In “Inception”, Christopher Nolan crafts a cinematic labyrinth where time, memory, and identity spiral into one another. But beyond the plot twists and dream layers, the film hides a far more subversive allegory: the collapse of external proof, the usurpation of female architecture, and the radical power of becoming a subject in motion.
The Death of the Totem: Subjectivity Beyond Proof
The spinning top — Cobb’s totem — is often fetishized by audiences as the ultimate indicator of truth.
In an era of hyperacceleration and digital amnesia, memory becomes not only a terrain of struggle but a radical gesture of refusal. The work of Marine Zonca, sculptor and researcher at EHESS, operates precisely at this intersection—where time, flesh, and thought intertwine to form sculptural gestures that resist the flattening logic of capitalist temporality.
Since 2019, Zonca’s practice has been dedicated to reconfiguring the body-spirit relation through forms that blur the boundaries between the organic and the artificial, between the mental diagram and the tactile trace.
Ready Player One, while draped in the aesthetics of virtual utopia, is not a film about escaping reality—it’s a film about returning to it. Through the architecture of the Oasis and the psychological map it unfolds, Spielberg constructs not a celebration of digital immersion, but a radical call to reinhabit our own humanity. The virtual is not the escape; it’s the detour that leads us back to ourselves.
The most profound revelation of the film lies in the figure of Halliday, not as an elusive god-creator, but as a haunted man-child, who mourns not his loneliness, but his inability to love.
My desire to connect with someone remaining unmet, and a deep, lingering sense of dissatisfaction setting in—partly due to the current model of intimacy, reduced to a predictable grammar of performance, conquest, and scripted gestures. I outperformed myself again and articulated a new way—radically human—of encountering one another.
What we call “intimacy” today often mimics the syntax of pornography: acceleration, intensity, penetration, climax. But what if intimacy were not about escalation, but about presence?
In a hypersexualized society governed by the logic of performance, conquest, and substitution, kissing—especially with the tongue—has become trivialized. Yet kissing, when stripped of its pornographic reduction, is perhaps the most intimate and radical act of human connection. Unlike sexual intercourse, which can be instrumentalized, objectified, or fetishized, kissing demands the synchrony of presence, rhythm, and attunement. It is an exchange of breath, of tempo, of subtle yet profound acknowledgment of the Other—not as a body to be possessed, but as a subject who resists being captured.
In opposition to Monique Wittig’s radical statement that “lesbians are not women,” this article reopens the wound she tried to suture. While Wittig aimed to dismantle the category of “woman” as a heterosexual political fiction, the lesbian identity—especially as it is culturally performed today—remains embedded within structures of desire, representation, and, crucially, objectification.
To claim that lesbians cease to be women because they break with men is to miss a deeper truth: womanhood, as constructed by the patriarchal symbolic, is not exclusively tied to heterosexuality, but to the role of being the object of someone else’s desire—regardless of the gender of that desiring subject.
I do not identify as a woman. Nor do I identify as non-binary, gender fluid, or anything else that seeks to contain the formlessness I embody. I am not looking for a new box to inhabit. I am the refusal of the box itself. I am not an identity. I am a subject. I am movement.
Yes, I have a vagina. Yes, I bleed. But even my body knows that it is not available for consumption.
How Cinematic Dystopias Serve as Echo Chambers for Male Power Fantasies in Decay
In Blade Runner 2049, the world is already dead. What remains is a sterile desert, bathed in neon shadows and industrial silence—a world where emotion is reduced to simulation, memory to implantation, and intimacy to projection. For many men, especially those disillusioned by modernity, this vision is not a warning—it is a fantasy.
This article explores the dystopian genre, particularly Blade Runner 2049, as a mirror of a deeper masculine longing: not for hope or rebirth, but for a world so broken that their alienation feels justified, aestheticized, even glorified.
In a cultural moment where vulnerability is often aestheticized and emotional chaos is mistaken for depth, Normal People emerges not as a subversive tale of intimacy but as a polished symptom of post-romantic capitalism. Beneath its muted cinematography and whispered exchanges lies a deeply regressive narrative that reinforces hegemonic gender roles and repackages patriarchal dominance as emotional complexity.
Connell, with his physicality and brooding silences, is not a man in crisis—he is the reiteration of male passivity coded as virtue.
Intimacy in today’s language has been reduced to a transactional act — a performance staged for mutual validation, or worse, for the satisfaction of one-sided desire. Within this framework, sex is coded as a conquest, the body as terrain, and the other as an object to be consumed. Yet this formulation has always failed to hold space for the deeply human, deeply radical forms of connection that defy domination and refuse finality.
