In the shadow of the wall – Israel/Palestine. No other part of the world evokes as strong reactions as Israel/Palestine. History is almost never what we believe. The route of sionism from idea to nation is lined with myths and notions with roots in European dreams of colonization. The Palestinians have not had a corresponding ideology. In this book the reader will meet lots of individuals talking about their goals and frustrations. What fears and aspirations are driving those who struggle for survival?
Art of love. What is love? In this essay I consider erotic love both as a practice and attitude, a biological power of attraction transformed into culture and moral. Love´s various features in different contexts throughout history is highlighted, but also excursions into particular themes like queer theory, sex handbooks, the phenomenon of falling in love, celibacy/promiscuity, jealousy, pornography, perversions etc. The book ends with the question what an erotic art worth its name could mean in our centrifugal and impatient time.
Om dödskonsten/On the art of dying (2024), with subtitle “essay about the end of life and what its certainty does with us while we still live”, is a book dwelling upon how dying and death was perceived in the Occident during the last two thousand years. Why are we so obsessed with death? Why has Enlightenment and secular trends affected how we nowadays look upon individual death? Is the way our bodies are taken care of by medical experts, instead of priests, necessarily offering everyone today a fair chance to experience one´s own end?
Stockholm April 2024