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A Normal Family  is a 2023 South Korean drama film directed by Hur Jin-ho and written by Park Eun-kyo and Park Joon-seok, based on Herman Koch’s 2009 novel The Dinner. The story follows two affluent families—two successful brothers—and a social world built on routine, composure, and reputation. The disruption does not come from the outside. The film shows how “normal” can cover cruelty and make it easier to accept, tolerate, and justify. It’s unsettling less because violence occurs and more because it can be made to fit. The ethical problem is tied to a specific family setup. Jae-wan is a high-profile lawyer who has recently had a baby with his second wife, Ji-soo. She is much younger than him, and her arrival has shifted the balance in his household. His brother, Jae-gyu, is a gentle doctor. He is married to Yeon-kyung, a sharp, capable translator who also cares every day for her mother-in-law, who has dementia. When the two families meet for dinner, the scene looks like upper-middle-class normalcy: warmth, controlled disagreement, light teasing, and practiced respect. But the film treats this surface not as comfort, but as a moral technology—something that can absorb conflict while still looking “decent.” The plot’s turning point is simple and decisive. Jae-wan’s teenage daughter Hye-yoon (from his first marriage) and Jae-gyu’s son Si-ho seem like typical kids at the table. Offstage, they live with reckless freedom, protected by money and the quiet assumption that consequences can be managed. On the night the families dine together, the two teens leave to drink at a party. Later, on the way home, they assault a homeless man and leave him badly injured. The film does not frame this as an aberration. It reads as an expression of entitlement and moral distance—violence made plausible inside a world where visibility and “social value” shape whose suffering counts. From there, the film works as a study in moral perception: how harm becomes visible, nameable, and actionable inside a privileged social order. “Normality” is not a neutral label. It functions like a filter for what seems credible, what counts as context, and what looks like a “reasonable” response. The central question is not whether the adults know right from wrong, but how they manage knowledge and responsibility once wrongdoing is discovered within their own circle. The truth surfaces through mediation, not confession. Yeon-kyung sees news coverage of the assault, including CCTV footage, and realizes Hye-yoon and Si-ho are the attackers. She becomes an unwilling hinge: she cannot unsee what she has seen, and she must decide whether to keep it inside the family or force it into the open. The film emphasizes her initial uncertainty. Ethical failure, it suggests, often starts as an attempt to preserve the things that make life feel stable—family unity, career security, social standing. The brothers’ responses sharpen the conflict. Jae-gyu argues the children should be reported. He grounds this in his professional identity as a doctor—someone trained to treat harm and take responsibility seriously. Jae-wan immediately calculates reputational fallout and institutional risk. As a lawyer, he understands exposure: how scandal can undo a career, destabilize a family, and stain a name. He fears losing what he has built—his new marriage, his baby, his status. The film’s ethical tension is not a debate about abstract right and wrong; it is a struggle over practice: who gets protected, what suffering is treated as acceptable, and what costs are judged too high. This is the film’s core claim: the gap between morality as performance and morality as action. The characters can speak in polished, even principled ways, while quietly narrowing the circle of who deserves their accountability. The collapse of ethics appears less as a rejection of values than as a shrinking of their scope. The victim—a homeless man—is treated as low-credibility, low-importance. His injury becomes easier to reframe as bad luck, “a mistake,” or an unfortunate event to be handled discreetly. The film is not only about concealment. It is about how respectability gives people language and procedure for avoiding responsibility—describing harm in ways that sound prudent, necessary, even humane, while the harm continues. The mother-in-law’s dementia underlines this with a single line: “He may look gentle, but he’s cruel. Be careful.” Here dementia matters less as diagnosis than as narrative device. It loosens politeness, interrupts the usual scripts, and makes room for what is normally unsayable. The film suggests cruelty is rarely unknown. More often, it is unspeakable within the family’s preferred self-image. Naming it clearly would threaten the “normal family” story. What sustains normality, in other words, is not ignorance but disciplined civility. The film also shows how wealth and success function as moral credit. Affluence reads as virtue; achievement reads as character. A Normal Family highlights the practical payoff: the ability to shift costs without losing face, to offload risk onto others, and to keep actions within the bounds of what still looks “reasonable.” Cruelty is portrayed less as a private emotion than as a mode of conduct—strategic indifference that lets one proceed with life while others absorb the damage. That is why the film feels so recognizable without turning into a lecture. Status allows people to perform innocence, receive trust, and shape the story of what happened—and what counts as harm. Harm does not simply occur; it is managed and sorted through the rules of respectability. Even the friction between the women—Yeon-kyung’s needling of Ji-soo, the younger wife—signals more than family tension. It marks differences in class position, gendered authority, and moral standing, which become decisive once the family must choose whose future to secure and at what price. By the end, the film lands a blunt ethical point: “normal life” can absorb a great deal of damage when the same rules that preserve normality also help people overlook damage, bury it, and move past it. The story is disturbing not because it lingers on violence as spectacle, but because it shows how violence becomes compatible with polite conversation—how cruelty persists when morality remains something people say, not something they do.

