  Rancière also distinguishes his discussion of novelistic realism and narration from Benjamin’s characterization of modernity as the decline in the ability to narrate experience, critiquing Benjamin’s nostalgia for the past while recognizing as fruitful his linking of new possibilities in aesthetic experience to the creation of new technologies.

Beauty is a contested concept insofar as it seeks to mark a categorical distinction among the sources of pleasure, typically in terms of oppositions such as objective/subjective, universal/particular, necessity/contingency.  Kant represents a culmination of this tradition in defining the judgment of beauty in terms of the requirement for universal agreement, modeling the judgment of beauty as closely as possible to ordinary factual judgments.   A different tradition of thinking about beauty, however, while still seeking to mark a categorical distinction by reference to the idea of necessity, finds the relevant sense of necessity not in conditions of agreement but necessities of erotic love and the sense of requirement felt toward its objects.  This paper explores the consequences of taking this other tradition seriously, using Proust as a representative exemplar, as a way both of making sense of some of the features Kant ascribes to the concept of the beautiful, while avoiding the paradoxes stemming from his focus on the conditions for universal agreement. 

• A new line of self projection magazines that started blooming in Lagos, Nigeria, about the mid-1990s defined itself by filling almost completely every issue with photographs that depict politicians, businesspeople, sports and show business stars enjoying fruits of their extraordinary achievements on festive occasions. The magazine’s cozy coverage of the rich and famous irks a lot of serious cultural and literary critics who believe that this style resembles praise singing too closely. This paper, unlike mainline criticisms of the pictorial magazines, takes praise singing to be a serious subject. Its central proposition is that the Nigerian magazine culture embraced these magazines because they have successfully translated into photography the panegyric tendency that pervades popular, self-projection arts in the underlying Yorùbá cultural environment of southwestern Nigeria. The sub-genre of Yorùbá panegyric that the magazines rework into the photographic medium is oríkì bọ̀rọ̀kìnní, or praise chants of the eminent. The paper analyzes sample issues of Ovation magazine to outline ways of placing contemporary African cultural forms in a long perspective and to propose an example of how inter-mediality operates today in popular cultures. In the concluding section, the essay proposes that a “poetic” understanding of photography, as opposed to “theatricality” and or melancholic substitution, represents the best way to think about the type of festive portraiture practiced in Ovationand its imitators.

Responses to "Badiou's Number," by Ricardo L. Nirenberg and David Nirenberg (Summer 2011).