Climate change in the aesthetic state (a memory (dis)order)

Parallax

Volumn 10, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 83-98

  Cohen, Tom ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249573539     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/1353464042000226099     Document Type: Review

References (10)

1. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), specifically the third chapter, 'Planetarity', pp. 71-102
2. and Masao Miyoshi, 'Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity & Totality', Comparative Literature, Winter 2002. Spivak recently argued for a turn from the term 'global', as a totalizing and blind metaphor, toward what she would name the 'planetary', with a caveat: 'I cannot offer a formulaic access to planetarity. No one can', p. 78.
3. See also Julia Kristeva, 'The Future of a Defeat', in Parallax 27, issue on 'Mourning Revolution' (April-June 2003), pp. 21-2.
4. In Mark Townsend and Paul Harris' report in The Observer (2004), we read the videogame speculation: 'Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world'. The report can be accessed at www.ems.org/climate/pentagon-climatechange.pdf.
5. This graphematic reading of the image was a key to Benjamin's thinking from his early work. See Walter Benjamin, 'Painting, or Signs and Marks', in Selected Writings, vol. 1 1913-1926, [eds. ] Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Belknap Press: London, 1996), p. 86.
6. This evocation of the photographemic 'image', or its warring logics, draws on Eduardo Cadava's brilliant resuscitation of the Benjaminian problem in that critic. What is at issue may be what Cadava terms 'the citational structure of photography', the motherboard of traces that, when entering legibility for the reader, shred the pretext of mimetic reproduction or indexing. See Eduardo Cadava, 'Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins', October 96 (Spring 2001), p. 55.
7. See Brian Rotman, 'The Alphabetic Body', in Parallax 22, special issue on 'Random Figures' January-March 2002): 'philosophy's inability/ refusal to countenance the presence of images in its texts, its unease in the face of the picture, is too thorough, unexamined, universal and deep-rooted not to suggest other -iconophobic or anti-visualist - forces at work', p. 100.
8. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 101.
9. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 100-1.
10. Peter Conrad, The Hitchcock Murders (New York: Faber and Faber, 2000).