To me, academia—and research in particular—has always felt somewhat akin to sport. It's about achieving a lot and doing it well, with constant, objective comparisons to competitors through metrics such as the number of publications per year, citations, journal rankings and impact factors. That alone would be exhausting enough. But I have a talent for complicating things for myself. Unlike many academics, who remain in a relatively stable niche, I keep changing fields and evolving, throwing myself into new territories about which I often know almost nothing at the outset of a project. I started with metaphor studies, then moved into critical discourse analysis. From there I explored visual studies grounded in metaphor and ideology, then the ideology and pragmatics of humour, narrative, narrative criminology and narrative identity. More recently, I have engaged with ideas from Derrida's hauntology, transgenerational conflicts and emerging social representations in contexts of marginality, deviance and crime. Who knows what will come next? If I had to pick a single statistic that really represents me, it would be this: across my fifty Scopus-indexed articles there is an unusually high diversity of journals and domains. I rarely see this level of dispersion, even among academics with a hundred or more publications, whose work often circulates within a familiar cluster of journals with known editors and close colleagues. As a result, I work intensely and I am always trying to outperform the previous year. This year, on more than one occasion, I have found myself feeling completely empty—simultaneously driven by the desire to achieve more and paralysed by the physical and cognitive effort that “doing more” actually requires. Some call this burnout. Perhaps it is. But the academic market is so competitive for people like me, and my desire to achieve a lot and to do it well is so strong, that most of the time I don't even feel the fatigue. Or I pretend not to. If I had to choose a metaphor, it would probably be a marathon. Except in this marathon, we don't know where the finish line is, how many kilometres are left, or even whether everyone is actually running on foot.

Revenge moves in shadows—never wholly absent, never fully revealed. It lingers not as an outburst, but as sediment: slow, narrative, dangerous. It fascinates most when it is not supposed to exist. In societies that elevate forgiveness to the rank of virtue, in cultures founded upon the Christian imperative of the other cheek, revenge becomes more than transgression—it becomes mythopoetic residue. Its allure lies precisely in its refusal to conform, in its refusal to be quiet. Within moral ecologies saturated by mercy, revenge pulses with the force of a secret heresy. Early encounters with this force were clothed in narrative elegance. The Count of Monte Cristo  did not simply tell a story of wrong and retaliation; it built a cathedral of moral architecture where justice, denied by institutions, returns masked in vengeance. Edmond Dantès does not avenge through impulse—he composes retribution like a fugue, patient and symmetrical. In him, revenge ceases to be chaos and becomes form. But even here, in Dumas’ pages, the seduction is not the cruelty, but the symmetry. The world, having broken him asymmetrically, is repaid in perfect geometric response. Years later, Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy  ripped away the veil. In Oldboy , Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance , and Lady Vengeance , the choreography of retaliation becomes lurid, erotic, posthuman. What is reclaimed is not balance, but affective intensity. These are not stories of justice, but of implosion—of selfhood so saturated by betrayal that retribution becomes the only imaginable syntax. Here, revenge is not a return to order, but a disruption of it. Not restoration, but disturbance. This subterranean logic of vengeance—its grammar, its rhythm—emerged again, unexpectedly, in the voices of migrant storytellers. Not in fiction, but in narrative interviews. In De Vindicta et Resistentia: The Failure of Migrants’ Narrative Resistance and the Emergence of Revenge Narratives , the terrain is no longer literary or cinematic. It is social, affective, intimate. The narrators do not act out revenge in spectacle. They narrate it. They conjure it through memory, tone, and silence. And in that conjuring, something far more politically potent is revealed. The migrants whose stories shaped that research had first attempted resistance—narrative resistance, the kind that hopes to interrupt dominant frames. Against the Threat Narrative  and the Integration Challenge Narrative —those cultural mechanisms that depict migrants as violent, incompatible, or burdensome—counter-narratives had been crafted with care. Tales of peacefulness, diligence, obedience. But when these stories failed to alter perception, when moral clarity was met with bureaucratic suspicion or everyday betrayal, something fractured. Out of that fracture, revenge did not emerge as fury. It emerged as style. Rachid, wrongly implicated by association and cast out of a social circle, withdrew from the logic of reform and began to imagine a scenario of poetic reversal. His exclusion no longer sought rectification; it began to desire exposure. Others, like Jaineba, retaliated through the slow machinery of community, circulating refusal and shaping economic consequence. These are not merely acts of anger. They are aesthetic choices—narrative revisions that no longer seek entry, but return gaze with fracture. There is a haunting beauty in the timing of these transitions. The counter-narrative collapses not with a scream, but with a shift in rhythm. The speaker no longer hopes to be heard as innocent, but to be known as injured. The revenge narrative, then, is not simply what follows failure—it is what failure makes possible. It is the second tempo of resistance. The cultural force of these stories is amplified in the very soil that seeks to suppress them. In Christian-inflected political cultures—where public virtues are shaped by the beatitudes and civic discourse repeats the catechisms of tolerance—the figure of the revenger becomes uncontainable. The subject who refuses to forgive, who names injustice without recourse to reform, unsettles the entire performance of moral modernity. In such a world, revenge is not simply improper—it is sublime. Narratively, revenge disobeys the arc of redemption. It does not culminate in reconciliation or closure. It loops, destabilizes, repositions. In this sense, the revenge narratives I encountered were not aberrations. They were corrections. Not of reality, but of narrative dominance. They disrupted the expected telos of integration and offered instead a politics of wounded memory. The lexicon of cultural studies has often flirted with such acts. