Gimmickification

Reivew of Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick

Alex Fletcher ~ RP 2.09 (Winter 2020), pp. 89–93 ~ Review

Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 416pp., £28.95 hb., 978 0 67498 454 7 ‘[I]f only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy’. In this oft-cited remark, made […]

Late style and contrapuntal histories: The violence of representation in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Livre d’image

Alex Fletcher ~ RP 2.04 (Spring 2019), pp. 59–72 ~ Article

If the category ‘late’ has generally served to designate an ever-extending period of Jean-Luc Godard’s filmmaking career – typically dated from his return to cinema at the end of the 1970s when Godard was approaching fifty – with the release of his latest feature, Le Livre d’image: Image et parole [The Image Book: Image and […]

From Berg to Beyoncé: Adorno and Politics: 1st Istanbul Critical Theory Conference, Boğaziçi University

Sebastian Truskolaski, Rose-Anne Gush and Alex Fletcher ~ RP 199 (Sept/Oct 2016) ~ Conference Report

The organizers’ opening address to this conference laid out an ambitious aim: to weigh up the Aktualität of Adorno’s critical theory in its capacity as a heuristic, pedagogical tool for the analysis of current political crises in Turkey and beyond; to go ‘with Adorno, beyond Adorno’ by applying the precepts of his negative dialectic to […]