Monthly Archives: January 2021

Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) Abstract During the half century of his writing, Leo Bersani has worked toward an onto-ethics/aesthetics of fascination in which cinema plays an important part. With the help of Proust, Sade, Caravaggio, Pasolini, and others, he outlines two modes of fascination: the spectator’s active exploration and evisceration of an enigmatic world, and his […]

Ackbar Abbas Ackbar Abbas is Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. Previously, he was Chair of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of The Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. Recent works include essays on Chinese cinema and urbanism, the art of Liu Dan and Antony Gormley, and […]

Carey James Mickalites (bio) A review of Van Tuinen, Sjoero, and Arjen Kleinherenbrink, editors. The Politics of Debt: Essays and Interviews. Zero Books, 2020. As I write this, governments the world over are calling boisterously for the “reopening” of global, national, and local markets in the face of the biggest pandemic since the 1918 influenza. […]

Daryl Maude (bio) A review of Akiko Shimizu, “‘Imported’ Feminism and ‘Indigenous’ Queerness: From Backlash to Transphobic Feminism in Transnational Japanese Context.” Lecture and Seminar, University of California, Berkeley, 27-28 Jan. 2020 What does it mean to be trans in Japan, or in Japanese? How does it correspond with transness in North America or in […]

Johanna Isaacson (bio) A review of Jenkins, Jerry Rafiki. The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction. Ohio UP, 2019. At the mention of the word “vampire,” a waxen figure of European origin leaps to mind. However, Jerry Rafiki Jenkins insists in The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction that vampire myths […]

Ackbar Abbas (bio) The world is an enigma, Nietzsche said, but an enigma composed of its various solutions (qtd. in Calasso 3). In much the same way, we can say that fascination in cinema is an enigma made up of its various interpretations. The essays in this special issue of Postmodern Culture, each brilliant in […]

Kwasu D. Tembo (bio) Abstract In the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Lacan, the term fascination – which connotes being immobilized, charmed, enchanted, attracted, enraptured, seized, captured, and/or dazzled by the power of the gaze – also evokes dynamics of power. Fascination is associated with the hypnotic bondage of love that paralyzes critical faculties […]

Calum Watt (bio) Abstract This essay offers a commentary on the French experimental director Philippe Grandrieux’s shooting diary for his film Malgré la nuit (2016). Grandrieux’s quotations from Maurice Blanchot and the diary’s appearance in the journals Trafic and Mettray activate intertextual references relating to Blanchot’s ideas about fascination and inspiration. The essay argues that […]

E. L. McCallum (bio) Abstract Michael Snow’s canonical experimental film Wavelength is commonly understood to model cinematic apparatus theory. This essay reads Wavelength through a different apparatus, one used in physics’ well-known double-slit experiment to demonstrate the wave theory of light. Reading the film via this quantum apparatus orients us to a different mode of […]

Eugenie Brinkema (bio) Abstract This essay argues that Pascal Laugier’s 2008 new-extremist horror film Martyrs generates a formal violence coextensive with the aesthetic fascinations that structure it, rendering an account of violence that is monstrative and creative. Reversing theoretical presumptions that horror is a mixed sentiment comprised of fascination and disgust, or that horror names […]

Mikko Tuhkanen, Guest Editor (bio) Their enchantment is disenchantment.- Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (297) Fascination is our sensation.- Mel & Kim, “Respectable” Speaking to students at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles in 1975, Ingmar Bergman evokes familiar tropes when he enthuses about cinema’s ability to prompt a cognition closer to dream logic […]