Publications Archives - Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA)

Publication | ‘Camering: Fernand Deligny On Cinema And The Image’- Marlon Miguel (Leiden University Press)

June 15, 2022/in Publications /by Pepita

Publication | ‘Camering: Fernand Deligny On Cinema And The Image’- Marlon Miguel (Leiden University Press)
Author: Marlon Miguel (with original texts by Fernand Deligny)
Publisher: Leiden University Press
ISBN Print: 9789087283841
Read more or purchase here

NICA-director Dr. Pepita Hesselberth and board member Dr. Yasco Horsman are extremely proud to present the newest publication in their ‘Media | Art | Poitics’ series. ‘Camering: Fernand Deligny On Cinema And The Image’ offers the very first English translations of Fernand Deligny’s radically distinct reflections on cinema and the image, edited and introduced by Marlon Miguel.

About the book

Fernand Deligny, ‘a poet and ethologist’, is mostly known for his work with autistic children, and his influence on the revolutions in French post-war psychiatry. Though neither director, scriptwriter, historian of cinema nor a theorist of the image, cinema is constantly called into his social, pedagogical, and clinical experimentations. Also, he elaborates on the image to reflect on autistic perception and to radicalize his critique of humanism and discursive language. Deligny emphasizes that the camera is an apparatus mediating collective relationships. Furthermore, more interested in the processes of making, he distinguishes ‘camering’ from filming. Freed from the need to produce a finished film, it is a ‘film to come’ that is emphasized. The several film projects structure Deligny’s experimentations since they emancipate them from their supposed aim — that of normalizing psychotic or re-educating deviant subjects.

This volume provides Fernand Deligny’s essential corpus on cinema and the image. It shows both the role of cameras in many of his experimental ‘attempts’ with delinquents and autistic children and his highly speculative reflections on the image.

About the author

Marlon Miguel works at the project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus’ at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. He holds a double PhD in Fine Arts (Université Paris 8) and Philosophy (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). He is responsible for the organization of Deligny’s archives stored at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine.

The ‘Media | Art | Politics’ series.

The series in Media / Art / Politics stimulates cutting-edge research in the fields of media, arts, and politics, focusing on transformations in technology, cultural expressions, and political processes, and their intertwinement, in our everyday, increasingly media-saturated, and globalized world. We welcome publications that address the myriad ways in which media-technological developments frame, shape and transform our (current) socio-cultural and political order, and give rise to new political ecologies, identities and communities, as well as to novel forms of cultural expression and communication. We seek to publish research that is case-based and theory driven. However diverse the cases addressed, the studies in this series converge in that they all take a specific set of cultural phenomena as a focal point to broach the larger socio-cultural and political issues from perspective of a critical (media) theory in development. Art probes the implications of such changes, offering an excellent starting point for critical reflections that seek to untangle the pivotal role of media in our world today.

Previous publications

Van de Ven, Inge (2019). Big Books in Times of Big Data. Leiden University Press (Read more here).
Shobeiri, Ali (2020). Place: Towards A Geophilosophy of Photography. Leiden University Press (Read more here).

NICA recommends | Book Launch: “Bodies That Still Matter: Critical Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler”

July 1, 2021/in Publications, NICA recommends /by Pepita

Event | Book Launch: Bodies That Still Matter: Critical Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler
Edited by Annemie Halsema, Katja Kwastek and Roel van den Oever | Amsterdam University Press 2021
21 September 2021, 20.00 CEST
Registration here

Bodies That Still Matter: Critical Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler

Keywords: Performativity, precarity, speech, bodies, psychic life
More information here

Since the appearance of her early-career bestseller Gender Trouble in 1990, American philosopher Judith Butler is one of the most influential thinkers in academia. Her work addresses numerous socially pertinent topics such as gender normativity, political speech, media representations of war, the democratic power of assembling bodies, and the force of nonviolence. The volume Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler brings together essays from scholars across academic disciplines who apply, reflect on, and further Butler’s ideas in their own research.

