Adrian Rifkin
Biographic Data
| ID | 3871698 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adrian Rifkin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adrian |
| FAMILY NAME | Rifkin |
| SIGNATURE | RIFKIN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leeds |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 32 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Curse of Nation, or the Dark Underside of French Modernity
Assyrians
This essay argues that Leo Bersani's immersion in a discipline of reading theoretical and psychoanalytic texts and literature with close critical attention effectively writes out his observations from an epistemology of being gay. His attention to visual materials is similarly acute and detailed, and the observed and the read fragment interfere with each other in a virtuosic demonstration of criticism that is both involved and detached. In this p…
Public City/Public Sex
This is a work of exhaustive and painstaking scholarship in Parisian archives and published sources of the nineteenth century. The cover image, Edouard Manet’s well-known Opera Ball signals its place in a long series of social and iconographical formulations and histories of Paris as precisely a city of public space and of sex and sexual encounters, the urban paradigm of their unfolding and the development of systems for the description and contr…
Paris and the Cliché of History. The City and Photographs, 1860 – 1970
Catherine Clark’s book is both a fascinating contribution to the history of diverse institutional situations and practices of photography in Paris over the last 160 years or so, based in an astonishing quality of deep archival sifting and research, and yet it is also beset by some surprising absences and oversights. I will here assess both these aspects of the work. I am doing so from the position of a generation of Paris historians who are, in o…
Reading Some Fragments From the Work of Muriel Dimen, or Contradictions on the Spicy Side
My piece is concerned with some of Muriel Dimen’s feminist writing of the 1980s and her bold and unyielding pleasure in elaborating a sexual politics rooted in an acceptance of the proliferation of sexual diversities and the ambivalent relations of feelings and theories that so marked the moment. Between subjective narrative, social theory and psychoanalysis Muriel found a new kind of space for a feminist enunciation that could be undertaken whil…
Is Berger Burning, Still
Does Gay Sex Need Queer Theory
Strategically pursuing the time-honoured notion of tactical essentialism I explore some of the unworked themes from my old porno-theories concerning the sexual as a site of reflection, the literal deferral of jouissance in favour of a moment of insight. In order to do this I locate my argument in pages from the diaries of an old friend and bar colleague in Paris, J, which extend over three decades of gay life and contain innumerable scenes of sex…
Apart from Sex
I am concerned here with the ways in which image and theory interact over decades of development and becoming visible the one to the other. I set out the processes of becoming visible and readable in new and unexpected ways against the questionable newness of the new, and against the outstanding question of what it might have been that the old really was. In this discussion the word sex is deployed as if it referred to an essential nature, and th…
JR cinéphile, or the philosopher who loved things
Dancing Years, or Writing as a Way Out
This essay is concerned with the random and arbitrary nature of the relation between taste, love, desire and knowledge as the basis for disciplinary formation. As an expanded oxymoron it thinks of the constitutive irrationality of the history of art as the space in which it can be shaped politically and theoretically through contingent and singular moments. It understands the Warburgian notion of nachleben not so much as a returning figure of old…
Sexual Anaphora
Thoughts on Iraq, After Many Years
Wotan Envy
From Structure to Enigma and Back, Perhaps
This article is concerned with reviewing the histories of structuralism and poststructuralism in their moment of redundancy as theoretical terms in order to unearth and instate some of the missing relations of writing and figure that we can read out of the work of the French writer Jean-Louis Schefer. Little read in the Anglo-Saxon university, his thinking on art, cinema and literature represents a unique intervention that, in its poetic denial o…
Il y a des mots qu'on souhaiterait ne plus lire
Americans go home –which is more American, Paris‐Texas or Paris‐France
Waiting and Seeing
This article argues for a Visual Culture of the endless elision of the object and the discourse in their own and each other’s anachronism as historical, on the one hand, and projections of the contemporary subject, on the other. It suggests that we are better to lose ourselves in our involuntary histories than to master them by methodological virtuosity and that we should wait for an enlightenment that will never come rather than engage ourselves…
A Roman Holiday
Collecting men, or my next duchess
In a concluding paper to the conference of which these essays are the record, I argued that the question of collecting is one that we can both think anew
Putting-off, the Painter's Tense some speculations on Gay Time
Benjamin’s Paris, Freud’s Rome
