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Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts (Riverhead) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert (Columbia University Press). Forthcoming in Summer 2023 from Riverhead is The Light Room, a meditation on art and care, as well as Tone, a collaboration with Sofia Samatar, from Columbia University Press in early 2024. ‘Insekt’ is part of an in-progress work of fiction, Realisms. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

Articles Available Online


Insekt or large verminous thing

Fiction

September 2022

Kate Zambreno

Fiction

September 2022

Around dusk one evening in March, I went out back to the small garage, and switched on my small square of artificial light at...

Feature

January 2018

Accumulations (Appendix F)

Kate Zambreno

Feature

January 2018

I’ve been keeping a mental list of all the pieces of art that I’ve nursed Leo in front of...

Modern philosophy is threatened by love, whose objects are never only objects Philosophers have discovered in love a lived geometry that positively demands their professional attentions; they swoop down like angels to deliver their sacred messages But love, which was not invited to the symposium before it had stolen in, remains troublesome Its power to disrupt is strategically deployed in the eternal cock-fight of philosophy   In an essay ‘The Intentionality of Love: In homage to Emmanuel Lévinas’, the Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion offers a gracious account of love’s significance for philosophy (and perhaps also philosophy’s insignificance for love) Marion describes a love that transgresses empirical knowledge, rationality and intentions; love offers the definitive answer to the philosophy of consciousness (the straw man of Western philosophy since Descartes’s dubious cogito) Falling in love, as everyone knows, is not intentional Marion’s love also refutes an existentialist philosophy that holds existence to be my own Love, as any good Franciscan will say, does not live under any logic of possession; it is never apprehended alone but in the presence of others Marion describes the faces of two lovers approaching one another: they make a quadrant of gazes, four black suns radiating and absorbing the invisible light of two gazes at their respective points, making a cross of their unbending trajectories For Marion there are two in love, no more The scene recalls a Gothic Annunciation scene where lines of sacred light describe the path of the divine message towards its target Finally, in Marion’s philosophy it is faith that makes love possible, faith acts as a guarantee in the surrender of your self to another (Faith, love might answer, or inconsolable terror) Love in this elegant diagram is an immediate knowledge for its Two In the world where a multitude of bodies and images intervene, love’s knowledge is accomplished with less geometrical certainty It is often as a problem for knowledge that love is manifest In this state of confusion, the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye offer new material to the philosophy of love   What has painting got to do

Contributor

August 2014

Kate Zambreno

Contributor

August 2014

Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts (Riverhead) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study...

Heroines

feature

March 2013

Kate Zambreno

feature

March 2013

I am beginning to realise that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like...

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poetry

January 2016

Two New Poems

Elena Fanailova

TR. Eugene Ostashevsky

poetry

January 2016

(POEM FOR ZHADAN)   This (my) country will be the death of you Its military mathematics Its secret services...

feature

November 2013

I Can’t Stop Thinking Through What Other People Are Thinking

David Shields

feature

November 2013

Originally, feathers evolved to retain heat; later, they were repurposed for a means of flight. No one ever accuses...

Art

February 2014

Starting with a Bang: Hannah Höch and The First International Dada Fair

Daniel F. Herrmann

Art

February 2014

A spectre haunted the Lützow-Ufer – the spectre of Dadaism. It hung from the ceiling and peered down from the...

 

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