Ariella Azoulay
Ariela Azoulay teaches political thought and visual culture at Brown University.
Her website can be found here.
Blog
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"In the name of the capital they covet": Ariella Azoulay on a new civil awakening
"And in the name of the capital they covet / recruit all who are allowed to remain or enter / as the nation's sentries"
In the latest issue of Manifesta Journal Ariella Azoulay writes as part of short poetic photo-essay on the development of the body politic after the Arab Spring, examining the developing civil language of the body from London and Madrid to Cairo and Seoul.Since then, when sometimes against all chances / Opportunity appears on the horizon / Citizens have not given up / The possibility of imagining another life / Once in a while they re-emerge and declare: / Without us there is no body politic; only an idea on paper.
Visit Manifesta Journal to view the essay in full. -
"Speaking a civil language"
"A sovereign democratic regime cannot tolerate its citizens speaking a civil language" writes Ariella Azoulay in Brooklyn Rail "and, hence, it reduces the language of revolution to a series of local events with discrete beginnings and endings as well as specific causes and effects, after which order—sovereign order, of course—is restored."
Developing the notion of a civil language opposed to sovereign power, Azoulay goes on to explore how sovereign power has dictated and restricted the discourse of revolutionary change:The sovereign language usually manages to subdue the inner syntax of civil language so that it is interpreted mainly as a series of goal-oriented actions whose meaning is construed to lie within the hegemonic political language. By restricting our understanding of revolution to national contexts, by associating it directly with well-defined goals and particular results, history, and political discourse since the end of the 18th century has delayed the emergence of a civil language according to which revolutionary history could appear as a single, albeit interrupted, campaign.
Visit Brooklyn Rail to read the article in full. -
A Civil State of Emergency—a photoessay by Ariella Azoulay
Jeff Wall, Citizen, 1996, black-and-white photograph, 71 1/4 x 92 1/8".
CITIZEN
The man sleeping in a public park in Jeff Wall's Citizen, 1996, represents an act of criticism, a transgression of borders, an inspiring example of both potential and practical citizenship. Ever since seeing Wall's photograph at Documenta 10 in 1997, whenever I see anyone asleep in a public park-whether someone homeless or someone, like the man in this image, who looks like he or she has a home to go to-I cannot help thinking of him or her as claiming a share in a public space. And if citizens can assert their right to sleep in public, they can also rebel against a sign prohibiting the erection of tents, such as the one that addresses visitors to Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.