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, revenge becomes a “minor literature”—a mode of telling that deterritorializes major languages of virtue, complicity, and belonging. It is not opposition alone that defines these narratives, but their capacity to rearrange the coordinates of morality itself. They do not merely say: I was harmed. They say: the moral world that expects me to forgive has already failed me. Such a refusal is not nihilistic. It is epistemological. In my article, what began as an investigation into the limits of narrative resistance became a meditation on vengeance as discursive survival. When migrants are asked to integrate, what they are often asked to do is to forget—to forget the indignity of suspicion, the bureaucratic violence of delay, the coldness of legal languages that record suffering without recognizing it. Revenge, in this context, is not the opposite of peace—it is the refusal of forgetfulness. This refusal materializes not only in what is said, but in how it is said. Intonation carries the weight of betrayal. Temporal shifts mark the moment hope recedes. Irony blooms where sincerity once lived. These are not aesthetic flourishes; they are structural acts. They rewrite the very architecture of what counts as a legitimate story. Revenge is not always a scream. Often, it is a whisper. But that whisper unsettles entire narrative economies. In Christian cultures, in liberal democracies, in humanitarian frameworks—where the ideal subject is the grateful sufferer, the disciplined supplicant—revenge refuses decorum. It stains the discourse. And in that stain, it reveals the limits of the moral imagination. What fascinates is not that revenge exists. It is that it insists—in the very places that claim to have outgrown it.

Evolution, with its taste for the baroque and the bewildering, has adorned the animal world with curiosities that verge on the miraculous: translucent creatures that shimmer like ghosts, wings disguised as limbs, pupils that dilate with the logic of machines. And to one creature, singular and tragically gifted, it granted the most useless yet transformative of endowments: the voice—a tremor in the throat capable not only of summoning others but of summoning worlds. Humans, unlike the rest of the kingdom, are not bound by fixed calls or inherited tones. Where animals emit a handful of cries to signal danger or desire, we have crafted infinite variations from breath and muscle. And more: we endowed those variations with meanings, stitched them into songs, pacts, myths, and mourning. Our languages, initially born of necessity, soon burst their practical seams and became vessels for the invisible, for what could not be touched but nonetheless governed life: the sacred, the absurd, the unknown. And when tribes—each with its own orchestration of sound and gesture—met others who sang differently, they encountered a problem that no other species had ever needed to solve: how to translate the untranslatable. And it is precisely there, in the unbridgeable gap between minds, in the flickering misfires between what is said and what is meant, that the symbolic mind took root. Where there is failure of mirroring, abstraction emerges. Meaning, deferred and reshaped, found refuge in metaphor, in ritual, in symbol. But now, in a time not entirely post-human but perhaps pre-something else, that symbolic edifice—so painstakingly constructed, so wildly generative—is dismantling itself. The ceremonies that once enveloped our existence in layers of meaning, that gave time its tempo and space its sacredness, are dissolving under the acid of utility. What once required processions, days, preparations, communions—marriage, death, communion itself—is now truncated, expedited, procedural. A wedding, once the staging of transformation, can now be executed in five minutes in Las Vegas, notarized in fluorescence. Mourning, once a season of veils and silences, is reduced to a black square on a screen, a digital echo with no aftersound. The tea ceremony, which once choreographed the body into meditative precision, has been replaced by a plastic button that says, with robotic indifference, VEND. In Klara and the Sun (2021), Kazuo Ishiguro constructs a world where the final custodian of symbolic reverence is not human but machine. Klara, an Artificial Friend designed for companionship, kneels in mute devotion before the Sun, not as a physical star but as a sacred presence. She sacrifices, she hopes, she prays—not in simulation but in sincerity. Around her, humans operate with cold pragmatism, outsourcing tenderness to circuitry. It is Klara, in her programmed purity, who carries the last ember of belief. Dave Eggers, in The Every (2021), sketches a surveillance-saturated society where ambiguity is outlawed and transparency is divine. Every emotion is quantified, every behavior monitored. In such a world, the symbolic has no refuge: symbols, after all, thrive in the half-light, in ambiguity, in shared uncertainty. And so they are eradicated—replaced with metrics, interfaces, feedback loops. A world where meaning has been replaced with measurement. In Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), the