Cinema in the outskirts of Naples, Italy
Thomas Hoepker
1956

Shame, in other words, does not require responsible action, but it also does not prevent it. Indeed, the risk of shame for the nation may be that it can do too much work in the uncertainty of the work that it is doing. It is no accident that public expressions of shame try to ‘finish’ the speech act by converting shame to pride. In this case, what is shameful is passed over through the enactment of shame. It is also no accident that in political rhetoric, ‘sorry’ moves to ‘regret’ by passing over ‘shame’. The affective economies at work, where words are substituted for each other as ‘names’ and ‘acts’ of emotion, certainly do something – they re-cover the national subject, and allow recovery for ‘civil society’, by allowing the endless deferral of responsibility for injustice in the present.

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Pather Panchali (1955), dir. Satyajit Ray

Eric Douglas
Lantern Slide - Tabular Iceberg
BANZARE Voyage 2, Antarctica
1930-1931

Spinoza means something very simple, that sadness makes no one intelligent. In sadness one is wretched. It’s for this reason that the powers-that-be [pouvoirs] need subjects to be sad. Agony has never been a cultural game of intelligence or vivacity. As long as you have a sad affect, a body acts on yours, a soul acts on yours in conditions and in a relation which do not agree with yours. At that point, nothing in sadness can induce you to form the common notion, that is to say the idea of a something in common between two bodies and two souls. What he’s saying is full of wisdom. This is why thinking of death is the most base thing. He is opposed to the whole philosophical tradition which is a meditation on death. His formula is that philosophy is a meditation on life and not on death.

Gilles Deleuze, On Spinoza

Hélio Oiticica (Brazilian: 1937 – 1980)
Metascheme
1959