#linked excerpts

Top, The Sun is rising at the left edge of the Moon, ending a nearly one-hour total solar eclipse on April 6, 2026. While the Sun hid behind the Moon, the crew aboard the Orion spacecraft, pictured in the forefront, saw a Moon shrouded in night. This offered a perfect opportunity to look for rarely seen phenomena. And the moment delivered. Calling down to Earth at 9 p.m. ET the crew reported seeing six impact flashes, which are light flashes that are created when meteoroids, traveling many thousands of miles per hour, smash into the Moon’s surface, NASA. Bottom, screen capture from Le gai savoir, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1969.

Comment dire « je » avec les autres sans parler à leur place?

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Jung himself was interested in the psyche's Trickster energies and how they related to compulsive and addictive trends. For example, in his alchemical studies, he compared the possessing "spirit" of compulsion to the alchemical sulphur, a substance associated with hell and the Devil as well as with the poisonous, crafty, and treacherous Trickster figure of Alchemy, Hermes/Mercurius. Like all ambivalent Self-figures, Mercurius, the Trickster-god was ambivalent, a paradox, and the source of healing as well as destruction (see Jung, 1955: para. 148). This fact is symbolically demonstrated in his winged staff, the caduceus, with two opposing serpents twined around it, one containing poison, the other the antidote. So, as Alchemy says, the darkest, vilest of inner figures, the very personification of evil itself "was destined to be the medicina" (Jung, 1955: para. 148). This is the mystery of the ambivalent figure of Mercurius and of all ostensibly "evil" things in the psyche. Jung was impressed all his life by the paradoxical role of evil in delivering people from darkness and from suffering.

Top, Bruce Nauman, Fist in Mouth, 1990, Cut-and-pasted printed paper and paper with watercolor and pencil on paper, 51,4 x 60,3 cm. Via. More. Bottom, Jana Convent, ohne Titel, 2024, Screen printing on fabric, 137 x 100 cm. Via.

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We are faced, ultimately, with two irreconcilable hypotheses: that of the extermination of all the world's illusion by technology and the virtual, or that of an ironic destiny of all science and all knowledge in which the world — and the illusion of the world — would survive. The hypothesis of a 'transcendental' irony of technology being by definition unverifiable, we have to hold to these two irreconcilable and simultaneously 'true' perspectives. There is nothing which allows us to decide between them. As Wittgenstein says: 'The world is everything which is the case'.

Jean Baudrillard, from The Perfect Crime, 1995. Via.

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Reality is decaying fast. It is hard to explain the news if you think only in terms of facts and material interests, because so much of it is about fantasies running out of control. Thinking about all this, trying to understand, my mind turns to an artwork by the artist Paul Chan from 2009 called Sade for Sade’s Sake.

The 5-hour-plus projection shows shadow puppets locked in an interminable reenactment of the many spectacles of sex and violence in the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785)—twitching silhouettes locked in a relentless, joyless, ghostly freak-off.

The product of an aristocrat’s overheated imagination, 120 Days of Sodom is an unrelenting and joyless read—just endless mechanical fantasies of powerful men engaging in sexual torture and taboo-breaking. Pier Paolo Pasolini used the same text to inspire Salò (1975), considered one of the most disturbing films ever, an attempt to capture the psychosexual pathologies that fed Italian Fascism. In an interview, Chan explained what inspired him to return to it in the 2000s:

I realized that we don’t really think about it this way, but Sodom was a book about war profiteers, that the four men who perpetrated the atrocious, sexual, violent acts of kidnapping people—girls and boys—to bring them to their chateau to do whatever they want with them, they could do that because they were war profiteers within the war of Louis XIV …That really struck me, because at the time that we were living, we were going through a war, the Second Gulf War. We were going through the destruction of countries in the Middle East, and we were hearing stories about war profiteering.

