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: Kritiko
is a critic of society who, esp. in the Third World (hence the Filipino word), occupies a unique and intense position.
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…
[Claude Monet's La Gare Saint Lazare (1877)] In the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition (1968; 1994), Gilles Deleuze writes “that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think” (xvi). This is the infamous image of thought that…
[The introduction to a current project:] There is something nomadic about Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006). While the novel, so far Pynchon’s longest, takes place in a specific context—the Progressive Era in America up to the chaos of World War I—it nonetheless moves back and forth across space—across America, the globe, and beyond, including…
[The Tupinambas; Image from wikimedia] In his provocative Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres draws from his ethnographic work to provide a theory of a society that, rather than developing into the state, operates directly against it. By ‘operating against’ I mean, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s reading of Clastres in A Thousand…
In “This Sex Which Is Not One” (an essay in the book of the same title), Luce Irigaray critiques the masculine conception of feminine/female sexuality and proposes descriptions that come from a woman. Irigaray explains that within female sexuality, an opposition is set up “between ‘masculine’ clitoral activity and ‘feminine’ vaginal passivity” in which “the…
Walter Benjamin begins The Origin of German Tragic Drama with an “epistemo-critical prologue” in which, before he presents his idea of the baroque, he articulates his conception of philosophy, the activity by which he represents ideas and conceptualizes phenomena (such as the baroque).[1] Benjamin does this by charting a dichotomy, in which he situates philosophy…
