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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

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The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

Here I offer some reflections and several facts potentially useful for a phenomenology of the mask Needless to say, these hypotheses are of an adventurous character With them I offer nothing less than an origin to the universal use of the mask by people, which goes back beyond this species, to the insects who still wear it     1 The Importance of the Mask   All humanity wears or has worn a mask This enigmatic accessory without useful end is more widespread than the lever, the bow, the harpoon or the plough Some peoples were entirely ignorant of more humble, or more precious tools Yet, they knew of the mask Some civilisations, among them the most remarkable, have prospered without having the idea of the wheel, or, worse, without knowing how to use it Yet they were familiar with the mask Man in general, abstract and hypothetical man, from the first eras and the first cultures – could not have embodied more accurately, more appropriately, Descartes’s saying: ‘I advance masked’ There is not a tool, an invention, a belief, a custom, or an institution which brings about the unity of humanity to the same degree accomplished by the wearing of the mask   The Mask remains mysterious What are the reasons that have driven people to cover their faces with a second visage, instrument of metamorphosis and ecstasy, of possession by the gods – instrument, as well, of intimidation and of political power? All of ethnology is filled with masks, and with the vertigo, the trances, the hypnoses, and the panics that are its nearly inevitable consequences Here I chance my first sprawling hypothesis: a people enters history and civilisation the moment they reject the mask, when they repudiate it as an instrument of individual or collective panic, once they consign it to an institutional function Even reduced to a simple carnival accessory or mundane festivity, it disquiets and fascinates Its power of seduction has been completely appropriated, yet it does not disappear I will come back to this For the moment, though, I would like only to underline that the problem

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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feature

November 2011

The nobility of confusion: occupying the imagination

Drew Lyness

feature

November 2011

The Oakland Police Officers Association in California said something clever recently: ‘As your police officers, we are confused.’ It...

feature

Issue No. 1

(Un)timely considerations on old and current issues

Donatien Grau

feature

Issue No. 1

Criticism has not been doing well lately. The London Review of Books, Europe’s biggest-selling literary publication, would no longer...

feature

February 2015

Greece and the Poetics of Crisis

Joshua Barley

feature

February 2015

On the Aegean island of Skyros, in the Carnival period immediately preceding Lent, a more ancient ritual takes place....

 

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