The problem of privacy
by Maria Takolander, We have a strange and contradictory fascination when it comes to other people’s lives. We care too much—as in the case of celebrities, those holographs (projected by the machine of capitalism) which we obsessively flesh out so that they resemble human beings. Our imaginations are tirelessly attentive to them. Alternatively, we care too little—as in the case of asylum seekers, whose lives we don’t want to imagine at all. Since the so-called ethical turn in literary studies, the skill of imagining another, of invading another’s privacy—which literature allegedly hones—has been regularly valorised by critics (Martha Nussbaum, for…