It includes a new essay by Butler herself, from which it takes its title. Organized around four key themes in Butler’s scholarship – performativity, speech, precarity, and assembly – the volume offers an excellent introduction to the contemporary relevance of Butler’s thinking, a multi-perspectival approach to key topics of contemporary critical theory, and a testimony to the vibrant interdisciplinary discourses characterizing much of today’s humanities research.

With contributions by Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Eyo Ewara, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Tingting Hui, Jean-Luc Nancy, Julia Peetz, Roel van den Oever, Noa Roei, Carmen Schuhmann, Friederike Sigler, Simon van der Weele, Adriana Zaharijević.

Biographies

Annemie Halsema is associate professor of Philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Katja Kwastek is professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Roel van den Oever is assistant professor of English Literature at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Book Launch

Tuesday 21 September 2021 | 20:00 CEST
Please register for this event via https://tinyurl.com/3d2k9aa3

During the book launch, next to an introduction by the editors, several of the authors will give pitches on their contributions. Judith Butler will be present to respond to the book.
More information can be found here.

NICA recommends | Jeff Diamanti on Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum

June 17, 2021/in Publications, NICA recommends /by Pepita

NICA recommends | Jeff Diamanti on Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum
24 June 2021, 16:00-18:00
Registration: m.vantunen@uva.nl

We cordially invite you to the next Critical Cultural Theory Seminar with Dr. Jeff Diamanti. We will discuss his new book Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum. Locating Terminal Landscapes which has just been published with Bloomsbury Academic.

We will discuss the Introduction and chapter 6 on “Contrapuntal Ice”, as well as the conclusion of the book.

Summary

Jeff Diamanti describes the destructive relationship between climate and capital through the exponential growth of the petroleum industry over the last 40 years. Building on key insights in the environmental and energy humanities, Diamanti introduces the concept of the ‘terminal landscape’ as a site of storage, transformation and transition, essential to critical ecology in the 21st century.

Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum presents these scenes of transformation as sites through which post-industrial capitalism distributes fossil fuels into the world. Diamanti uses this concept to redefine the post-industrial landscape by revealing the global flows of exchange and storage that precede the distribution of fossil fuels into the world as social form. Advancing a new media theory of energy, fossil fuels and other finite resources become new types of distributable media. Through this line of thinking, the book makes solid connections between media technologies and energy cultures that help to shape a radical critique of the current energy infrastructure that characterises global capitalism.

Arguing that this infrastructure rests on millennia of compact matter, centuries of colonial violence, and decades of technological development, Diamanti’s analysis deepens our understanding of the environment as a ‘terminal landscape’ through case studies of oil companies, countries, artworks, and historical events. Using his under-examined typology of global energy further theorises and politicises the climate crisis for scholars and activists alike.

Jeff Diamanti is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. He has contributed to a number of works on energy culture and is part of the University of Alberta’s Petrocultures and Rice University’s Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS).

Please contact m.vantunen@uva.nl to receive the zoom link and, if desired, the introduction and the first chapter of the book.

Publication | Politics of Withdrawal: Media, Art, Theory

May 6, 2021/in Publications /by Pepita

Publication | Politics of Withdrawal: Media, Art, Theory
Edited by Pepita Hesselberth and Joost de Bloois
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International

Politics of Withdrawal considers the significance of practices and theories of withdrawal for radical thinking today. With contributions of major theorists in the fields of contemporary political philosophy, cultural studies and media studies, the chapters investigate the multiple contexts, possibilities and impasses of political withdrawal – from the radical to the seemingly mundane – and reflect a range of case studies varying from the political thinking of Debord, the Invisible Committee, Moten and Harney, feminist notions of ‘strike’ and ‘exit’, and indigenous forms of sabotage, to the individual retreat as means of reconfiguring political subjectivity. It looks at technological failure as disconnection from surveillance, and from alternative financial futures to contemporary ‘pharmako-politics.’

