Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Simone Weil, Grace and Gravity
Frederick Wiseman died this last Monday, February 16, and whatever words we could share to celebrate his work we thought should be his. And as for his films, his “reality-fictions”, their greatness lies in their care in expressing that perspective which never ignores the experience of those filmed, even when they are so overly and burdensomely determined and framed by the institutional worlds in which they find themselves.
The generosity that Wiseman brought to his film subjects is the ethical fibre of his art. What politics can be read off it must be read off it, for he refuses the openly didactic and ideological role of the film maker, or even the artist more broadly.
There is a lesson here for the understanding of politics. If the latter is the collective and ongoing activity of free and equal of “citizens” in the shaping of a common life (Hannah Arendt), art, in contrast, is a making of something, a poiesis, which presupposes no equality. That art should be political in any direct sense is therefore problematic. Where the two however do meet is in an ethical engagement with others; in the ethical openness to others.
Frederick Wiseman’s films are “lessons” in the ethics necessary for any real politics.
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Fascist subjectivisation
From lundimatin #509, (18/02/2026)
To take an interest in fascism is to feel a connection with a past that is imminent in a threatening future. This past is not simply an ancient present: it is a past that is contemporary with our present, actively feeding into it. It is not a past that determines our present, that is its prelude, or that is the first occurrence in a sequence of events destined to repeat themselves as they are. It is a set of gestures, materialities, affects, ideas and subjectivities that haunt our present: this haunting is both an imposing presence and a sign that attracts us, while remaining strange, different and heterogeneous.[1]
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