• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.34
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• pp.7-41
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• 2014

This article examines magical realism in contemporary european film, which is considered to be one of the most popular styles in the present culture, with regards to Antonio Negri's theory of art. Magical realism is "alternative approach to reality" (Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism) and defined as "a fictional technique that combines fantasy with raw physical reality or social reality in a search for truth beyond that available from the surface of everyday life" (Joan Mellen, Magic Realism). The term of Magic Realism was coined in 1923 by Franz Roh, German art historian, as the concept for the post-expressionist painting in Germany. It has flourished in the Latin-American literature during the 1950s to 1980s and spread worldwide. Since 1980s magical realism is considered to be a universal artistic mode. Since 1990s magical realism is to find in the various novels, and since 2000 one encounters magical realism in the cinema very often. Antonio Negri writes about the relationship between life, imagination, art and the political in his book Art et Multitude. According to Negri, the hard life of people in the present society liberates the imagination and this creates the art as "the excess of the existence". In this process the aesthetic becomes to the political. Negri calls this space of art as "magical time and space". Claire Denis' film Vendredi Soir is analyzed as a contemporary magic realist text, which realizes Negri's concept of art: vendredi soir (friday night) in Vendredi Soir is the magical time, when the impossible becomes the possible, and paris in the public transportation strike is the magical space, where the individuals meet the other in a new situation. The film analysis associates itself with Negri's theory of art: in Vendredi Soir, it is to see, that the excess of the existence liberates imagination and creates the magic reality both in the movements of things and the human relationship. The phenomenon of magical realism in contemporary culture can be understood as the symptom of the emotional and existential pains of contemporary people in the current world. The contemporaneity of the magical realism can be read in the film as "the metaphor for contemporary thought" (Alain Badiou, Cinema). As Antonio Negri writes, art can become "the aesthetic redemption" (Negri, Art et Multitude) for us. At the same time "(t)his is where aesthetics can be transformed into the political." (Lee, "Communism and the Void")

• Journal of architectural history
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.21-30
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• 2016

Autonomia movement that emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism gives historical and discursive context to Manfredo Tafuri's famous criticism of ideology. His thesis on the death of architecture was a radical criticism of Keynesian intervention which was a strategy to cope with the Great Depression. For him, this capitalist development had taken away ideological prefiguration from architecture. At least Tafuri's this early intellectual phase was formed in the wake of magazine Contrapiano and Antonio Negri's influence. Tafuri almost entirely adapted Negri's thought on the importance of capitalist innovation that was uncovered by Keynes, Schumpeter, and Manheim and the periodization in modern history. When we read Tafuri's text with this concrete context, we can avoid being plunged into his abstruseness. On the other hand, 1980's Korea cannot understand Tafuri comprehensibly. 1980's situation to struggle to acquire democracy prescribed only one mode of reception of Tafuri's historiography in Korea. Tafuri's so-called pessimist view point could not satisfy student activists. They want to take intellectual means to sustain student movement and to secure political dynamics of protest. But at the same time they have anxiety to understand tafuri's thesis that they consider ad a critical theory for Korean Architecture. Double contexts of Tafuri's criticism of ideology bring to light to historicize both Tafuri's historiography itself and reception of his text in Korea.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.903-941
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• 2012

This essay examines Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism focusing on the concepts of 'culture,' 'empire,' and 'nation'. The approach is critical, theoretical, and historical rather than explicatory. Consequently, the range of the essay is not limited to Said's own explanation and argument about Western imperialism and its culture presented in the book. In doing this, this essay finally purposes to be a discursive resistance to the current global empire, the United States, via a critical reading of Said's work. Said's notion of culture is set upon to disclose the function of culture as an apparatus of ideological consent of the dominated to the dominant. When applied to imperial practice, Western culture functions to subject the colonized to the colonizer. Said's geographical approach to imperialism complements the historical understanding of imperialism. Imperialism is not only the practice of Western-centered historicism but also the spatially mutual interaction between the West and the rest of the world. Along with European imperialism, Said poses the current global empire of the United States as his main target of criticism. Said's problem is that he takes the United States as a nation-state. When examined, the United States is not a nation-state, but today's empire. The empire in the appearance of the nation-state United States does not work for the interest of the American nation, that is, the American people. The empire is the transnational and postnational political and economic institution that works for the interest of global capital. In order to resist the current global empire, this essay suggests that the building or restoration of nation-states with its basic principle of people's sovereignty is in need.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.169-188
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• 2008

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri find in women's caring/domestic labor a potential for producing affects, relationships, and forms of communication and cooperation in the family and in the community. Caring/domestic labor in their view is biopolitical in that it directly produces social relationship and forms of life. In this way, they contributed in deconstructing the fixed idea that women's caring/domestic labors are confined to the private domain rather than public one. The literary representations of women's caring/ domestic labor, however, have tended to emphasize its repetitive and confining attributes to private domains and the accompanying physical and mental alienation. Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen" and James Joyce's "Eveline" are the examples. "To Room Nineteen," an indirect manifestation of Doris Lessing's position as a Communist, criticizes the sexual distinction of domestic labor under Capitalistic ethic and describes the possible extinction of women's subjects who internalize the capitalistic ideology of bourgeois middle class nuclear family. "Eveline," the fourth work of Joyce's Dubliners, is another example to show the negative result of internalization of Catholic orthodox in which women are obligated to care and sacrifice specially through domestic and caring labor.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.79
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• pp.226-259
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• 2016

Drawing on the autonomist Marxist concepts of 'social factory', 'immaterial labour', and 'precarity', this paper discusses the changed nature of labour, life and social relations in contemporary informational capitalism. More specifically, it first traces back to the early autonomist (operasimo) theories of 'social factory' and 'class composition' and then discusses how these earlier theories were developed into the concept of 'immaterial labour' by a group of later autonomist theorists such as Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Micheal Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Then, it reviews how the concept of immaterial labour was taken up to understand the nature of labour in digital economy within the tradition of Cultural Studies, closely intersecting with the critiques of 'creative labour'. Finally, it discusses how the changed nature of labour is interrelated with the neoliberal labour forces transformations such as casualization of employment and increasing insecurity in employment and life, which the autonomist explores with the concept of 'precarity', the material condition of immaterial labour.