In Cinema 1, Gilles Deleuze offers a new philosophy of the image. Arguing that history has seeped into cinema behind its back, with cinema unconscious that it is already doing history’s work,[1] cinema being one of the forces that constitute history,[2] Deleuze develops a notion of the image that does not merely reflect, represent, or…
Category Archives: Art
The graduate students of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, invite submissions for its annual conference: Impasse University of California, Irvine Friday, March 2, 2012 Humanities Gateway 1030 Website: impasse-uci.tumblr.com Keynote Speaker: Professor Homay King, Bryn Mawr College In a climate of seemingly insurmountable economic indebtedness, a poisonous and ineffectual…
Tony Perez’s Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao (1995) begins after a gruesome crime. Some terrible event—criminal rapes kid, criminal kills kid, cop chases criminal, criminal kills cop, criminal kills self (xii)—is briefly sketched in the prologue that serves as “a short history before the novel begins” (prologue title) (xii). The novel itself (separated by a section title, “Kid,…
[This is the preface to my attempt to translate the first chapters of the Filipino novel Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao by Tony Perez] [Image of Cubao from Dennis Villegas] I took up the project of translating what at first seemed the whimsical choice of Tony Perez’s 1995 novel, Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao, out of a fear and a hope,…
[The statement of purpose I'm using for my MA Review at UCI. Please leave comments and suggestions, especially before my exam (on 15 Feb)!] My main interest is in political economy. I am interested in the ways in which material scarcity (real and imagined) leads to some kind of system or regime, a certain way…
[A revised version of the “purpose of study” I sent out when applying for the PhD, written with the feedback of professors, friends, and family] I have taken a long and unusual route to decide what kind of work to do for the PhD. Partly this is due to my Third World background. Focused on…
I watched Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson again last night. It was for the nth time, yet I continue to be moved by the subtle beauty of the film. It was quiet, still, uneventful, with a minimal plot, but not boring. There was no shouting, no spectacular confrontations, no grand battles (except for those underneath that…
[The Berkeley Free Speech movement; Image from The Berkeley Daily Planet] In the section of the essay of the book of the same title, Jean-Luc Nancy explicates his notion of being singular plural. Composed of three words that, as Nancy describes, “do not have any determined syntax (‘being’ is a verb or noun; ‘singular’ and…
This is the second and final written part of my MA exam. In this part, I was asked to evaluate the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the study of the humanities. Issues that came up during the oral defense include the materiality of language in Lacan (as cited in an article where Lacan interprets that…
Fellows, Friends, and Others, I am sending another one of my reports from the field. As stipulated, I am using the species’ own mode of transmission, their own semiology—what is referred to in these parts as “language” (though, technically speaking, they use many “languages” organized in a similar way as a system (i.e. as “language”),…