mirror is held up closer still. As artificial beings acquire human form, it is the human who begins to flatten into mechanism. Love becomes algorithmic compatibility; guilt becomes a malfunction. The symbolic collapses into simulation. The sacred becomes executable code. Elsewhere, in Autoportrait (2005; English 2022) by Édouard Levé, the annihilation of the symbolic is neither argued nor mourned. It is simply performed. The narrator offers no narrative, no metaphor, no mythos—only a litany of disconnected statements: “I like fog. I avoid dentists. I once saw a man fall asleep during a funeral.” The self is not a story but a spreadsheet, each line itemed and orphaned. It is autobiography without arc, identity as static inventory. And yet, resistance, gentle and stubborn, persists. In The Overstory (2018), Richard Powers writes the forest back into consciousness. The trees in his novel are not scenery but syntax—alive with memory, ritual, communication beyond our comprehension. His characters, flung across generations, slowly reorient their lives toward the slow grammar of the natural world, seeking to re-enter a space where meaning is not manufactured but inherited, where the sacred is rooted rather than downloaded. And then there is My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Ottessa Moshfegh’s eerie lullaby for a world that has grown too thin for meaning. Her protagonist, drifting through late-capitalist New York, decides to vanish—not through drama, but through sleep. Not a symbol of rebirth, not a metaphor for healing, but sleep as negation, as protest. In a world stripped of ritual, she crafts her own—an anti-ceremony of chemical sedation. A stillness louder than speech. So where are we now? In a time when science has unmasked the illusions of ritual, and art has laid bare their contradictions, the symbolic mind finds itself exiled from the ordinary. Friendship is now a contact list. Love is a compatibility score. The homeland is a flag printed on a boarding pass. Meals are no longer sacraments but transactions. Sex, a stimulus; not a rite. Even morality, once propped up by the scaffolding of myth, dance, and decree, now floats on a sea of context-dependent reasoning. What was once commanded by gods is now debated in podcasts. What once required genuflection now asks only for consent. And yet—we keep telling stories. We imagine machines who still believe in the sun. We dream of forests whispering truths. We invent women who sleep their way into oblivion, and selves that dissolve into lists. Literature becomes the last remaining ritual, the echo of the symbolic mind long after the temple has crumbled. Perhaps the symbolic has not vanished but withdrawn. Perhaps, like Klara, it waits—silent, faithful, at the window—watching for the sun not as a physical fact but as a sign. A resurrection. A symbol of the symbolic itself. So we circle back to where we began: the voice. That improbable, fragile apparatus—capable of noise, yes, but also of poetry. Of spelling time. Of sanctifying space. Of transforming event into memory, memory into myth. We are creatures made not only to survive but to symbolize survival. Not only to endure the world, but to mean it. And when the circuits quiet, and the code cools, perhaps we will again remember what it is to speak not for function, but for reverence. Not to say, but to signify. Not to do, but to be.

We live surrounded by information—abundant, immediate, incessant. Data flows faster than thought, and with every scroll, click, or swipe, the world offers itself in fragments. But amidst this deluge, something essential is being lost: the difference between having access to information and knowing . The distinction is not trivial. It marks the gap between accumulation and understanding, between quantity and transformation. Information can be produced indefinitely. There is no limit to how many posts can populate our feeds, how many articles can be uploaded, how many videos can be stored. But our capacity to learn , to truly integrate what we encounter into a meaningful cognitive and ethical structure, remains deeply human—and therefore limited. There are physiological constraints, of course: time, attention, mental energy. But there are also existential ones. Learning requires more than exposure. It demands intention, slowness, friction. It is not enough to register that something has been said; one must wrestle with it, relate it to other ideas, test it against experience. Only then does it begin to take root as knowledge. This is why a “knowledge base,” no matter how vast, does not make a person knowledgeable. One can access a million pages and remain untouched, unchanged. Knowledge, in its fuller sense, is not something downloaded. It is something cultivated. Social media—today’s primary engine of exposure—illustrates this paradox. It offers everything: facts, opinions, insights, outrage, banality. But the constant stimulation does not translate into deeper understanding. Instead, it often short-circuits reflection. What remains is not knowledge, but noise. There is also the question of how  we learn. Not in theory, but in practice. Here, too, the digital promise of automated instruction, intelligent platforms, and infinite scalability misses the point. No interface, however advanced, can replace the encounter with another human being who teaches not only through concepts, but through presence. In my own experience, the teachers who left a mark on me—who made me want  to become a man of culture—were never the most orthodox or aligned with institutional expectations. They were vivid. Charismatic. Passionate. Imperfect, and often at odds with the very institutions they served. And it was precisely this contrast that made them appear free . They taught as though education were not a bureaucratic exercise, but an existential adventure—a way of inhabiting life more intensely, more truthfully. There is a scene in Corpus Christi  (Jan Komasa, 2009) that captures this beautifully. Daniel, a young man