This article sets out to consider the ways in which specific cities and particular bodies of theory come to belong to each other through the interaction of complex processes of urban development on the one hand and the institutional life of theories on the other. If Paris belongs to Walter Benjamin and Rome belongs to Sigmund Freud, to whom are we to attribute London? Arguing that London is an essentially unsatisfactory and even frustrating lingu…
Julia Kristeva and her histories
Making Ruins
Reconstructing ruin
(1997). Reconstructing ruin: Change in Paris and the gay as trace. Renaissance and Modern Studies: Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 111-121
Total ellipsis
Does Gay Sex Need Queer Theory
Strategically pursuing the time-honoured notion of tactical essentialism I explore some of the unworked themes from my old porno-theories concerning the sexual as a site of reflection, the literal deferral of jouissance in favour of a moment of insight. In order to do this I locate my argument in pages from the diaries of an old friend and bar colleague in Paris, J, which extend over three decades of gay life and contain innumerable scenes of sex…
Sexual Anaphora
Total ellipsis
Musical Moments
Cultural Movement and the Paris Commune
Ingres and the Academic Dictionary
The Sex of French Politics
Marianne into Battle, Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France by Maurice Agulhon , translated by J. Lloyd, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1981, 235pp., 35 ills, £18.50 cloth, £6.95 paper Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon by James Henry Rubin , Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, 177 pp., 35 ills, £10.80 cloth £5.25 paper
Marx' Clarkism
The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers by T.J. Clark , London: Thames & Hudson, 1985, 338 pp., 30 colour pls, 118 b & w ills, £18
Brief Encounters of the Cultural Kind
Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures by Michael Baxandall , New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985, 148 pp., 62 ills, 4 colour pls, £12.95
Musical Moments
A conversation on Judith Butler's bodies that matter
(1995). A conversation on Judith Butler's bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “Sex”. Parallax: Vol. 1, Cultural Studies and Philosophy, pp. 143-164
Total ellipsis
Reconstructing ruin
(1997). Reconstructing ruin: Change in Paris and the gay as trace. Renaissance and Modern Studies: Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 111-121
Julia Kristeva and her histories
Making Ruins
Putting-off, the Painter's Tense some speculations on Gay Time
Benjamin’s Paris, Freud’s Rome
This article sets out to consider the ways in which specific cities and particular bodies of theory come to belong to each other through the interaction of complex processes of urban development on the one hand and the institutional life of theories on the other. If Paris belongs to Walter Benjamin and Rome belongs to Sigmund Freud, to whom are we to attribute London? Arguing that London is an essentially unsatisfactory and even frustrating lingu…
Collecting men, or my next duchess
In a concluding paper to the conference of which these essays are the record, I argued that the question of collecting is one that we can both think anew
A Roman Holiday
Waiting and Seeing
This article argues for a Visual Culture of the endless elision of the object and the discourse in their own and each other’s anachronism as historical, on the one hand, and projections of the contemporary subject, on the other. It suggests that we are better to lose ourselves in our involuntary histories than to master them by methodological virtuosity and that we should wait for an enlightenment that will never come rather than engage ourselves…
Americans go home –which is more American, Paris‐Texas or Paris‐France
From Structure to Enigma and Back, Perhaps
This article is concerned with reviewing the histories of structuralism and poststructuralism in their moment of redundancy as theoretical terms in order to unearth and instate some of the missing relations of writing and figure that we can read out of the work of the French writer Jean-Louis Schefer. Little read in the Anglo-Saxon university, his thinking on art, cinema and literature represents a unique intervention that, in its poetic denial o…
Il y a des mots qu'on souhaiterait ne plus lire
Thoughts on Iraq, After Many Years
Wotan Envy
Sexual Anaphora
Apart from Sex
I am concerned here with the ways in which image and theory interact over decades of development and becoming visible the one to the other. I set out the processes of becoming visible and readable in new and unexpected ways against the questionable newness of the new, and against the outstanding question of what it might have been that the old really was. In this discussion the word sex is deployed as if it referred to an essential nature, and th…
JR cinéphile, or the philosopher who loved things
Dancing Years, or Writing as a Way Out
This essay is concerned with the random and arbitrary nature of the relation between taste, love, desire and knowledge as the basis for disciplinary formation. As an expanded oxymoron it thinks of the constitutive irrationality of the history of art as the space in which it can be shaped politically and theoretically through contingent and singular moments. It understands the Warburgian notion of nachleben not so much as a returning figure of old…
Art (25 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Art history (15 works) · History (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Literature (8 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works)