The Politics of Death and the Question of Palestine

This article considers the work of Hannah Arendt and Ghassan Kanafani in relation to the social and juridical logic and form of the settler colony and of the settler-colonial logic and form of the Israeli state and its ideology, Zionism. The argument is framed in relation to two moments: (1) the notion and practice of Bildung—education, training, formation—where the subject of language, in becoming literate, thoughtful, and self-reflective, is to become a being that recognizes itself and others in these and related terms: as legible, autonomous, and self-determining; and (2) the ongoing debates around the politics of death, articulated through the writing of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Carl Schmitt, Achille Mbembe, and Arendt. The article argues that, insofar as they presume an understanding of Bildung as a principal category of social thought, these debates reiterate the terms they claim to diagnose or contest. It also argues that, in their affective relation to decolonization, Arendt—and Foucault and Agamben—conjures and advances a social panic in a desire to domesticate the destabilizing force of anticolonial struggle. Finally, the article reads Kanafani’s Rijāl fī al-shams (Men in the Sun) to argue that Kanafani’s novelistic practice discombobulates the terms privileged in the settler colony and in its social and literary logic and form, as it promises a nonredemptive, anomic, and non-state-centric futurity.

Rematerialization, Art, and Affective Economies

The paper highlights artworks that engage with materials to comment on the dematerialization of the economy and the invisibility of labour. The emphasis is on artworks which disturb these conditions through a process of rematerialization, defined as “attending to materials.” How to revalue what has been dematerialized, devalued, or deemed invisible? To revalue invisible labour is to find a material that can engage with the affective relation surrounding labour and space, a material that can experience the invisibility rather than represent it. By correspondences of materials, actions and the body, the artworks counter abstraction and standardized value. One can identify across diverse contemporary artworks parallel forms of rematerialization through tasks. Tasks are free from the hegemony in the binary of work vs. leisure and productive notions of land and labour. The geographically dispersed artistic examples present a possible process of revaluation rather than mere critique of value. These examples are compared against twentieth century artworks considered critique of standardized value. With the help of affect theories, the paper argues that such rematerialization through care and attention may offer a “reparative” process that posits an alternative to exposing economic structures.

The Emotional Geographies of Québécois Cinema

This text examines four Québécois movies and their impact on the affective relation of the province to key aspects of its territory: La Mort d’un bûcheron (Carle 1973), Kanehsatake 270 ans de résistance (Obomsawin 1993), Les Racquetteurs (Brault and Groulx 1958), and Le Chat dans le sac Groulx (1964). This chapter is divided in two main parts that are devoted respectively to the experience of thresholds, frontiers, and territorial conflicts as well as to the concrete effect of seasons and weather on exterior movie settings and film equipment. It uncovers a long-lasting instability in the relation between the rural spaces of Québécois cinema and the commonly associated emotions, as well as a corresponding unpredictability in the actual filmic experience tied to weather elements not directly associated with sight and sound. Ultimately, the text calls for the integration of this instability and this unpredictability as critical tools in Canadian cinema historiography.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment

Starting from differences between reenactment and the more established practice of historical reconstruction, leading practitioners and theorists ask how the notion of preservation and representation associated with reconstruction is transformed by reenactment into historical experience and affective relation to the past in the present. In other terms: How does dance convey historical meaning through sensuous form? Danced reenactment poses the problem of history and historicity in relation to the troubled temporality inherent to dance itself. Ephemerality as the central trope of dance is hence displaced in favor of dance as a reiterative practice that confounds categories of chronological time and opens up a theoretical space of history that is often invisibilized by ideologies of immediacy traditionally attributed to dancing. The preponderance of the re- in contemporary choreographic creativity points to the operational value of reenactment in dance as synonymous with cultural production itself inasmuch as culture is engaged with the re-appropriation of signs, citationality, and intertextuality. Collectively, these chapters theorize choreographic reenactments’ potential not only to re-arrange the relationship between past, present, and future, but also to destabilize singular authorship, to unleash choreographies’ multiple meanings, to challenge the linearity of dance history, to rewrite and re-inscribe dance canons, and to the highlight the dancing body’s agentive status as archive.

The pharmacologization of loneliness and insecurity

Research conducted in a province of Italy evidences that the consumption of psychotropic drugs mostly involves women, the elderly with chronic illnesses, and people who have experienced breakdown in a primary affective relation (separation, divorce, partner's death), as well as workers in precarious employment. As emerges from the debate on medicalization, psychotropic drugs are prescribed not only to treat specific psychopathologies but also to reduce the common emotions of loneliness and insecurity.