Erik Stattin

Excerpter & böcker 16 februari ± Cykel | Aurora

A large part of the attraction of the problematic that Jameson’s work opens up comes from his emphasis on the need to think our current moment in its logic and totality and to give it a name. At the same time, he gives us something to do with all the cultural fetish objects and mindless distractions, both high and low, that subsume our daily lives—to redeem them as indexes of historicity, symptoms ripe for interpretation nonetheless shot through with a utopian potential however simultaneously distorted and undermined.Nico Baumbach, "The Last Good Dad: On Fredric Jameson's Pedagogy", Parapraxis, issue 50

Romantic chess arose in the 19th century, a dashing style characterised by the use of flourishes and traps. Winning with style is the priority, losing in style perfectly acceptable. One of the most famous games, the epitome of Romantic chess, is the ‘Immortal Game’ between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky in London in 1851. Anderssen won by sacrificing his major material in the service of developing a mating pattern with his minor pieces. The game – reproduced in Blade Runner when Sebastian checkmates Tyrell – contains strategies that are frowned on now, even as they are celebrated.Nicholas Pearson, "On the Chess Circuit", London Review of Books, 12 februari 2025

Strabos geografi

In scores of passages Strabo uses the Greek geographical term oikoumenê to refer to the landmass formed by Europe, Asia and Africa; nearly every English translator renders the term ‘inhabited world’. Pothecary has opted for ‘lived-in’ rather than ‘inhabited’. Since ‘lived-in’ implies deterioration with age, a reader of this Geographica might well imagine a world that is wearing out from overuse – increasingly accurate, perhaps, but not what Strabo intended.James Room, "Mapped Out", London Review of Books, 20 februari 2025

But it begins with the curator-author placing ARO [Architecture Research Office] in an intellectual context of which few laypeople are likely aware, and which even many professionals seem to have forgotten: when partners Stephen Cassell and Adam Yarinsky founded their joint practice in the early 1990s, “architectural theory (think Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, among others) was de rigueur in many architecture schools,” Hodge writes. Against this current, ARO was among the first offices to propose a fresh set of priorities, referred to by the designers as “curiosity with a purpose,” but perhaps even better summed up by their name, signaling as it does their shared determination to take the real world and real people as subjects of serious inquiry.Ian Volner, "New York Is Now", Bookforum, Winter 2025

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