This particular artwork gets a mention in the recent dump of Epstein emails. In January 2010, an art advisor identified as Annibelle from Neilson Consultancy—likely the late Annibelle Neilson, a British socialite known to have wrangled girls for Epstein—writes to Epstein. She suggests names of artists who “could and have done some of the things you explained to me that you were looking to do on your island,” telling him to check out the Paul Chan artwork seen at the 2009 Venice Biennale: Sade for Sade’s Sake. (...)

Read enough of the Epstein emails and you find yourself in a strange headspace. You begin to reconstruct the outlines of a hermetically sealed, hyper-transactional world of privilege, where anyone from outside appears like an inconvenience to be ignored or a prop to be used.

Left, found slide on ebay, photograph by Tom Powel. Tony Cragg, The Complete Omnivore, 1993, Plaster, wood, steel, 160 x 200 x 200 cm. More. Right, Sue de Beer, Early Photos (Horror Photos), 1997 - 2001. Via. More.

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It’s worth mentioning that forgiveness isn’t the same as reconciliation—returning to some sort of relationship that will continue into the future. Regardless, I want to spell out that, in Judaism, a person can do real, profound, comprehensive repentance work and even get right with God—experience atonement—even if their victim never forgives them. Repentance and forgiveness are separate processes.

For the rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud, and for our guide Maimonides, forgiveness is much less important than the repair work that the person who caused harm is obligated to do. The Hebrew word that is often translated as “repentance” is tshuvah, which literally means “returning.” In Modern Hebrew, a tshuvah is an answer to a question—you’ve gotten back to someone—but it also means “returning” in the sense of “I’ll also need a return ticket for this bus ride.” In a spiritual context, tshuvah is about coming back to where we are supposed to be, returning to the person we know we’re capable of being—coming home, in humility and with intentionality, to behave as the person we’d like to believe we are.

Top, Paul Klee, Prophet (Prophète), May 6, 1930, Tempera on paper, 61 x 47 cm. Via. Bottom, Robert Filiou, That Spiritual Need, 1971, Wood, nails, screws, black and white photograph and tabor with bank card on wooden panel, 55,5 x 68,5 x 7 cm. Inscription on recto: "Concentration and meditation while using works in a bodily way. That my art should be in action. That spiritual need." Via. More.

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Who among us has not, by chance, looked in the mirror and felt surprised? For a fraction of a second we see ourselves as an object to be looked at. Some might call this narcissism, but I would call it: the joy of being. The joy of finding in our external face echoes of our internal face: ah, so it's true, I didn’t just imagine myself, I actually exist.

Clarice Lispector, from Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles, 1967-1977. Published 2022. Via.

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Mind, then, as the steady dreaming of this Eairth (sic), the unseen depth from whence all beings draw their sustenance. Mind as wind, this whooshing force, the medium that moves between and binds all earthly beings. This mystery rolling in and out of breathing bodies, invisible: wafting up from the soil and gusting down from the passes in vortices and curling waves that splash against the grasses. A fluid receptacle, clear as crystal, for the inpouring (sic) fire of sunlight; the pellucid nighttime lens through which our eyes receive the stars. Sentience was never our private possession. We live immersed in intelligence, enveloped and informed by a creativity we cannot fathom.

Top, screen capture from Beneath the Skin, directed by Cecelia Condit, 1981. Via. Bottom, Rebecca Ackroyd, Open ended, 2020, Resin and steel, 63 x 87 x 56 cm. Via. More.

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The ancient Greeks placed coins over the eyes of their dead, not only as payment to Charon for the ferry ride across the River Styx, but also because it shielded the living from the horrors of the deactivated gaze. We don’t like it when a thing seems to look back at us in negation, when we subconsciously calculate the subject/object parallax and find that it has collapsed into vacant reciprocity. Sigmund Freud’s contention is that the eyes are the most potently charged site of the uncanny, I guess because they sit at the threshold of life and withdrawal. I’ve been assigning his essay on the topic to my students lately; it feels increasingly urgent to me, as though he anticipated our contemporary taste for chatbot boyfriends and rubber love dolls, as though he saw that we would one day want true-to-life silicone replicas of newborn babies, their inert bodies the exact temperature of human flesh. Freud largely constructed his analysis of the uncanny around E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816), the story of a man driven to madness after discovering that the woman he’s fallen in love with is in fact a doll and not a person at all. There stands Olimpia, that beautiful glass-eyed thing, that stiff-jointed, blandly assenting clockwork whose cosmetic appeal conceals an alarming vacancy. In 2026, I wonder how many men might actually like to date her.