The volume provides a vital grip on a key notion in contemporary radical politics, in all its complexity, contradictions and tribulations.

Find more information here

Publication | Dutch Post-war Fiction Film through a Lens of Psychoanalysis

May 6, 2021/in Publications /by Pepita

Publication | Dutch Post-war Fiction Film through a Lens of Psychoanalysis
Peter Verstraten
Amsterdam University Press, 2021

This week ‘Dutch Post-war Fiction Film through a Lens of Psychoanalysis’ by Peter Verstraten was published by Amsterdam University Press, the sequel to Humor and Irony in Dutch Post-war Fiction Film from 2016. Each chapter in his 482-page new study begins with a title of Fons Rademakers who made films such as De aanslag, Max Havelaar and Als twee druppels water.

Inspired by the thinking of the Slovenian cultural philosopher Slavoj Zizek in particular, Verstraten analyzes, among others, Karakter, Gluckauf and De vliegende Hollander about father figures; De Poolse bruid, De grot and Loos about desire; Soldaat van Oranje, Pastorale 43 and Spoorloos, crossing the line between common man, bastard and hero; Joao en het mes, Onder ons and Van God los about passages à l’acte (or excessive outbursts of violence); De schorpioen, Het zwijgen and Charlotte on historical trauma; Kracht, Antonia and Verdwijnen over aphanisis; Mysteries, Flesh + Blood and Brimstone about neurosis and perversion.

Amsterdam University Press

Publication | Art as an Interface of Law and Justice: Affirmation, Disturbance, Disruption

April 22, 2021/in Publications /by Pepita

Publication | Art as an Interface of Law and Justice: Affirmation, Disturbance, Disruption
Frans-Willem Korsten
For more information, see here.

This book looks at the way in which the ‘call for justice’ is portrayed through art and presents a wide range of texts from film to theatre to essays and novels to interrogate the law.

‘Calls for justice’ may have their positive connotations, but throughout history most have caused annoyance. Art is very well suited to deal with such annoyance, or to provoke it. This study shows how art operates as an interface, here, between two spheres: the larger realm of justice and the more specific system of law. This interface has a double potential. It can make law and justice affirm or productively disturb one another.

Approaching issues of injustice that are felt globally, eight chapters focus on original works of art not dealt with before, including Milo Rau’s The Congo Tribunal, Elfriede Jelinek’s Ulrike Maria Stuart, Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives. They demonstrate how through art’s interface, impasses are addressed, new laws are made imaginable, the span of systems of laws is explored, and the differences in what people consider to be just are brought to light.

The book considers the improvement of law and justice to be a global struggle and, whilst the issues dealt with are culture-specific, it argues that the logics introduced are applicable everywhere.

Frans-Willem Korsten holds the chair in ‘Literature and Society’ at the Erasmus School of Philosophy and is working at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society in the Netherlands.

Publication | Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography, Ali Shobeiri

April 1, 2021/in Publications /by Pepita

Publication | Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography, Ali Shobeiri
For more information, see here.

By examining photography through geography and philosophy, this book makes evident that place is not the content of a definite representation. To do this, it breaks down the participatory elements of photography into six tropes: the photographer, the camera, the photograph, the image, the spectator, and the genre. Afterwards, through a rigorous theoretical analysis of each of these themes vis-à-vis the notion of place, it shows how they manifest inactive, contingent, unlocalizable, liminal, evental, agential and exigent features. In doing so, it establishes a ‘geophilosophy of photography’, which regards place as that which resists being restricted to where it is (the photographer), to what it is (the camera), to where it goes (the photograph), to what it encloses (the photographic image), to how and when it occurs (the spectator), and to what it represents (the genre).

Ali Shobeiri is Assistant Professor of Visual Art Theories in the Departments of Art History and Media Studies at Leiden University. He is co-editor of Animation and Memory (2020).