from “take and eat,” introduction

Evil does not always arrive with spectacle, Arendt once said. That may have been true of a world in which visibility had not yet congealed into a dominant cultural imperative. But what might such a claim suggest in a time when even banality insists on stepping into the light? Once, we feared evil in its quieter forms—bureaucratic, mundane, pervasive, slow-moving. And once, too, we honored a different logic: an ethic of discretion, of acts without audience—let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing. That ethic, too, may be wearing thin. What once passed in silence now seems increasingly drawn to the surface—gestures seeking the light, even when trivial. Love and heartbreak, dissent and applause, protest and remorse all lean into visibility—shaped for circulation, calibrated for response. Visibility, in such cases, may function less as revelation than as rehearsal. What once aspired to claritas—a luminous self-evidence grounded in form—now often appears enfolded into a regime of performance.

This tendency is far from confined to the personal. It extends outward, increasingly enfolding institutions that once operated behind a veil of symbolic—perhaps almost liturgical—distance. Legal rituals, political procedures, financial maneuvers: many of these seem to be undergoing a slow transformation, in which the act of governance registers presentation as part of its logic. What once derived its authority from some degree of deliberate opacity now appears to invite the gaze. Deliberations are not replaced but reframed. One begins to sense a gravitational pull toward choreography: proceedings that are not merely enacted, but timed, framed, and delivered. The logics of the clip, the stream, the press cycle subtly yet effectively shape the space of judgment. It becomes harder to tell whether what is made visible serves the act, or whether the act is increasingly shaped by what might be made visible. Furthermore, the gravitational pull toward visibility does not seem to discriminate by domain. It operates less like a directive and more like a climate—a cultural atmosphere in which exposure becomes a default mode of legibility and legitimacy. In such a climate, the courtroom and the bedroom are not opposites but analogues: spaces once protected by form or intimacy, increasingly shaped by the anticipation of viewership.

In this light, the current regime of images—what Victor Krebs has described as compulsively transparent, stripped of resistance, density, or interiority—begins to resemble not just a culture of spectacle, but something more enduring. Pornographic, in the etymological sense: a system devoted to making everything available for view, putting on display what was once meant to be held, shielded, or approached slowly. In this shared aestheticization, the obscene and the righteous no longer appear as opposites, but as reiterations—instances of the same visual economy unfolding across domains.

The movement I’m tracing here, I dare saying, is theological in structure—though not necessarily in a political-theological sense. I do not mean to rehearse the familiar claim that modern political forms are secularized theological ones. That line has been well-traveled (and well-exploited), with Schmitt still being milked, sometimes ad nauseam, for theoretical capital. My concern lies elsewhere. It is, strictly speaking, aesthetic—visual and gustatory, optic and gastric.

In Orthodox Christianity, the iconostasis stands as a threshold—a screen of images dividing the nave from the sanctuary, the seen from the unseen. These icons never aimed at full disclosure. They did not expose the sacred but gently signaled it. They held the place of mystery without dissolving it, stood between the viewer and the divine not to obscure, but to mediate. In our own visual regime, that mediating function has been largely abandoned. The image no longer stands before the holy but stands in for it; what once guarded the mystery now consumes and replaces it. This project attempts to move past the iconostasis into what lies behind the veil—the Hagia tōn Hagiōn. Not as a return to theology, but as an experiment in its grammar. A shift from seeing to eating. From visual mediation to material implication. From eye to mouth. Far from transgressing, this is but an attempt at reorientation. There are other organs, other thresholds. The eye—exhausted by its constant summons to witness, consume, verify—may no longer suffice. And in the space beyond the veil, sight falters. In here, the mouth has to do the job.