Editorial

No Return, Only Becoming

April 2025

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule."— Walter Benjamin

There is a moment, sometimes quiet, sometimes violent, when the frame slips. The image unravels, the sentence falters, the self becomes unfamiliar. What follows is not resolution but a kind of trembling, a fabric woven from contradiction, residue, and distortion. The works gathered in this issue of The Pasticheur live in that terrain, in what remains after the rupture.

The rupture may be personal or political, visible or internal. It can take the form of exile, of erasure, of the slow disintegration of language; it can show in the distortion of a body or the corruption of a memory. Sometimes it is the soft interruption of a gesture. Sometimes it is history breaking open.

We live in a time that rewards certainty and speed, where ambiguity draws suspicion and slowness is a liability. Voices that once lingered, thoughtfully and vulnerably, are drowned out by slogans, spectacle, and surveillance. In such a climate, to dwell in complexity is not a luxury but a form of resistance.

There is a moment in literature when the so-called monster speaks. He walks through a vast, echoing house, tenderly narrating his solitude and his rituals, and only at the end do we recognize him: not a beast but Asterion, the misnamed Minotaur, exiled by the world that feared him rather than by anything in his own nature. The works in this issue echo that quiet reversal. They ask us to look again at what we are told to fear, and to find in difference and ambiguity not danger but grace.

We are not outside this terrain. The fractures that art and literature explore are not only aesthetic; they are lived. We carry them, we recognize them, we move through a world shaped by systems that fragment us and technologies that remake us, by images that both reflect and betray us.

This is not a restoration of what once was. There is no return. Only becoming.

— Jorge R. G. Sagastume, Editor