TheDrouth

23rd December 2020

Feminist City :
City of Possibility
Andrea Gibbons

'Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies', runs the blurb on on Leslie Kerns' book feminist city published by Verso. Writer and housing activist Andrea Gibbons takes a critical read, and ponders on why our cities are still made for and by 'mostly men', and what are the possibilities for other, better cities for all sorts of bodies and beyond the already charted pathways...
16th December 2020

Australian War Crimes : The Importance of Holding Oneself to Account 75 years after Nuremberg by Shannon Maree Torrens

The Brereton Report, commonly named so after the leader of investigations, NSW Supreme Court Judge Paul Brereton, was published in November 2020, seventy-five years after the Nuremberg Trials began. The Report found evidence of war crimes committed by the Australian Defence Force troops in Afghanistan between 2009-13. Shannon Maree Torrens discusses the situation in Australia. In an age where 'sovereignty' is much discussed (and much superficially in Brexit) this piece shows us something of where the life and death issues of the question really lie.
15th December 2020

James N. Hutchinson

James N. Hutchinson is an artist based in Glasgow. He makes drawings, texts, commissioned objects and exhibitions, which are generated through a process he refers to as ‘Resorption’....
4th December 2020

R D Laing- Glasgow, The Centre of Reality

It’s difficult to know what to believe. Was R D Laing a thoroughly humane figure driven to ruin by the inhumanity he found in the world around him? Or did he ultimately betray the early brilliance he showed in astoundingly original early works like The Divided Self by lapsing into the role of lazy charlatan in the hippy sixties and seventies?
4th December 2020

Pippa Goldschmidt – Writer, Scientist, Scholar

Is it even possible to believe in the ‘two-cultures’ dichotomy in a virtual post-Freudian cyber age? No-one embodies, and operates from all the positions implicit in such an age more comprehensively than Pippa Goldschmidt.
3rd December 2020

Lorens Holm – Writer, Scholar, Architectural Theorist

What is it about that New York rhythm of intellectual engagement that mesmerises, convinces, becalms, and at the same time energises us? Lorens Holm has it in spades
3rd December 2020

Theatres of Disquiet: A Diagnosis of the Baroque – by Murray Smith

If the overlay and clash and contrast of instincts is a topographical question for Freud, then Murray Smith has it here as a graphical one. Smith's own instinct, however, is that the Baroque, in its heightened sensitivity to force, tension and unease, is the 3D paradigm for exposition of the ineffable mysteries of consciousness.
2nd December 2020

Isabel Millar – Philosopher and Psychoanalytic Theorist

Isabel Millar is probably the world’s first virtual public intellectual. Watch this: an Englishwoman on Russian TV, speaking about a French psychoanalyst in Spanish language. That’s as neat a laying out of the cards as you might ever see.
1st December 2020

Laura Gonzalez – Artist, Writer, Scholar …

Freud aimed at working out the ‘topographical’ aspects of mental processes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle . By ‘topographical’ means, might indeed be the best way to approach the interdisciplinary complexity and irrepressible joie-de-vivre that we see in Professor Laura Gonzalez’ work