The ritual of contemplation, as the poet used to call it, is one of the ways of enduring the flood of images. Contemplation requires distance, momentarily renouncing the frames of meaning that determine functionality and the common usage of things; it implies opening oneself up to the experience of estrangement from the objects that rest on the shelves of our world.

Some discourses allow glimpsing at the structuring traits of a time. “The truth” of a time is revealed not as much by its symbolic regulations as by its manifestations on the bodies. Although both keys are inseparable for thinking a specific culture, a substantial difference determines them: The former places itself on the arbitrary dimension of sense (an established order), the latter, instead, is due to the jouissance of the body (the singular manifestations that arise in it).

«Then into our life there comes the darkness, there’s a spacecraft blocking out the sky…” is on the surface ready to be read, not in its depths ready to be interpreted; it is on the line of sight that draws the horizon. In this first stanza of Decks Dark, from Radiohead’s newest album A Moon | … |

It was exactly 500 years ago that the first edition of Thomas More’s On the Best State of a Republic and on the New Island of Utopia appeared. Utopia, as it is commonly known, turned out to be a signifier that has managed to adhere—without it being its original aim— plenty of human projects of the | … |

But what is the place of political jokes in the crisis that surrounds us? Let us begin by stating that within a polarized context there is no discourse capable of dealing with any possible tolerance of the crisis (its difficulties and horrors), because neither requires elaboration; on the contrary, the polarized discourse is that of certainties, of repetition, of mere speculation without questioning. In every polarized discourse lies a project of erasing difference.

The image of swallowing as a death drive is a poetics that has been around for less than a century. It is true that depictions of men around the banquet are as old as the Egyptian civilization. In the paintings found in the tomb of Nebamun (1400 B.C.)—perhaps one of the most important pictorial records | … |