Writing: Books
Is writing about peace after the Rwandan Genocide a pointless task? Whether it is the intensity of the massacres; the popularity of the genocide; or the imaginary forms of cruelty; however one looks at it, everything in the events of 1994 appears to defy once again the possibility of thinking peace anew. In order to address this issue, this book takes an unprecedented route in philosophy and amidst the bibliography available on Rwanda and holocaust studies: it focuses on the work of both African and European philosophers. Through a close reading of their views on this topic, peace becomes not an ideal in the future, but the imperative that language imposes on itself to retain its violent ways over any other form of violence. Writing about peace after the events of 1994 might perhaps be futile, but this futility is the least violence imaginable and as such should be valued over and above our sense of right or freedom.
After “Rwanda” is the first monograph ever dedicated to a philosophical analysis related to the Rwandan Genocide. It juxtaposes for the first time European and African thoughts (here specifically Levinas, Derrida, Kagame, and Balibusta) and put them to work together in an effort to make sense of the idea of peace today. After “Rwanda” is currently under review.
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The essays in this edited book attempt to make a crucial distinction between “curating” and “the curatorial.” One of the main reasons to differentiate between these two concepts is to open up a space of theoretical reflection and speculation consistently missing within the ever-increasing activity of curating and its professionalisation. While ‘curating’ as such deals with the mechanisms of staging exhibitions, ‘the curatorial’ explores what takes place on the stage set up, both intentionally and un-intentionally by the curator. By this we mean:
-The event of knowledge both scopic and non-scopic
-The ideologies embedded in and projected onto these events
-The participatory games of knowledge put forward by the displays
-The use (or abuse) of other fields of inquiry: history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, politics, geography, etc.
The space of theoretical reflection thus opened allow for a radically new approach to museums studies and conventional analysis of curating. Instead of a compendium of views on specific projects, a survey of exhibitionary practices, a tool-kit for exhibition-making, or an analysis of particular trends in contemporary art history, the essays in Allegories of the Curatorial propose instead to pin down the ways in which meaning sets itself in thought, the way it plasticizes itself as a body of knowledge, for the artist, the curator, and the viewer.
This 20-essay edited book will be published by IBTauris late 2012. For more information, please email vas02jm@gold.ac.uk
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“The language produced under the protection of power is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: schools, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology. Confronting it, the New is jouissance: novelty is the condition for orgasm.” Roland Barthes.
BOOKS
Published and forthcoming publications
A history of Hackney Workhouse from its origin in 1729 to the abolition of the Workhouse System in 1929. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Care and Control, Rear Window, 1995, 225pp.
ISBN: 0952104040
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Futurity. The times ahead of us, the times that we can sense coming: a promising young horse, the possibilities of a scientific breakthrough, our retirement, our old age, our death. In this conventional sense, futurity is the present space of the future, what allows us to “gaze” or “peep” into futurity, what forces us to “proceed carefully” or “throw oneself” into futurity, all the while knowing that this gazing, peeping, careful process, or abandon is only that afforded by our present situation. The meaning of the term is therefore unambiguous: that which can be identified here and now as the future. None of these connotations are used in this book. The title of this book is simply a deliberate mistranslation of a French verbal expression that occupies a central place in this book: à-venir [“to-come”]. This deliberate mistranslation is not intended to deprave or lead the English language astray. Instead of offering a mistranslation as an incorrect translation, this book proposes a mistranslation in order to give an English word a new connotation. The aim of this mistranslation consists of re-inventing the term futurity as signifying something that no futurologist, clairvoyant, or gambler could possibly forecast: that is, what can never be reduced to the simplicity of a future present.
Palgrave, 2007, 224pp. ISBN: 9780230506848
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Read Review of On Futurity here
How is a man supposed to articulate himself in a world where the hallmarks of masculinity have been so dramatically questioned so as to become practically meaningless? This book attempts to answer this question by revisiting key concepts in the construction of masculinity, not in order to re-write or debunk them again, but in order to provide a radically new departure to what masculinity means today. This new departure focuses on an understanding of sexuality and gender that is structured neither in oppositional (masculine-feminine, male-female, man-woman) nor in performative terms (in which the opposition remains always already in play), but in a perpendicular relation akin to the relation that brings space (and) time together. In doing so, this book doesn’t aim to establish a theory of masculinity, but to put forward a personal account of how a particular masculinity defines itself as and in space (and) time.
The End of Man is currently under review.
The Introduction will be available for download soon.