with a criminal past, pretends to be a priest in a small Polish village. Despite his deception, or perhaps because of it, he throws himself into the role with extraordinary sincerity. His sermons are raw, emotional, sometimes inappropriate. He confesses—publicly—to having killed someone. And yet, the parishioners follow him. Not because he knows doctrine better than others, but because he embodies something they recognize as real: he believes , he feels , he struggles . He is charismatic, passionate, imperfect—human. His words reach the people not in spite of, but through, his brokenness. He offers not authority, but authenticity. This kind of figure enters the heart, and once seen, is not easily forgotten. There is something in us that still responds—perhaps always will—to those who speak with their whole being, even (especially) when they defy the expected form. Institutions may offer structure, but it is the encounter  that transforms. That kind of teaching cannot be replaced by content delivery. It is not replicable, because it is not procedural. It is relational, affective, and unpredictable. It invites students not only to learn about  knowledge, but to desire  it. The same logic applies to books. A paper book does not merely contain content; it offers an experience. The weight of pages, the margin notes, the ability to move backward and forward with one’s hands—these are not nostalgic details. They are part of how knowledge settles, how it becomes part of the body, not just the brain. Samuel Johnson once remarked that people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed. And perhaps this is the crux of the matter. Learning is recursive. It grows through repetition, variation, and resonance. It is not about constant novelty, but about returning differently to what we thought we already knew. More importantly, knowledge is never neutral. It is always filtered—by judgment, by intuition, by conscience. Common sense mediates how we apply what we know, allowing for discretion, irony, even rebellion. Morality anchors knowledge in a framework of responsibility. Knowing how to do something does not tell us whether we should. A society that forgets this—that treats humans as information-processing machines—risks producing obedience without wisdom. A machine can be filled with knowledge, but it will never ask why, or for whom, or at what cost. It will never hesitate. True knowledge, human knowledge, is inseparable from hesitation. From context. From doubt, error, and care. That is why we must continue to defend the difference between knowing that  and knowing how , between having data and being formed . The former can be scaled. The latter cannot. It must be lived.

Memory, narrative coherence, and the indeterminacy of identity guide my studies toward hauntology and narrative identities. Derrida’s insight that ‘to be is to be haunted’ reveals how existence is shaped by the past and the specters of lost futures. The present is never self-contained; it is always influenced by echoes of what was and what could have been. This haunting becomes most evident in moments of crisis, when broken expectations leave a residue of absence and unfulfilled potential. The illusion of self-coherence depends on the assumed unreliability of memory. We construct consistent narratives by selectively reinterpreting the past, doubting memory’s accuracy to maintain stability. Yet memory may be entirely accurate: we have pursued both X and its opposite, held both A and its negation. Acknowledging this would mean accepting a fundamental indeterminacy in identity. Instead, we reshape past motivations to align with the present, retroactively constructing continuity. Self-deception becomes necessary for meaning-making. Without it, we would confront the unsettling reality that we have drifted, driven by shifting and often contradictory impulses. The more invested we are in our self-concept, the more we alter memory to fit our narrative. Memory is not simply fallible—it is an active process of reconstruction, validating our present through the past. This process is essential to understanding deviance and migration, which are shaped by disrupted temporalities. Migrants exist in haunted time: suspended between a past that will not release them, a present marked by instability, and a future that remains uncertain. Their identities carry lost possibilities, unresolved histories, and the weight of futures that never materialized. Hauntology reveals how these spectral elements influence decision-making, social belonging, and resistance. Crime narratives also embody haunting. The specters of past choices, alternate paths not taken, and constrained future possibilities shape how individuals construct meaning around their actions. These narratives often reflect a struggle between coherence and contradiction, as individuals attempt to reconcile their actions with a fractured self-concept. Hauntology provides a lens for analyzing how time, space, and identity intersect in crime and migration. The sensation of being trapped in an incomplete present, haunted by failed futures, is not just a philosophical condition—it is deeply political. Structures of exclusion render certain futures impossible, forcing individuals into precarious, stagnant temporalities. If haunting is a reminder of lost alternatives, its study is also a study of resistance: an insistence that those lost futures still hold power, shaping present struggles and decisions. As I continue exploring these themes, I hope they will be acknowledged within academic discourse, despite increasing specialization and technical rigidity that resist interdisciplinary approaches. My work thrives on blending perspectives rather than compartmentalizing them, a position that both defines me and complicates my academic engagement. Whether this epistemological resistance can be dismantled remains uncertain, but I remain committed to demonstrating that the specters of the past—and the futures they foreclosed—continue to demand our attention.

Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine as Light  is a hypnotic film where slowness serves as a means to penetrate human experience. Rooted in a documentary sensibility, her direction invites the viewer into a visual universe of vivid yet soft colors, rendering each emotional nuance tangible. This film is not merely cinematic but poetic, an oneiric journey between reality and imagination, solitude and connection. Through three intertwined stories, the film reveals urban contradictions, where life oscillates between frenetic rhythms and moments of suspension. Prabha, Anu, and Parvaty navigate a world marked by class injustices, religious tensions, and power dynamics. Yet, Kapadia avoids turning the film into a social manifesto; her gaze remains intimate and attentive to the nuances of everyday experience. A key strength of All We Imagine as Light  is its seamless integration of the political and personal. Rather than merely depicting societal struggles, it explores the protagonists’ responses, hesitations, and unrealized desires. The film introduces characters contending with broad social problems while also delving into their individual trajectories, allowing the audience to experience the emotional depth behind each choice. The camera lingers on details: shadows stretching across faces, blurred city lights reflecting in eyes, small gestures that speak volumes. The film’s magic lies in this apparent lightness, floating between dream and reality. Mumbai, with its chaos and elusive beauty, becomes a character—a crossroads of destinies and unresolved desires. Prabha is trapped in a ghost marriage, bound to a husband she has neither seen nor heard from in years. Her solitude is reflected in her measured gestures, her gaze briefly brightening at the possibility of new affection. In contrast, Anu is impulsive, young, and full of immediate desires: her secret relationship with Shiaz defies familial and societal pressures, despite the risks. Parvaty, meanwhile, faces eviction from her home of two decades, emblematic of the vulnerability of widowed women without legal protection. Together, they form a triptych spanning past, present, and future, illustrating facets of the female condition in India. The film is structured in two segments—first in Mumbai, then in a coastal village—mirroring the protagonists’ inner journeys. Only after leaving the urban frenzy can they confront their emotions. This shift is marked by a visual transformation: the city is depicted with cold lighting and confined spaces, while the village is warmer and more expansive, evoking a near-magical suspension of time. Here, the film subtly introduces magical realism, enhancing its message without feeling contrived. Kapadia navigates the boundaries between documentary and fiction, realism and symbolism, evoking the styles of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Chantal Akerman. Her storytelling relies on omission, letting images convey meaning: a projection of light on a face, a billowing sheet, a passing train. The piano-driven soundtrack underscores this contemplative dimension, accentuating the characters’ emotions. All We Imagine as Light  is not merely a film to watch but an experience to live—an immersive, introspective journey that lingers beyond the screening. With rare narrative elegance, Kapadia illustrates how, even in a world of uncertainty, light can emerge—if only we imagine it.

In the last six months, I have published three articles on distinct topics, each reflecting my ongoing engagement with narratives and their transformative impact on individuals and behavior. These articles include Food Stories , which investigates how food narratives become powerful vehicles for nationalist and racist ideologies, often driven by the desire to protect cultural heritage amid globalization. Through interviews with individuals in the Italian food sector, this research highlights the paradox of promoting national identity while simultaneously adapting to global influences—a contradiction that reveals the complexity of cultural nationalism. Identity Studies examines how the structural composition of crime narratives shapes criminal behavior, focusing on recidivism and desistance. By analyzing crafting styles like bead-threading and weaving, the study reveals how narrative choices influence the persistence of criminal identity or the transition to non-criminal roles. Narrative Criminology  delves into the interplay between victimhood and criminality, showing how experiences of victimization contribute to the development of resilience, leadership, and strategic adaptation—traits essential for constructing successful criminal personas capable of navigating complex social dynamics. Although these studies share common threads—the exploration of narratives as engines of identity and action—I often face the challenge of wondering if, amid the diversity of topics, I am genuinely contributing to knowledge or merely restating familiar concepts. The pressure to produce, meet academic benchmarks, and enhance metrics can overshadow the most important question: Am I creating original, meaningful content? I strive to do so, but uncertainty lingers. This uncertainty pushes me to consider the broader implications of originality—not just in scholarly work, but within the context of social class and economic conditions. Think of the slums and marginalized communities where creativity thrives because survival demands it. In these environments, individuals constantly devise ingenious, unconventional solutions: a railway track becomes a bustling market, a police checkpoint doubles as a snack stand. Their creativity is adaptive, spontaneous, and driven by necessity—a stark contrast to the rigid, predefined routines of the "white" economy, where innovation is often stifled by standardization. This resourcefulness, unmatched by structured systems, forces us to ask: who truly owns creativity? When absorbed into the formal economy, many of these highly creative individuals are relegated to repetitive tasks that suppress their ingenuity. The routines of the "white" economy amplify small, incremental innovations, but at the cost of reducing human inventiveness to mechanized processes. If 1% of the world’s population holds 40% of its wealth, who holds 40% of its creative, moral, or emotional richness? These questions are intertwined, and answering them is essential to understanding how societal structures shape and limit potential. Academia and its relentless production cycles risk turning originality into a hollow routine. Yet, the slums’ model of constant creative adaptation offers a compelling reminder: academic work should not settle for merely reiterating known ideas or playing within safe, predefined boundaries. It should aspire to address real, evolving challenges. True originality does not arise from the comfort of routines, but from the willingness to step into the unknown and embrace the transformative potential of uncertainty.

