Writing on Israeli art in light of Heidegger is a pioneering and subversive act: pioneering, because it has not yet been undertaken to any significant extent; subversive, because it challenges the exclusion of Heidegger from Israeli academic discourse due to his Nazi past. The engagement with major works from the corpus of Israeli art through a Heideggerian perspective proceeds along two paths, corresponding to the two ways in which art is addressed in Heidegger’s essay “On the origin of the work of art”: the first is associated with the image of a stage (the open); the second is associated with the image of the rift (Riß), within which the strife between earth and world unfolds. This endeavor proves fruitful to both parties: it broadens the discussion of Israeli art, while enriching Heidegger’s discussion of art by introducing new dimensions to the notions of the stage and the rift.
This essay critically examines the relationship between music technology and the democratisation of musical creativity, using the Ableton Move as a case study. While digital advancements like the Move simplify music creation by promising accessibility, speed, and frictionless workflows, they often conflate democratisation with mere accessibility. True democratisation, however, requires more than removing barriers; it demands fostering agency, originality, and meaningful engagement. The Move’s design, prioritising convenience and pre-approved gestures, risks homogenising music-making by stripping away the struggle, reflection, and discomfort essential to creative expression. Drawing on theories of creativity and the role of productive discomfort, the essay argues that friction is not an obstacle but a catalyst for creativity. It concludes that democratisation in music technology must move beyond frictionless design, embracing intentional discomfort to empower users to challenge norms, redefine their creative processes, and reclaim genuine artistic agency.
This article explores the “lesson” found in the “scandal of the aesthetic event,” drawing on Heidegger’s inquiry into what provokes thought. It argues that the discourse of the “self-evident” — dogmatic and rationalistic — leads to cultural desolation, a condition currently characterizing Israeli politics. Countering this, the essay suggests that provocative encounters with art awaken consciousness. The proposed solution is “active nihilism,” located in the intermediate space between the self-evident and critical interpretation. This nihilism embodies a momentary encounter with “radical otherness” in art, suspended between “meaning and jouissance.” Radical Otherness frames our era as possessing “baroque” elements, where thought is awakened by aesthetic shock. The discussion centers on a Caravaggio painting displayed at Palazzo Barberini, positioned in intriguing proximity to a work formerly attributed to Guido Reni.
This essay proposes bad guest poetics as a way to examine how artistic practices resist philosophical abstractions of hospitality when applied to literature and performance. Rejecting phenomenological terminology derived from Levinas, the essay returns to an ordinary understanding of invitation and hosting in order to analyze David Antin’s improvised “talk poems.” Delivered in institutional settings and later adapted into texts, these performances present talking as poetry while deliberately testing the expectations placed on invited speakers. Focusing on Antin’s 2006 talk poem “hiccups,” performed at SUNY Buffalo, the essay shows how Antin responds obliquely and comically to Levinasian poetics advanced by his host, Stephen McCaffery. Grounding poetic meaning in bodily interruption and ordinary language, “hiccups” exposes how theoretical vocabularies can become inhospitable to artistic practice. Bad guest poetics thus names an ethic of artistic responsibility enacted through refusal rather than accommodation.
In his recent book, Dror Pimentel calls for “aesth-ethics” to “replace ethics as prima philosophia”. Aesth-ethics is thus a new way of thinking not only about art or ethics but also about thinking itself. In this paper, I discuss this “new discourse” in light of Derrida’s deconstruction. First, I draw on Pimentel’s remarks about Levinas in order to recall the relationship between hospitality, which is a key concept of aesth-ethics, and the gift. I then focus on Derrida’s understanding of the gift. Through a reading of the analysis of the latter in Glas, I suggest that a deconstructive case can be made for aesth-ethics. However, I also argue that the undecidability of Derrida’s thinking of the gift sits uneasily with aesth-ethics insofar as it is understood as first philosophy. I argue that aesth-ethics tends to repress the violence of the event to which it means to be hospitable.
In this essay, I build on a theory of tragedy (that tragedy involves the inhospitality of the world to what matters) to explore how tragedy’s beauty can be understood more robustly than through the traditional functional conceptions of tragedy from Aristotle, Hume, and others. Part of tragedy’s beauty is the unique frame it places on its constituent values lost. It is only because something matters that its loss due to the world’s inhospitality can be registered as tragic. This makes tragedy an indirect window into what matters. Artistic representations of tragedy can be appreciated along this measure: the unique and creative ways they represent their values lost, providing through this representation a novel and enriching perspective on what matters. How does this view of the beauty of tragedy have consequences outside the realm of aesthetics? Specifically, how do we understand the role of the tragic emotions in real-life tragedies?
The urgent and existential nature of the ecological crisis easily inspires fear and desperation, begging for radical interventions. According to Theodor Adorno, such interventions easily relapse into actionism, which reproduces the instrumental and self-centred thinking that undergirds our contemporary crises. This paper engages with these hesitations about actionism to reflect on the limitations and potential of activism in the Anthropocene by elaborating on Adorno’s hesitations about actionism. I subsequently examine how these hesitations led him to endorse a negativistic form of resistance revolving around saying “no” to the present. By turning to Eve Sedgwick’s concepts of paranoid and reparative reading, this paper considers why such negativism alone might not be sufficient because it can stultify and paralyse those engaging in activism. As such, this article argues that critically (self-)reflecting on activism is crucial today, but that such efforts must always be paired with affirmative searches for a reparative otherwise.
