Theory

Viviana A Zelizer The Purchase of Intimacy 2007 I find myself frequently returning to sociologist Viviana Zelizer’s outline of the ways in which economics and intimacy intersect. Confronting contemporary Western culture’s built in social taboos, Zelizer illustrates...

Victor Turner The Ritual Process 1995 It is through the work of Victor Turner that I came to truly appreciate and understand the meaning and charge of the term ‘liminal’ as a threshold inherent to a ritual of transformation. As an anthropologist, Turner spent time...

Jacques Ranciere The Politics of Aesthetics 2013 What I’m most interested in is how Ranciere teases out the definition of the visible and invisible as indispensable to politics. Rather than seeing aesthetics as a narrow definition beholden to philosophy, art and...

Marc Auge Non Places: An Introduction to Super Modernity 2009 Like Foucault, Auge’s focus is on space in Modern and Post Modern discourse. He spends time discussing arenas like supermarkets, airports and hotels, which can also be seen through the lens of liminal in...

Michel Foucault Of Other Places: Utopias & Heterotopias From Architecture/Movement Continuite October, 1984 Translated from French by Jay Misckowiec In this essay, Foucault introduces the concept for a unique space he defines as the ‘heterotopia.’ Here, the word...

Catherine ClementSyncope: The Philosophy of Rapture In this collection of essays, philosopher Catherine Clement explores the idea of syncopation as an interruption of time in music, spirituality, sexuality and theater. Clement leaves no stone left unturned looking...

Mikhail BakhtinRabelais & His World Russian writer Bakhtin is most famous for his contribution of an understanding of the grotesque, having studied French Renaissance writer and physician Francois Rablelais as a starting point. Mikhail Bakhtin focuses on the...