"Through our own personal displacements (traumas, losses) we come to identify with other displaced conditions. [...] It’s the madness of travel, or of being nowhere or wanting to be somewhere else.[...] There is a magical reality about how language comes to you. The path you travel in If Only… is labyrinthine. One of madness and magic. A space of “radical closure” as Jalal Toufic says. In a way, you are inventing a cinematic temporality that makes one very aware of technique and production, and which draws on constraint as a resource rather than a lack. Speaking of grand narratives, it is as if you are miniaturizing the epic. Boiling it down. Pressurizing it. Then again, storytelling has always been a matter of making up stuff as you go on. And wandering. Rhyme, too. A form of movement within constraint."

Thom Donovan on Guy Ben-Ner

www.thinking-resistance.de

Video documentations of the lectures are online now:

Ulas Aktas (Frankfurt on the Main): Civil-wilderness (CIVILDERNESS) and Cultural Immune Systems
Armen Avanessian (Berlin): Reading Political Theories’ Readings
Friedrich Balke (Weimar): All in Good Time? Fiction and the Possibility of Historic events
Bruno Bosteels (Ithaca): Transatlantic Decadence: Aesthetics and Politics
Ramsay Burt (Leicester): The Biopolitics of Modernist Dance and Suffragette Protest
Simon Critchley (Essex/New York): The Faith of the Faithless – Experiments in Political Theology
Bojana Cvejić (Brussels): The Politics of Problems
Mark Franko (Santa Cruz): Antifascist Utopias and Action Photography: Nationalism and the Popular Front in Martha Graham’s American Document
Josef Früchtl (Amsterdam): It is, as if. Fiction, Aesthetics, and the Political
Andreas Hetzel (Darmstadt): Resistance Speaks: Languages of Resistance
Dieter Mersch (Potsdam): The Political and the Violent. On Resistances
Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (Hamburg): Plus d’un rôle. On the Politics of Playing Together in Contemporary Theatre and Performance Practices
Wim Peeters (Dortmund): Contesting “the Democratic Chattering of the Letter”. Politics of Comment in 20th Century Literature
Jacques Rancière (Paris): Doing or Not Doing: Politics, Aesthetics, Performance
Gabriel Rockhill (Philadelphia): Critique of the Ontological Illusion. Rethinking the Relation between Art and Politics
Frank Ruda (Berlin): Thinking Politics Concretely: Negation, Affirmation and the Dialectics of Dialectics and Non-Dialectics

you walk along the same avenues in the winter, another year. the houses and the angles of the streets; the cracks in the concrete a little wider now. these images are the clearest: the shadows along the walls, the degree of darkness of a room; the height of the ceiling, the distance between buildings, the shades of grey and the cold touch of the railings. the smells perhaps too, though distorted. you can recall the cadence of his speech but not the words. you cannot recall the events leading up or what happened afterwards. in many ways it might not have happened at all.
there was an exchange across time zones, in march it was, but the year is unclear. it was a very cold winter. time meanwhile has fallen prey to the inevitable disintegration that comes with the incessant replaying of events, each time burning off the edges until the clippings stand isolated and overturned.
only the sensation of falling remains imprinted in your muscle memory, and the lights shutting down.
his mouth shaping words that are lost now and the noise all around, above and below, there was a wall, there must have been a wall you were leaning against, and a car at the end of the night, heading north.
these places now have become impossible to return to, not only those of this story but all of comparable circumstantial designs: a door to the left, a breath of icy air behind, the occasional flickering of car headlights as they pause by the traffic light outside, the clicking of glasses to the right in the back, the pattern on the floor and the fabric on the chairs, a preemptive reenactment of what had not happened yet which you would only become aware of much later.
black hair black hair.
they come and go, the half-bloods, along the edges of darkness, as a tide which they will carry with them at all times, a gradual rhythm of disappearing so imperceptibly slow yet irreversible. your blood is black, black, they would say, and your bones are glass, and the towers of your birthplace have long crumbled.

"It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision."
— W.G. Sebald (Austerlitz)

Ghostly Appearances, Gestures of Radio
Workshop led by LIGNA

Saturday September 26 - Sunday September 27, 2009

About the event
This workshop explores how the personal appearance of the body can be haunted by what has been historically repressed and delves into the kinds of gestural 'ghosts' that are necessary to evoke historical appearances, ephemeral but lasting at the same time. The process involves an examination of a specific space or site in the city as well as all the gestures that appear in it. The inspiration for the thoughts behind the workshop are Agamben's remarks on the vanishing gesture as a means without an end.
In Beirut, LIGNA will be working with participants on examining the possibilities of radio as a means and on the idea of the ghostly appearance of the radiovoice.

Death in Second Life

Article: http://www.obit-mag.com/articles/death-in-second-life