The Synthetic Landscape

A post by Ian Chamberlain

In the following paper ‘The Synthetic Landscape,’ I will highlight and examine some of the core values at the heart of my practice. These will include my approaches to making, the themes and concepts I explore, and most importantly how I see these connections. I will overview some of my past works and focus on three bodies of work that I see as pivotal in the development of my practice, bringing together process and core conceptual concerns.

Empty echoes of empty dishes

A post by Hilary Tsui, contributing to the Shadows under the mistletoe theme

I grew up celebrating the Winter Solstice

A day to mark the longest day in winter

But also a time where we feel closest to each other and home

Home is my grandparents’ cooking

Food so delicious that we joked they are a restaurant powerhouse

Tong-Hing Restaurant, we called it

Home is my grandfather’s stash of biscuits and toffee

The dining table forever adorned with his favourite Danish butter cookies

Accompanied by the crinkle of candy wrappers

Stories wanted: Shadows under the mistletoe

The Chiaroscuro is a blog that dances with the spectres of memory—a place where the past is never truly gone but lingers like an elusive shadow, slipping between moments of our everyday lives. Here, we’re fascinated by those fleeting glimmers of memory, the eerie remnants of what once was but somehow never left. Each story, reflection, and image we feature weaves nostalgia together with the uncanny, exploring how the echoes of yesterday reach out to touch the present, haunting us in unexpected ways. This season, as festive lights twinkle and winter settles in, we’re gathering short, evocative pieces on the theme Shadows under the mistletoe.

Towards a Hauntology of Life and Death

A post by Lucas Gronouwe

Philosophically questioning the relation between life and death is usually considered to be the proper territory of movements such as existentialism and Lebensphilosophie. This belief is instigated by the explicit treatment of the life-death relation by authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre who, each in their own way, exposed and examined the presence of death in our daily lives. With the rise of poststructuralism – undermining the existentialist ideal of a free and autonomous individual – subjects such as life and death also lose their central importance, as they are replaced with historical, linguistic, and textual concerns. Or so one thinks, because the case of Jacques Derrida provides us with a vivid counterexample in this regard.

Doing Justice to Poetry: Gadamer and Derrida on Reading Paul Celan

A post by Lucas Gronouwe

INTRODUCTION

What does it mean to do justice to a text, be it philosophical, literary, or poetic? In this regard, what is the task of philosophical hermeneutics, the discipline traditionally concerned with explanation and interpretation? This is the question at stake in the ‘Gadamer-Derrida encounter’, an intellectual debate that retains its relevance, not only because it has ‘animated contemporary philosophy’ (Di Cesare 2004, 74), but also because the practice of reading and interpreting texts makes up a large part of research and education in the humanities as such. By revisiting the diverging hermeneutical strategies of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, this paper seeks to determine how we can engage in the practice of reading and interpreting in a righteous and just manner. 

Five Poems by Jennifer Maritza McCauley

Poems by Jennifer Maritza McCauley

Past

I swallow the past, steadying myself against the back of a young birch tree. The past is pulped, palpable; it is large and too-huge to choke down. When I live in the present, I feel newly cleaned and scrubbed by sun. When I face the day brightly, I see the world through baby-eyes; I see freckles of color and rainbowed-light. So what to do?

What I shall do: I shall defy hauntings. I digest the past, in all its spikes; then I will forget it. I will know the past; it has kissed me blithely and squatted in my house; I will feel the wild grip of past and know it still struggles under my skin but I will not see it. It will be in me, but I will not love it. The past: that ghosted hunger; look, I’m going to ignore my appetite.

Oh present, I open my mouth to consume you in full.

Sonja Stojanovic. Mind the Ghost. Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French. Liverpool UP, 2023.

A post by Catherine Nesci

Sonja Stojanovic. Mind the Ghost. Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French. Liverpool UP, 2023. xi + 307 pp. 

This book offers fascinating insights into the return of ghosts and memorial passages across generations in contemporary French-speaking narratives about the Shoah, the Algerian War of Independence, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, and mass crimes during the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s. Starting with an expected and yet fresh discussion on haunting and spectrality in Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, and continuing with a most innovative review of recent texts by Hélène Cixous, whose writing opens and weaves lines of communication with the disappeared, Sonja Stojanovic highlights the key notion of double suffering (double souffrance or double douleur in Cixous), which allows empathy and listening to the cry of others, without appropriating the latter’s suffering.