At the core of Solenoid  by Mircea Cărtărescu lies a profound exploration of memory, identity, and personal narrative. This novel, blending surrealism, metaphysics, and corporeality, illustrates the fragile coherence we construct to give meaning to our lives. Drawing from ideas on the unreliability of memory, Solenoid  shows how self-perception often relies on selective reinterpretations of the past. In the novel, memory is not a repository of facts but a battleground where the protagonist negotiates shifting motives and purposes. As suggested, memory itself may be accurate, but its contradictions challenge our identity, leading to selective reinterpretation. The protagonist’s obsession with past details—an encysted umbilical cord, preserved baby teeth—represents an attempt to anchor a fragmented life in tangible relics. Yet, this fixation only underscores the impossibility of creating a unified narrative. Self-deception is vital in the novel, where the protagonist avoids acknowledging life’s lack of inherent purpose by weaving illusions. His fragmented memories and surreal encounters reflect the postmodern view that coherence is an illusion. This resonates with Borges’ and Kafka’s influence, where labyrinthine narratives and the idea of inescapable existential traps dominate. As the protagonist pursues transcendence beyond his decaying body, he mirrors the idea that memory distortion serves to adapt past motives to current goals, constructing a coherence that never truly existed. Cărtărescu portrays the body as a metaphor for identity’s disintegration. Through imagery of teeth, scars, and parasites, the novel highlights how physical decay parallels mental fragmentation. The protagonist continuously reconstructs himself, embodying the view that identity is fluid and memory is constantly reshaped to align with self-perception. Ultimately, Solenoid  suggests that meaning is not found in coherence but in the process of exploring memory’s instability. The novel’s labyrinth reflects life’s ongoing negotiation between past and present, reality and imagination. As the protagonist moves through surreal encounters and shifting selves, he exemplifies how memory and narrative adaptation create the illusion of purpose, even when facing the endless complexity of human experience. In Cărtărescu’s world, meaning lies not in resolution but in the continual act of searching.

When I embarked on this study , I was aware of the challenges involved in finding a participant like Antonio. His entanglement with organized crime made obtaining a comprehensive interview incredibly complex. Each detail gleaned from our conversations was invaluable, and I felt immense pressure to make the most of this rare and precious material. Antonio is not just a member of organized crime; he is also a migrant and an artist, which added layers of complexity and fascination to his story. I had to handle these nuances with care to ensure that the richness of his experiences was not lost. The interview revealed how Antonio uses his criminal identity not only for illicit activities but also to craft an image of himself as a benefactor and respected professional within both the criminal and migrant communities. Antonio described crime as a means to elevate his social status and prove his worth, a motivation deeply embedded in his self-representation. This made his narrative uniquely significant for studying criminal identities. Every word he spoke offered an opportunity to better understand the interplay between criminal identity and other situational identities, such as those of a migrant and an artist. Further studies on this participant will follow, with the hope that the need for originality will not be overshadowed by a familiarity with his stories. Each new insight into Antonio's multifaceted identity promises to deepen our understanding of the intricate dynamics at play​.

