Petyarra and Moffatt: 'Looking from the sky'

Moffatt’s Up in the Sky series draws attention to the relation between sky and earth, through the content and camera angles of the images. Similarly, Kathleen Petyarre’s Central Desert acrylic dot painting evokes this relation representing country and Dreaming from a celestial perspective—as she says ‘looking from the sky’. Yet here any association between these artists seems to end with the urban artist refusing to engage Aboriginal tradition and the desert artist focused on Dreaming, country and heritage. However, a further connection between these disparate works may also be discerned as each, in differing ways, transforms our conventional perceptions of space and time. Reading these images in relation to Walter Benjamin’s concepts of the auratic and of messianic time, I suggest that each restructures dimension and duration putting in question the (post)modern calibrations of our space/time experience. This paper stages an engagement between these artists’ works and Benjamin’s concepts exploring the variations and modifications of the spatial and the temporal that hybrid cross-cultural exchanges require and facilitate

Interrupting Mythic Community

If nation is increasingly perceived as a less than honourable institution formed through war, invasion and geo-political territorialisation, and government is widely denounced as the site of political intrigue and the means of subjectification of citizen–voters, community appears to escape this critique and to be viewed as an idyllic formation based on bonds of affinity. However, this romancing of community is disrupted by trans-cultural and sub-cultural formations that expose the fantasy of a harmonious, homogenous community. While community is often conceived as arising organically from familial, tribal or cultural similarity, or as constituted through a common history and shared cultural institutions, this totalising conception of community is interrupted by the demands of difference and heterogeneity and by a questioning of the idyll of community authenticated in myths of archaic origin

Petyarre and Moffat: 'Looking from the Sky'

Moffatt’s Up in the Sky series draws attention to the relation between sky and earth, through the content and camera angles of the images. Similarly, Kathleen Petyarre’s Central Desert acrylic dot painting evokes this relation representing country and Dreaming from a celestial perspective—as she says ‘looking from the sky’. Yet here any association between these artists seems to end with the urban artist refusing to engage Aboriginal tradition and the desert artist focused on Dreaming, country and heritage. However, a further connection between these disparate works may also be discerned as each, in differing ways, transforms our conventional perceptions of space and time. Reading these images in relation to Walter Benjamin’s concepts of the auratic and of messianic time, I suggest that each restructures dimension and duration putting in question the (post)modern calibrations of our space/time experience. This paper stages an engagement between these artists’ works and Benjamin’s concepts exploring the variations and modifications of the spatial and the temporal that hybrid cross-cultural exchanges require and facilitate

Introduction

Introduction to the 'Affective Community' section of the issue

The Heart and Guts of Cultures

A review of Jean-Luc Nancy's A Finite Thinking (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003)

Editorial

In this issue of Cultural Studies Review we have been joined by Linnell Secomb as co-editor and facilitator of the special section ‘Affective Community’, which also provides us with the issue’s tag. The essays in this section, introduced by Linnell in the following pages, originate from the Hybridity/Community Conference held at the University of Sydney in March 2002

Amorous politics: between Derrida and Nancy

Beginning and ending with Jacques Derrida's anecdote about kissing Jean-Luc Nancy, this essay traces the disparate, yet entwined, thought of Nancy and Derrida on the amorous and tactile basis of philosophy and politics. While Derrida acknowledges, via his reading of Nancy, the affective basis of the political, each develops this insight differently: Derrida analyses friendship and democracy, Nancy contentiously links love and community. Nevertheless, these differing approaches intersect via a shared debt to Levinas; with Nancy developing Levinasian love into a conception of community, and Derrida transforming it into a theory of hospitality and democracy. Yet, there remains a melee of engagement and disagreement, transformation, deviation and recomposition that characterizes the exchanges between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy

Interrupting mythic community

If nation is increasingly perceived as a less than honourable institution formed through war, invasion and geo-political territorialisation, and government is widely denounced as the site of political intrigue and the means of subjectification of citizen-voters, community appears to escape this critique and to be viewed as an idyllic formation based on bonds of affinity. However, this romancing of community is disrupted by trans-cultural and sub-cultural formations that expose the fantasy of harmonious, homogenous community. While community is often conceived as arising organically from familial, tribal or cultural similarity, or as constituted through a common history and shared cultural institutions, this totalising conception of community is interrupted by the demands of difference and heterogeneity and by a questioning of the idyll of community authenticated in myths of archaic origin

Killing time: Simone de Beauvoir on temporality and mortality

Simone de Beauvoir's conception of temporality in her novel 'She Came to Stay' is influenced by her reading of Hegel, Heidegger and Bergson. While not explicit in the novel these influences form a background for Beauvoir's original conceptions of time that emerge in the characterisation, the phenomenological descriptions, the focalisations, and the structural devices employed. This article discusses three aspects of this temporalisation: the differing experiences of time represented by the two central characters Francoise and Xaviere; the emergence of a conception of inter-subjective temporality; and the annihilation of an 'immanent' time that is associated with the final murder of Xaviere