The risk of mourning, as Jacques Derrida continues to teach us, is that one of the two of you will see the other die. That there will come a day when “one of the two of us will see himself no longer seeing the other ...”. Where, the limit of friendship — when the friend is no longer with you — is also its very condition. That, without the risk, not of death — which is not so much a risk as an inevitability — but the risk of loss, of being the one without the other whom one calls, has called, one‘s friend, there is no possibility of friendship.
The text traces how rock art in southern Africa has been constrained by disciplinary frameworks and the attendant consequences. The argument proposes an alternative approach that renders San rock art multigenerational and intercultural through the concept of ethical ingenuity developed through a sustained engagement with the example of the Ukwanda Puppetry and Design Collective’s work in South Africa. The argument culminates in a call for a critical imagination that allows for the productive intermingling of knowledge and desire, thereby opening new possibilities for ethical engagement with the past in the present. This possibility lies in a contemporary engagement with San cosmology of the therianthrope and how the visual and embodied unity of puppet and puppeteer reactivates the human–animal hybrid as lived, performative experience and mnemotechnical envoy. This activation invites the viewer into an act of “beholding”, a dynamic that reworks the ethical imagination of the post-apartheid.
The notion of hospitality is re-thought as an event that pierces through three fundamental economies, constituting human existence: The economy of perception, addressed by phenomenology; the economy of sexuality, addressed by psychanalysis; and the economy of production, addressed by Marxism. Each of these economies negates primordial Being, understood through the Hebrew term rav. In each of these economies, the event of hospitality is described as a secondary negation of the rav’s initial negation. In phenomenology, the event is envisioned through in-stasis, conceived as the counterpoint to Heidegger’s notion of ek-sistence. In psychoanalysis, it is thought in terms of the uncanny. In Marxism, it is exemplified with Kafka’s figure of Odradek, that eludes the economy of commodification. This reframing of hospitality positions it as a fundamental trait of human existence, one that warrants further exploration. Discussion concludes with evaluating the relation of the current economy of the algorithm to hospitality.
Review of Aesth-ethics: Of Hospitality in Art by Dror Pimentel, translated by Talya Halkin (Palgrave: Macmillan, 2024). 294 pp. Softbound. ISBN: 978-3-031-65845-7.
Review of i'm not ghosting you by Jeremy Fernando (Delere Press, 2025). 122 pp. ISBN 978-981-94-1724-7.
What would be required to dismantle modern psychology? How could it be purged of its pervasive dichotomies? Could we focus on hybridisation to reformulate psychology as a non-modern science? This overreaching project will be explored in a series of four essays. This second article will explore some usually overlooked exchanges between Bruno Latour and cognitive sciences. The French philosopher, suspicious of classic cognitivism, crafted an alternative theory of thinking. Incidentally, different authors started to conceptualise cognition as situated and distributed simultaneously. However, by the turn of the century, Latour turned his attention to ecology, leaving the incognita of how his prior theses would play out in contemporary debates about the nature of the mind. This article explores Latour further as a cognitive scientist by reconstructing his account of cognition, delineating the genealogy of those dialogues and contrasting his arguments with other contemporary authors’ work.
The article examines the relationship between members of the British aristocracy and German Nazism in the 1920's,1930’s and 1940’s. The examination is extended into an analysis of the resistance movements in Norway and Denmark during the occupation 1940-1945. A significant issue is the infiltration of democratic, non-repressive societies perpetrated by German Nazis during World War II and the decades leading up to it. The article is not historical. It is a literary interpretation of the socially, politically and psychologically complex conditions making up the crisis of World War II, based on the three novels. The analysis of Kirsten Thorup's novel Mørket bag dig includes an account of the rescue of the Danish Jews. The rescue operation was undertaken for the sake not only of the Jewish people but also for the sake of the preservation of democracy as an ethical and humanistic institution.
Review of Undoing Apartheid by Premesh Lalu ( Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023). 202 pp. Softbound. ISBN: 978-1-509-55284-9.
Open-ended, controlled, and graphic, Claire Keegan's narrative style is powerfully brief and succinct and her mastery with the short story form has garnered global attention. Allowing herself limited space to share her depths and insights, she portrays slivers of lives and pieces of Irish history by getting to the point and introducing us to characters who in an almost chronicle-like fashion represent national stereotypes. Their queries and anxieties are set in narratives within a provincial Irish context expressing local concerns yet possessing wider relevance as universal issues. Their fates bind us across cultural borders and divides, therein lie their wider relevance. This essay inserts Keegan in an existentialist framework and draws on Zygmunt Bauman, Walter Benjamin, and Susan Sontag while focussing on stories where the mundane hides deeper concerns which are expressed less through verbal communication than pauses and silences charged with emotion.
Coastal zones are places of permanent bleed and shift, whether sudden and swift or slow and shallow. This experimental paper takes the coast — broadly conceived — as a site for a reflection on historical writing and historical memory, following the history of whales and whaling. Its three sections, one on the sun-stricken waters and hidden whaling stations of Adventure Bay in Tasmania (“time and the tryworks”), one on the ice-thick Arctic and the wreck of the whaleship Helen Mar (“holding ocean”), and the last on the oil-dripping skeleton of a blue whale held in the New Bedford Whaling Museum (“scent of undried bones”), make the at once impossible and inescapable attempt to touch the past through writing through touch; what makes itself known; what is only a seeming; and that each of these things is inevitably the other.
Review of Uncertain Times by Jacques Rancière (Polity, 2024). 200 pp. Translated by Andrew Brown. Softbound. ISBN: 978-1-509-55868-1.
Review of America: The Troubled Continent of Thought by Avital Ronell (Polity, 2024). 154 pp. Softbound. ISBN: 978-1-509-56027-1.
