- An Interview: Timothy Halligan, my best friend. We met my freshman year of high school and he was the other half of my first gay relationship. In an hour-long conversation on the tenth of April 2017, we discussed our friendship and experience together, and I asked him to meditate around the concepts of identity and community. I attempted to figure the shape of our shared culture from his answers. Tangentially, he brought up intersections of capitalism in the gay community, and his remarks inspired many of my later sources and structure.
- A Primary Source: Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. 1927-1940. I am assuming that Benjamin’s final, personal notes on his city constitute a primary source. His endlessly inspirational fragments continue to guide my work. Specific passages, like “Collector” resonate particularly with my idea of identity as intrinsically tied to cultural objects. I will most likely use other interpretations of Benjamin, e.g. Susan Buck-Morss’ The Dialectics of Seeing, to more precisely find productive material in the vastness of the original source.
- An Aesthetic Choice: Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1891. This book has laid on my to-read pile for a few years, and I recently read an article about a new book constellating Nietzsche’s influence on Benjamin so I thought I would try to bring the two together in my work. I am excited by the messianic and omnipotent language, albeit perhaps ironic, as well as the ability to interweave philosophical meaning through a narrative.
- A Resource: Moran, Marie. Identity and Capitalism. SAGE Publications Ltd, 2014. Described titularly as an attempt to grapple the modern concept of identity through the structure of modern capitalism, specifically from the author’s cultural-materialist viewpoint. This framework is immediately beneficial to my project through subject alone. Summaries and chapter titles expose an argument for identity conceptualization itself as a manifestation of modern consumption, a theory that adds tension to my ideas about the value of identity.
- An Image: Raphael, The Transfiguration. 1516-1520. Like Benjamin’s Arcades, this is Rafael’s last work and magnum opus. It depicts two scenes from the Gospels, the transfiguration of Christ in the upper panel and the miraculous healing of a possessed boy in the lower, depicting a dichotomy, and more than that a relationship, between reason/purity/divinity and emotion/chaos/mankind. Transfiguration is a central metaphor to my project, so this image invigorates my descriptive capacities and leads me through new allegorical dances.
- Other Sources: Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”; Annie Dillard’s “Transfiguration”; Cary Howie’s “On Transfiguration”; Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts; and The Catholic Encyclopedia.
Posted: April 26th, 2017
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