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 The Pasticheur, and in this issue, live in that terrain—what remains after the rupture.

The rupture may be personal or political, visible or internal. It might take the form of exile, erasure, or the slow disintegration of language. It might emerge through 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. Ambiguity is treated with suspicion. Slowness is a liability. Voices that once lingered—thoughtfully, critically, vulnerably—are drowned out by slogans, spectacle, and surveillance. In such a climate, to dwell in complexity is not a luxury. It is a form of resistance.

There is a moment in literature when the so-called monster speaks. He walks through a vast, echoing house and universe, tenderly narrating his solitude and rituals. Only at the end do we recognize him: not a beast, but Asterion—the misnamed Minotaur—exiled not by his own nature but by the world that feared him.

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. Because as viewers and readers, 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, technologies that remake us, images that both reflect and betray us.

This is not a return. Not a restoration of what once was.

There is no return. Only becoming.

—Jorge R. G. Sagastume
Editor