Freud published The Uncanny in 1919, just one year after artist Oskar Kokoschka commissioned a full-scale replica of Alma Mahler, the ex-lover who had left him for the greener and less psychotic pastures of Martin Gropius. Kokoschka provided doll maker Hermine Moos with a list of exacting specifications, including Mahler’s real-world measurements, descriptions of how her skin should feel, and a suggestion for what type of padding might best suggest the whiff of life. If Kokoschka hoped that the doll would serve as a good-enough proxy for the woman he’d lost, the figure Moos delivered disabused him of his fantasy. The object was lumbering and clumsy, its exterior constructed from a fluffy-looking swan skin that left no room for ambiguity, even in the darkness of night.

Despite his displeasure, Kokoschka ferried the thing around. He dressed it in finery and made paintings of it, he engaged a chambermaid and brought it to parties and the opera, dragging it behind him until he eventually tired of its absence of spirit. I wonder if he felt bored or resentful when he eventually emptied a bottle of red wine over its head and decapitated it with a knife; maybe it simply became too shop-worn to support his fantasy. In his old age, Kokoschka would recall the experiment differently; “I freed the effigy of Alma Mahler from its packing,” he wrote in his 1974 autobiography, as though he’d committed an act of generosity rather than one of necrophilic perversion.

Left, Tatiana Trouvé, From here I disappear, 2009, Wood, mirror, plexiglas, metal, neon lamp, Dimensions variable, from the exhibition A Stay Between Enclosure and Space at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst Zürich, November 11, 2009 - February 21, 2010. Via. Right, Victor Simyan, A LARGE MINTON MAJOLICA TURQUOISE-GROUND 'PROMETHEUS' VASE, date cypher for 1867, 97,7 cm H, manufactured by Minton and Co., 1873. Via. More.

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This, then, is the paradox of drama and tragedy: how can essence come alive? How can it become the sensual, immediate, the only real, the truly "being" thing? Drama alone creates — "gives form to" — real human beings, but just because of this it must, of necessity, deprive them of living existence. Their life is made up of words and gestures, but every word they speak and every gesture they make is more than gesture or word; all the manifestations of their life are mere ciphers for their ultimate relationships, their life merely a pale allegory of their own Platonic ideas. Their existence can have no reality except the reality of the soul, the reality of lived experience and faith. "Lived experience" is latent in every event of life as a threatening abyss, the door to the judgement chamber: its connection with the Idea—of which it is merely the outward manifestation—is no more than the conceivable possibility of such a connection in the midst of the chaotic coincidences of real life. And faith affirms this connection and transforms its eternally improvable possibility into the a priori basis for the whole existence.

Top, Haus-Rucker-Co., Oase No. 7, documenta 5 exhibition, Fridericianum museum, Kassel, West Germany, 1972. Via. Bottom, Robert Irwin, Nine Spaces, Nine Trees, Public Safety Building Plaza, Seattle, Washington, 1983. Via.

Oasis no. 7 was a temporary architectural intervention contributed by the experimental Austrian collective Haus-Rucker-Co to the fifth edition of Documenta, an exhibition of contemporary art in Kassel, Germany. Conceived as “an emergency exit leading people to another realm,” the work consisted of a translucent, inflatable orb precariously protruding from the classical eighteenth-century facade of Kassel’s Fridericianum. Theatrically staged as an artificial oasis, the orb contained two plastic palm trees, a hammock, and a red flag. Via.

