The Uncanny Metonymy of Helen Phillips’s “The Need”

Sara Ahmed argues that fear behaves like a metonymy. It is a sticky, parasitic attachment to objects that slides easily from sign to sign and, in the process, remakes how matter are named, and hence how they exist in the world. This is how “terrorist” sticks to “Islam, Arab,” or “criminal” to “Mexican,” even in the face of arguments (with facts!) that should otherwise unmake them. Whereas anxiety is static, it becomes fear when the object recognizes the fearful (or the other way round), and approaches. Ahmed, citing Freud, explains that these affects are responses to a love that can disappear, that connection which “secures the subject’s relation to the world.” Because fear expects pain, the fearing subject is split psychically between a present and a future, and is felt intensely in the former at the same time they are dissociated from it. Fear may unveil how absent we are in the present. In the moment of fear, the body wants to flee in the face of the feared object. To whom does it turn? Ahmed writes that fear also turns us towards love, towards protection and care for an other. “In this way,” Ahmed argues, “fear is that which keeps alive the fantasy of love as the preservation of life, but paradoxically only by announcing the possibility of death.” At the instance when the body erects a wall between it and the threat, fear also intimates the possibility of a love as intense as fear. 

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Kleist and Kleist, or Failure as Transcendence

“You can make me mount the scaffold, but I can get you where it hurts, and that is exactly what I want.” – Heinrich von Kleist, “Michael Kohlhaas.” The first thing I noticed in the Times Obits in March, I’m a little embarrassed to say, was not the man’s accomplishments, but merely his name. Namely, his name wasn’t his name: the copycat’s original had died nearly 200 years ago under wildly different circumstances and causes, and for vastly different reasons. […]

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The Girl Least Likely To: A Social History of the Pompadour

I used to have really long hair–long enough that if it had lasted until Halloween, I could’ve passed for a young James Iha of the Smashing Pumpkins. Long enough that it earned me a few cat calls from men who’d seen me from behind, regular instances of being referred to as “Miss.” I’d always wanted to wear a pompadour, and when I got tired of wrapping my head in a towel post-shower I went to Tomcat’s Barbershop in Greenpoint and […]

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Proper English: The Teddy Boy Suit and Its Tiny Revolution

  During the Second World War, British troopers fighting in the African Theatre were issued suede boots with thick, rubber crepe soles that kept them from sinking into the desert sand. After the war, young British GIs brought their boots to dance halls and night clubs, where they became “brothel creepers.” Militaristic shoe design vanished and was replaced with woven patterns around the toe, single and double monk strap closures, and a thinner platform of about 1.5”-2.5”, usually in black […]

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You’ve Got The World By The Balls: An Interview With The Crowd’s Jim Kaa

In 1979, up in LA, Germs released the legendary GI. A year later, X’s incredible Los Angeles declared itself. In San Francisco: The Avengers happened. It was, we know now, a seminal year for California punk and hardcore. In Huntington Beach, a middle-class suburb in Orange County, CA, this compilation called Beach Blvd. was released in 1979. I found it on the Internet in the early ’00s. The record boasted the best tunes from Orange County bands Rik L Rik (whose […]

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