Alice Sarmiento

Curiously enough, what scientists do is much more like what literary critics or art historians do: Scientists study patterns. And this suggests that what we explore in the humanities is not just some decorative, pathetic human candy on a rather boring cupcake of unthinking matter. We are too often afflicted with a form of Stockholm syndrome in which we beat up on anyone who declares that there is more to life than what fits the default, dominant materialist reductionism. The aesthetic dimension (the place where patterns happen) is where all the relations between things live (that’s what a pattern is, after all). Taking patterns seriously means that the aesthetic dimension isn’t just a cinema that humans get into sometimes, but rather that what we call “aesthetic” isn’t confined to objects in the Centre Pompidou but is in fact the sensual glue of the universe that enables things to happen.

When I think of the family legacy that included silence as a way to belong, I see it against those individuals targeted for registration despite their legal entitlement to protection by the Constitution. Today, I wonder if my Arab surname, even two generations out, could be seen as an identifiable threat.