Lycra in the forest. I feel really American Beauty lying in the leaves. The young ones I study with don’t get the reference.  It was a massive cult movie when I was 20-something but it didn’t age well. All people remember now is latent paedophilia – even worse as Kevin Spacy, a now cancelled celebrity – plays the titular role. Super creepy that a sex offender struck such a chord with a generation. I tiled this pic Abjection. Discarded like the leaves of autumn. A life force now irrelevant and soon disgusting and rotting. I guess I’ve also abjected my 20-year-old self. The ideologies we perpetuated as naïve youths seem so ridiculous and cringe now. 

The tree trunk feels oddly like skin.

Fashioning the Other: Fashion as an Epistemology of Translation

This chapter explores the problematique of translation in international politics. In the absence of a semiotic ‘master code’, knowledge about, and understanding of, the other cannot be taken for granted. Drawing on Heidegger and Derrida, the following discussion deconstructs the modern episteme underlying Western notions of translation and excavates the political and cultural contexts in which the latter takes place. This ‘post-modern’ understanding of ‘translation without a master code’ is exemplified via a discussion of the way fashion operates as an epistemic paradigm. Focusing on a 2009 Chanel fashion show that appropriates Chinese sartorial signs, it demonstrates that the inability to know the ‘real’ China is the very condition for it to emerge in our imagination in a creative play of identity and différance.

Andreas Behnke

References

• Behnke, Andreas. Fashioning the Other: Fashion as an Epistemology of Translation. 2021. 10.1007/978-3-030-56886-3_5.