Book Review by Maximilian Römer

Webster reminds us that breathing phenomena were and are involved in a variety of neurotic symptoms and refers to the first patients of psychoanalysis, who developed swallowing difficulties, feelings of suffocation, and coughing tics. Nowadays, we experience the importance of breathing in anxiety disorders, with their high prevalence, and in a heightened form in panic attacks, in which the ability to breathe seems to be lost.

Caving with Rainbow-Covered Headlamps

Caving with Rainbow-Covered Headlamps By Martin Perez

So, in existential panic, I pulled my gaze from the claustrophobic weight and scanned the narrow tube I sat in and knew while I was not suffocating, nor in peril like those doomed cavers, I too lived in a dangerous world, and I too didn’t measure the consequences of my choices adequately, and I too got sticky in the ungainly spaces I crawled through.

Tangerine By Ornella Antar

Her grandmother warned her not to fall into the trap. She didn’t say what it looked like, or when or how one might typically encounter it. She used the article “the,” not “a,” as if there was only one trap to fall into, and everyone must look out for it at all times.

ROOM 10.24

Toward a New Collectivity by Hattie Myers

Think what it would be like,” Italo Calvino wrote, “to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own, but to give speech to that which has no language… ” Of course we know that no person and no theory can ever escape the limited perspective of Calvino’s “individual ego.” Taken together, however, the authors and artists in ROOM 6.24 are giving language to a world that is rendering us all increasingly speechless.

Portrait of My Grandfather in Uniform by Stefania Baresic

Portrait of My Grandfather in Uniform by Stefania Baresic

I understand my subliminal acknowledgment of this absence as the source of my uncontainable sadness when I look at his image. I recognize the seed of that absence in my younger self as well, when in the grip of my defenses I distanced myself from an other with all my disowned shame around my own vulnerability; in the way I was a mother to my child, when unaware of my own dissociated self-states, I shared with them the heavy anxiety of my emotional inheritance.

Stemming the Flow: Racism in White America by Michael Krass

Stemming the Flow: Racism in White America by Michael Krass

[…] Many of us recognized the need to unblinkingly face the people we kill by our complicity in a racist system, a system that could make such an unabashed murder possible. Many of us started a long-overdue process of mourning the devastating impact of our complicity, of the ways we enact our own nightmares, creating a nightmare for an Other. But such tectonic cultural shifts generate great volatility.

Fascism’s Erotic Register by Sue Grand

Fascism’s Erotic Register by Sue Grand

[…] Watching the rituals of fascism, these people can see what the Leader does not want to be seen. They can look at him and through him. Their eyes seem to be everywhere. In the United States, we can sense that this gaze shatters fascism’s narcissistic mirror. To MAGA, this gaze must feel like a shaming panopticon. It is no wonder that these unregulated bodies evoke paranoia and rage in the dominant.