Thomas Ades's 'The Exterminating Angel'

Thomas Adès's third opera, The Exterminating Angel, is based closely upon Luis Buñuel's 1962 film El ángel exterminador, in which the hosts and guests at a high-society dinner party find themselves inexplicably unable to leave the dining room. Initial critical response to the opera too often focused on superficial similarities and discrepancies between the two works at the expense of attending to the specifically musical ways in which Adès presented the drama. This article explores the role that repetition plays in the opera, and in particular how repetitions serve both as a means of critiquing bourgeois sensibilities and as a representation of (loss of) will. I conclude by drawing on the work of Deleuze in order to situate the climax of the opera against the notion of the eternal return, highlighting how the music articulates the dramatic failure of the characters to escape

Archive and Affect in Contemporary Photography

This article concentrates on two contemporary photographers, Greg Staats and Arnaud Maggs, whose work generates an affective response by engaging in an archival practice. Drawing on Jill Bennett\u27s analysis of affect in contemporary art, including her discussion of the way work can be transactive, Bassnett considers how the work of these artists addresses viewers, and how different archival practices unsettle conventional viewing relationships. In the case of Staats, affect is activated by his engagement with archival sources. Staats draws on family history and Iroquoian traditions to address individual and cultural loss in a process that translates what Bennett calls “sense memory” into “common memory” through art discourse. With Maggs, it is the artist\u27s archiving of cultural ephemera that engenders an affective response. The objects Maggs photographs have been taken out of their cultural and historical contexts and relocated within the discourse of art. Through an analysis of the way selected works produce affect, Bassnett argues that these approaches to photography as an archival practice offer ways of negotiating individual and cultural loss

Double Boundary and Cosmopolitan Experience in Europe

This contribution aims to open up the debate about national, European and cosmopolitan identity through an interpretation of Simmel’s double boundary dialectic: human beings are boundaries and only those who stand outside their boundaries can see them as such. One difficulty with defining oneself as European stems from what could be called the “double Other” (intra- and extra-European) diachronic recognition process. Exploring the possible/impossible cosmopolitan meta-synthesis can identify certain traits of the cosmopolitan experience in Europe.Peer reviewe