..S
o this production of relations against the image of thought—it may be madness or stupidity, but it is also infrapolitics, since it always points to whatever precedes politics as its condition. Take the wonderful Velázquez oil portrait of a kitchen maid in the Chicago Art Institute, do you remember it? The gleaming kitchen utensils—the cups, the silver or tin pots: they are already thought beyond the image, in a relational universe that includes the world as such, of which there should be no image. They depict an immanent world in its glory, and it is a world that does not want to point beyond itself. I think Velázquez also painted several versions of the same painting—obsession, or something else. These are images that shatter the image of thought in the Deleuzian sense, because they won’t let themselves be tamed by any common sense or dogmatic conception: they are savage-hybrid images, or incurable images, as you put it.” (Alberto Moreiras responding to Tarek Elhaik, Image Lab, April 24, 2017. )
Clink on the links below to read a full transcript of the conversation and listen to the podcast…
A
lberto Moreiras is a Spanish-born academic and Professor of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University. Previously, he taught at Duke University and at the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen. He is a leading Derridean scholar and theorist of Ibero-American literature, as well as a trenchant critic of the politics of Latin American cultural studies. His books include The Exhaustion of Difference (Duke U. Press, 2001), Tercer espacio (Lom Ediciones, 1999), Línea de sombra: El no Sujeto de lo Politico (2006), and the recently published Marranismo e Inscripción: o el abandono de la conciencia desdichada (Escolar y Mayo Editores, 2016). He is co-editor of three journals namely, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Res publica, and Política común. Moreiras describes himself as neither identitarian, nor a specialist in any one “discipline.”
CONVERSATION PODCAST AND MATERIALS