"Remember this: They insist that they are innocent, because they really are... innocent. The people we interrogate aren’t really terrorists, spies, or saboteurs. But there is a reason why they end up here, with us. Because they are all unreliable elements. For many reasons. Some have questionable backgrounds. Others had their relatives repressed. They disowned them, but still hold a grudge. Some are actually Polish. Or German. Which means a soon-to-be spy. Some of them just don’t love the Motherland. Yes, there are people like that. They just don’t, and that’s that. It’s incredible how many of these unreliables there are. It’s...very dangerous. You know the times we’re living in. The country is surrounded by enemies, war is inevitable. How will these unreliable elements behave when it starts? Yes, they’re innocent right now. But they will be guilty later on. We can’t just sit and wait for that to happen. For them to turn into traitors, spies, terrorists, saboteurs...It will be too late. That is why we lock them up and execute them. Today. Now. Beforehand. It’s called 'preventative action against potential enemies'. That is the work you and I are doing." This chilling rationale sets the philosophical tone for Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov's "Captain Volkogonov Escaped," set in Stalinist Russia in 1938. The film follows Captain Volkogonov, a loyal enforcer of state terror, who becomes a fugitive seeking redemption after being accused of crimes. The opening scene, set in an ornate palace ballroom with an immense chandelier, features young, shaven-headed men playing volleyball. The game degenerates into roughhousing and wrestling, showcasing the raw aggression that defines their masculinity. This scene juxtaposes the decaying grandeur of old Russia with the brutality of its revolutionary heirs, highlighting a society where power is maintained through violence, mirroring the oppressive environment that shapes Volkogonov’s existence. Volkogonov’s transition from feared interrogator to fugitive embodies the film's exploration of the thin line between hunter and hunted. His loyalty to the state crumbles as he becomes a target of the very system he served, underscoring the precarious nature of power. This transformation is poignantly depicted when Volkogonov flees upon noticing his comrades being summoned for “re-evaluation,” a euphemism for their impending doom. His flight marks the beginning of his quest for redemption, driven by a vision in which he must seek forgiveness from his victims to avoid damnation. The philosophical core, revealed in the preemptive rationale of the opening quote, exposes a regime that punishes potential future threats in the present. This dystopian logic fosters fear and suspicion, where innocence is transient and guilt is preordained. The regime justifies its brutality as safeguarding the future, reflecting deep moral corruption. Volkogonov’s quest for redemption, driven by fear of eternal damnation, introduces a spiritual dimension. However, his motives are selfish, driven by fear of damnation. This complex portrayal prevents the film from descending into simplistic moralism, presenting Volkogonov as a flawed individual grappling with his guilt and mortality. His journey is marked by failures as he encounters the sullen rage and madness of his victims’ loved ones, highlighting the futility and complexity of seeking true forgiveness in a corrupted system. The non-linear narrative structure mirrors Volkogonov’s fractured psyche and the chaotic world he inhabits. This approach, while enriching the film’s psychological depth, can make it a demanding watch. The blending of action sequences with introspective moments creates a dynamic yet heavy atmosphere, reflecting the oppressive weight of the historical and personal themes. Ultimately, "Captain Volkogonov Escaped" critiques the moral bankruptcy of a regime that sacrifices individual lives for illusory collective security. Through Volkogonov’s journey, the film challenges viewers to confront the unsettling reality of a world where innocence is fleeting and redemption is tainted by self-interest. The visceral cinematography, anachronistic costuming, and propulsive score enhance this dark tale, underscoring the superficiality of physical fitness and aggression in totalitarian societies while leaving Volkogonov's internal evolution somewhat underdeveloped.

"Challengers," directed by Luca Guadagnino in 2024, embodies the potential pitfalls of auteur cinema when visual flair overshadows the essential narrative and thematic elements required for a film to resonate deeply with its audience. While Guadagnino's film is visually arresting, thanks to the stunning cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and the director's sophisticated stylistic touches, it underscores a critical issue in auteur cinema: the imbalance between aesthetic allure and substantive storytelling. The film's ambitious attempt to weave complex themes of relationships and sexuality into the competitive setting of professional tennis is undermined by a superficial treatment that fails to explore these themes with the necessary depth. This surface-level exploration results in a narrative that feels both underdeveloped and disconnected, highlighting a common critique of auteur films that they can sometimes become too enamored with style at the expense of substance. Moreover, "Challengers" suffers from an overemphasis on its lead actress, Zendaya, whose character is presented with an almost obsessive focus. This approach not only detracts from the development of other characters but also shifts the film from being a multi-dimensional exploration of its themes to a showcase of Zendaya's star power. Such a skewed focus is indicative of a broader issue in auteur cinema, where the director's vision can sometimes lead to unbalanced narratives that serve more as vehicles for the director's stylistic preferences or the lead actors' performances rather than as robust, well-rounded cinematic experiences. Additionally, the film's overt and excessive use of product placement further exemplifies how commercial considerations can intrude upon the artistic and narrative integrity of auteur films. This prevalent display of brands and logos not only disrupts the viewer's immersion but also reinforces the critique that even films intended as high art are not immune to the pressures of commercialism, often at the cost of their artistic potential. "Challengers" also demonstrates the challenges auteur films face with structure and pacing. The decision to oscillate between different timelines could have added depth and complexity but instead contributes to a disjointed narrative flow. This structural choice, often seen in auteur cinema, may aim to enhance the visual and emotional impact of the story but can lead to confusion and a lack of coherent engagement if not handled with meticulous care. In essence, while "Challengers" showcases Luca Guadagnino's undeniable skills as a filmmaker capable of producing visually impressive cinema, it also serves as a cautionary tale of the inherent risks in auteur filmmaking. It illustrates that without a strong narrative foundation and a balanced approach to character development, even the most visually captivating films can fail to leave a lasting impact. This highlights the crucial balance required in auteur cinema between visual artistry and the substantive engagement of its themes and characters.