Irwin subdivided the approximately square plaza into nine smaller squares, each 22 by 22 feet, and placed at the center of each a square concrete planter which also provides seating. In each planter is a flowering purple plum tree—small, delicate, with one-lobed, dark red leaves. Each “room” is surrounded by a fence of small-mesh chain link, coated with blue vinyl; the fence rises to a height of 16 feet, where it is topped with lights, one pointed at each of the nine trees. The rooms open into one another through large doorways in the fence. Via.

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When what were believed to be Mary Magdalen's remains were discovered in 1279, there was "a strong fragrance, as if a storehouse of sweet spices had been opened." As The Golden Legend explained, "so powerful an odor of sweetness pervaded the church that for seven days all those who entered noticed it."s The corpse of a fourteenth-century Italian nun, "despite its being plentifully covered in flesh and fat, and though it had not been embalmed," similarly "exhaled a gentle odour, a heavenly fragrance." The grave of another saintly woman exuded "a supernatural fragrance so sweetly aromatic and unlike any earthly odours," and this fragrance grew stronger "at times when Holy Mass was celebrated, almost in token of her pleasure at the entreaties addressed to her." From the tomb of St. Dominic, too, "an odor of such sweetness came forth that it might have come from a storeroom of perfumes rather than from a tomb," and following her death in 1607 the corpse of Maria Maddalena de'Pazzi evidenced a popular variation on the theme when it leaked fragrant miraculous oils.' Teresa of Avila's corpse was examined nine times (the last in 1760, 178 years after her death) and evidenced always an exception state of preservation, even though the clothing was completely decomposed. Immediately after her death, the floral "aroma that her holy corpse gave off was so strong" that "it spread through the whole house." In the Carmelite convent of Alba de Tormes, where her transverberated heart is enshrined, the reliquary glass occasionally breaks and the sweet odor of sanctity is still released.'

Top, photograph, NASA astronaut Christina Koch, Artemis II mission specialist, peers out of one of the Orion spacecraft’s main cabin windows on Saturday, April 4, 2026, looking back at Earth, as the crew travel toward the Moon, NASA. Via. Bottom, Park Hyun-ki, TV Seesaw, 1984, Television monitor, 2 stones, 2pcs of steel, CD/DVD player, 56 x 282,5 x 60,7 cm. Via.

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The unfinished and incomplete aspects of webcam viewing suggest that the spectator is too close to see the desired images of women. The spectator often obtains partial views because the woman webcam operator is near the camera lens. Instead of a fetishistic array of breasts, buttocks, and legs that are presented by the Hollywood cinema, promised in the webcam advertisements, and critiqued by Mulvey and others, the brief and often unidentifiable glimpses of women webcam operators prevent the spectator from gazing upon the desired body and gaining control. The impression of an almost claustrophobic closeness, in which the spectator seems to be pushed up against the screen, is supported by the grainy and otherwise illegible images that webcams deliver. When the spectator’s image is reflected on the screen and both spectator and operator are working at the computer, then they seem to be conjoined. Rather than the singular and empowered spectator indicated by apparatus theory and promised by Internet sites, this morphed position may be closer to the fragmented and unstable forms of identification proposed by Lacan, other psychoanalysts, and feminist film theorists. Vivian Sobchack relates such morphed experiences to computers. These aspects of webcam spectatorship, and the qualities of digital imaging that are analyzed later in this book, indicate that Internet sites render bodily morphing and synthesis even though there are continued narratives about individual and empowered users.

Internet and computer spectators are already much too close to the screen in order to enact a classic film viewing position. Metz suggests that a clear distinction between subject and object and distance are necessary aspects of voyeurism—a process where individuals derive pleasure from secretly watching. He relates the voyeur’s care in maintaining an “empty space” between the viewer and object to the ways cinema spectators avoid being too near or far from the screen. Burch also indicates that it is necessary to see the whole visual field in order to have a comprehensive understanding. According to their apparatus-based theories, male cinema viewers achieve an ideal spectatorial position because of their physical distance and intellectual detachment from the screen. However, female spectators are conceived as being inextricably bound to their bodily processes, tied to a version of their image within the screen, and thus unable to completely comprehend the text.