Laughter is a sense-making device in the darkest phases of restraint, and also a means of self-extension. Bodies in pain and souls in fury are fundamentally transformed in sonorous gradations of mirth. “Isn’t laughter the first form of liberation from a secular oppression?” asked Luce Irigaray. Rational terror is pulverized by the Medusa’s laugh—to draw from Cixous’s formulation—an entrapped body given release in her reverberation.

Corruption is the disappeared body coming back to life. Its flesh seizes the veins of the postrevolutionary state, pumping, circulating, and blocking in a synchronized manner while unleashing shape-shifting forms as its residue. In medieval Europe, the Sovereign’s body was considered to be double: the limited apparatus of the natural body, and a larger state of abstraction of the body politic. 1 Together they formed the geocosmic “whole” of sovereign territorial…

Corruption is the disappeared body coming back to life. Its flesh seizes the veins of the post-revolutionary state, pumping, circulating, and blocking in a synchronized manner while unleashing shape-shifting forms as its residue. This ultimate stench of capital thrives in passing from body to body, as though an uncontainable viral flu.

Natasha Ginwala: I wonder if we could think about corruption as something that already performs immanently in your various roles as an artist, musician, and writer, in the ways that these different approaches become entangled across processes of liveness and improvisation, in music, scripting and building film scenarios, and so forth. Hassan Khan: Of course even the word “corruption” is very broad; there is direct political and financial corruption, there is entropy as a…

The Shell In The Mountain The theories of natural science that were nascent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may be re-excavated through the figure of the marine shell—encountered as a form of stone, and lodged mysteriously in the highest mountains of Lower Saxony. These stone shells (as well as eels), Voltaire said, “made new systems blossom.” A cacophony of eminent philosophical and scientific voices entered to contest the origins of these aberrational geotic forms,…

When R.L. Stevenson undertook his first transatlantic voyage at the age of 25, journeying to reunite with his future wife in California, he wrote the essay “The Amateur Emigrant.” This writing became the first chapter of his collected works, Essays of Travel , published in 1905. On board the Devonia from London to New York in August of 1879, he opens with scenes from “The Second Cabin”: A few Scandinavians, who had already grown acquainted on the North Sea, were friendly and…