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SHIFTER17 : RE___ING
Re___ing, co-edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Matthew Metzger exists both within Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 23 No. 2 as well as a new issue of Shifter. This folding of one identity into another, a re within a Re and the resultant destabilization of both frames of reference, is precisely the nature of Re___ing. While re proliferates additives, doubles and fissures within the sphere of cultural production, it also implies multiple temporalities – to renew and to rewind. ing on the other hand, asserts the present continuous, it is always and already. Paradoxically, re is also to reify. When you call me and I respond I am born. When I call you and there is no response I feel the threat of erasure. I therefore call with the strongest faith that you will respond and when you do we cement our relation. The abstract becomes concrete. At what point does the attempt to exonerate representation from its intrusive counterpart, “the aura”, become a concern around appearances rather than labor? As with Borges’s Pierre Menard who rewrites Don Quixote word for word only to produce an anachronistic and inadequate adaptation, perhaps pure repetition is impossible. Therefore, although re attempts to proliferate multiples, the insistent ing, always in the present disturbs this veracity. Here, contributors engage a variety of gestures tied to reproducing by deploying palimpsestic archives culled from historical documents, proposing morphological relations as historic fact and ultimately forcing procedures of mimicry, translation and interpretation to their limit. This limit or threshold in many instances is defined here through the body and its traces, actions, delusions and dreams which may often remain utterly irreproducible. |
