Stefan Niklas

Notes on Cassirer, Star Wars, and the Aesthetic Transformation of Mythical Consciousness

This essay argues for a reinterpretation of myth as an autonomous modality of the human consciousness and the significance of inquiring into pop-cultural phenomena to understand it.

Pınar Türer

Thinking Intimacy through Maria Lai: Depth, Subtlety, and Meaning-making

This paper is a draft of a chapter in my Ph.D. thesis titled Ethics of Intimacy: Reconfiguring Relational Knowledge Practices through Transnational Art and Literature. As I think with the sewn works of the Sardinian artist Maria Lai, in this chapter I set out to unpack a part of intimacy’s complex nature – that of depth and meaning-making, inspired by the tactile qualities of Lai’s works and her play with language and meaning through textile. Starting from the idea that intimacy, as a mode of relating, involves a sense of depth, I ask the question of how to think carefully about this depth without repeating the dualist model of surface/depth that at times becomes a ground for hierarchizing difference. Furthermore, what does this notion of depth give us to explore relationality and knowledge practices in intimacy? I propose that the “text” of the depths in intimacy is created, and/or read through subtle signs that open onto an abundance of meaning.