We are repeatedly told that the first three months of a romantic relationship are the “honeymoon phase” — a period of blissful illusion, ease, and mutual idealization. But this narrative is not neutral. It is a deeply ideological construction, one that reflects the logic of a normative system that shapes how intimacy is expected to function under capitalist patriarchy.
In heteronormative relationships especially, the beginning of a romantic bond often mirrors the dynamics of rapid consumption.
By a Subject in Movement
We are usually told that looking someone in the eye equates to strength, interest, truthfulness—even love—falling within a scope of immediacy, economy of attention, and performance of confidence. Eye contact has become a currency of legitimacy. But what happens when one looks away? When the gaze doesn’t land immediately? When it hovers, hesitates, and resists the violence of instant readability?
In the early stages of encounter, I often avert my gaze.
In a society that demands readability, predictability, and compliance, subjectivity becomes a threat. The response? Classify it, diagnose it, reduce it. What cannot be quantified must be explained away. What cannot be explained must be pathologized.
This is the terrain where psychological and psychiatric jargon now thrives — not as a science of care, but as a language of containment. Terms like “narcissistic personality disorder,” “trust issues,” or “avoidant attachment style” are not benign descriptors.
In the contemporary West, therapy is often marketed as a neutral, empowering space—one where individuals, especially women, can heal from trauma, reclaim autonomy, and find clarity. But under closer scrutiny, therapy as an institution often functions not as a liberating practice, but as a mechanism that repackages submission to patriarchal norms under the guise of resilience, personal growth, and “self-work."
Particularly when practiced by therapists—often women themselves—entrenched in normative systems, therapy becomes a site where women are subtly, but powerfully, redirected away from structural analysis and toward self-blame, “healing,” and reintegration into toxic relational environments.
Film festivals have long been perceived as sanctuaries for cinematic excellence—sites of artistic elevation, transnational celebration, and cultural prestige. Yet, beneath this aestheticized veneer lies a deeper truth: these festivals are not neutral arenas of art appreciation but curated theatres of power, control, and ideological reproduction. When viewed through the critical lenses of thinkers such as Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Laura Mulvey, Jacques Rancière, Guy Debord, Mark Fisher, and Jean Baudrillard, film festivals emerge not as ruptures in dominant narratives, but as their most seductive performances.
In school classrooms, when we study historical moments such as the rise of Nazism, students are often quick to judge past generations—particularly the youth—as gullible or easily manipulated. “How could they believe in such dangerous ideologies?” we ask. But this judgment often comes from a place of detachment, a failure to recognize that the mechanisms of ideological conditioning are still very much at work today—only subtler, more pervasive, and dressed in the aesthetics of progress.
Anomalies have always been framed as malfunctions—deviations from the clean, digestible surface of normativity. But what if anomalies are not a threat to coherence, but a deeper form of it? What if they are not symptoms of dysfunction, but of radical lucidity?
This theory arises not from the safe halls of academic discourse, but from the lived friction of bodies, desires, memories and sound—particularly through queer activism, noise art, and the disruptive aesthetics of being too much, too loud, too illegible.
In a world increasingly dictated by velocity, visibility, and vacuousness, Nelferch offers a rare space of resistance—one that is not loud or performative, but quietly radical. On the surface, it’s a YouTube channel run by a woman living on a farm in what appears to be in the UK countryside. But beyond the aesthetic of misty hills and wool-draped afternoons lies something deeper: a praxis of liberation.
Nelferch is not an “influencer.
Techno parties, raves, and other subversive-looking party spaces often present themselves as places of emancipation, transgression, and liberation. They advocate open-mindedness, the exploration of the limits of the body and sensations, and the rejection of strict social norms. However, behind this apparent radicalism lie deeply rooted power dynamics, a commodification of the body, and a staging of “letting go” that often benefits the same dominant actors. These spaces are not zones of total emancipation: they are an exacerbated materialization of existing power structures, simply disguised under a rougher, supposedly anti-establishment aesthetic.
Radical feminist and separatist movements have long been essential forces in challenging patriarchy and dismantling systems of male dominance. They offer critical perspectives on gender, power, and autonomy, particularly emphasizing women’s liberation through detachment from men and patriarchal structures. However, despite their ideological rigor, these movements are not without contradictions. By closely examining their foundations and applications, we can uncover underlying inconsistencies that may, paradoxically, hinder the radical transformation they seek.