Search results for ""diaphanes ag""

“Here Lies” preceded by “The Indian Culture” collects two of Antonin Artaud’s foremost poetic works from the last period of his life. He wrote both works soon after his release from the psychiatric hospital of Rodez and his return to Paris, and they were published during the flurry of intensive activity and protests against his work’s censorship. The Indian Culture is the first and most ambitious work of Artaud’s last period. It deals with his travels in Mexico in 1936 where Artaud sets aside his usual preoccupations with peyote and the Tarahumara people’s sorcerers to directly anatomize his obsessions with gods, corporeality, and sexuality. Here Lies is Artaud’s final declaration of autonomy for his own body from its birth to its imminent death, won at the cost of multiple battles against the infiltrating powers amassed to steal that birth and death away from him. Both works demonstrate Artaud’s final poetry as a unique amalgam of delicate linguistic invention and ferociously obscene invective. “Here Lies” preceded by “The Indian Culture” was translated by the award-winning translator Clayton Eshleman, widely seen as the preeminent translator into English of Artaud’s work, with its profound intensity and multiply nuanced language. For the first time since its first publication, this bilingual edition presents the two works in one volume, as Artaud originally intended. This edition also features a contextual afterword by Stephen Barber as well as new material, previously untranslated into English.

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At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life's "big questions," however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children and curious grown-ups to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Socrates to Descartes, Einstein, Marx, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging and often funny story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations. In Diogenes the Dog-Man, the philosopher Diogenes not only admires the honesty of dogs, he has actually become one sleeping, eating, and lifting his leg to pee wherever he chooses! Best of all, unlike humans, who dupe one another as to their true feelings, Diogenes the Dog-Man is free to bark his displeasure and even bite his adversaries in the calves even if they happen to be Alexander the Great. Initially, the citizens gathered in the Agora think Diogenes is mad. Does he have rabies? But it soon becomes clear that we can all learn a thing or two from dogs about how to live a simple life.

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El Hadji Sy is one of the most significant figures in African contemporary art. Since the late 1970s, the Senegalese artist and curator has helped shape the country's thriving art scene through his innovative painting and performance art. But El Sy is also an internationally recognized activist, having founded the collectives Laboratoire Agit-Art and Tenq, which aim to create contemporary art that engages with the country's pressing social and political issues. The first comprehensive publication on El Sy, this book places the artist's work in the context of activism in Senegal since the country gained independence from France in 1960. Included are critical essays by Hans Belting, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Pablo Lafuente who explore post independence aesthetics and the effect of postwar relations between Germany and Senegal. The critical essays are supplemented with copious illustrations from the artist's archive - many never before seen - offering rare insight into African art before the Global Turn of 1989.

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Siegfried Kracauer was one of the foremost representatives of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. This book brings together Kracauer's essays on photography that he wrote between 1927 and 1933 as a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, as well as an essay that appeared in the Magazine of Art after the eminent emigre's exile to America.

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At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life's big questions, however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children and curious grown-ups to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Descartes to Socrates, Einstein, Marx, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging and often funny story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations. In Professor Kant's Incredible Day, the philosopher Immanuel Kant wants only to be left in peace to consider life's big questions: What can I know? What can I hope for? But, when a perfumed letter arrives one day, it interrupts his studies and sets off a series of events the dour professor could not possibly have predicted. But just when it seems as though al

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At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life's "big questions," however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children and curious grown-ups to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Descartes to Socrates, Einstein, Marx, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging and often funny story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations. "Mister Wittgenstein! Stop looking for a horned beast in the middle of a Cambridge classroom!," an exasperated Bertrand Russell commands his pupil. But the young Ludwig Wittgenstein knows that, just because we don't see a rhinoceros, doesn't mean one may not be hiding where we least expect it. When war breaks out in Europe, Ludwig is recruited for a top-secret mission. Alas, no one is able to make sense of rhino-loving philosopher's notebooks. What could he possibly mean by so many seemingly nonsensical statements? Plato & Co.'s clear approach and charming illustrations make this series the perfect addition to any little library.

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Two important essays on Étienne-Jules Marey published for the first time in English alongside his breathtaking images of moving air and smoke. Featuring more than one hundred and fifty photographs and images, Movements of Air reprints the breathtaking pictures of Étienne-Jules Marey—images captured between 1899 and 1901 during his scientific experiments with moving air and smoke—and complements them with essays by Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannoni. Mannoni begins by reflecting on Marey’s experimental approach. As the founder of the “graphic method,” Marey was also the developer of an aerodynamic wind tunnel. His experiments’ photographs of fluid motion introduced a whole world of movements and turbulences, and fluids, and influenced generations of scientists and artists alike. Didi-Huberman expands on the philosophical debates surrounding these aesthetically and technically instructive images. Even though Marey’s main interest was graphic information, Didi-Huberman shows us how the flow of all things drew this ingenious experimenter to a photographic practice that creates drags, streaks, expansions, and visual dances. Marey’s wind tunnel photographs were also themselves causes of turbulence in the history of images. The artists Dombois and Oeschger explore these “graphical” vortices of the last 120 years, providing at the end of the book a collage from historical and contemporary material interlaced with their own image-making in Dombois’s wind tunnel at the Zurich University of the Arts.

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By defining a concept of architecture based on the tactile experience and not on construction, this book allows us to explore both discursive practice as the study of architectural art and the integration of architectural art as a discourse of spatial practice. In order to take on this new lens, Non-Construction utilizes a cinematographic documentary image strategy that engages with a critical spatial exploration of current entanglements of art and research at the crossroads of art, theory, and architecture. A challenge to visual conventions, this book offers conceptual and aesthetic insights into spiraling and voiding sensual experiences, with implications for the decolonization of the documentary and cinematographic reaching far beyond architecture.

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Through the lenses of Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, this edited volume traces the development of the relation between the will and the law as self-given. Modern Philosophies of the Will explores a variety of topics including: the ontological turn in philosophy of the will; the will’s playful character and the problem of teleology; the will as principle of morality as discussed by Kant, of life­forms as discussed by Nietzsche, and of technology as discussed by Heidegger; the formal identity of legislation; and transgression of the law. This volume traces three strategies in the development of the philosophy of will from Kant to Heidegger, through rationality and irrationality of the will, the ontological turn, and law.

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Computer-based technologies for the production and analysis of data have been an integral part of biological research since the 1990s at the latest. This not only applies to genomics and its offshoots but also to less conspicuous subsections such as ecology. But little consideration has been given to how this new technology has changed research practically. How and when do data become questionable? To what extent does necessary infrastructure influence the research process? What status is given to software and algorithms in the production and analysis of data? These questions are discussed by the biologists Philipp Fischer and Hans Hofmann, the philosopher Gabriele Gramelsberger, the historian of science and biology Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, the science theorist Christoph Hoffmann, and the artist Hannes Rickli. The conditions of experimentation in the digital sphere are examined in four chapters—“Data,” “Software,” “Infrastructure,” and “in silico”—in which the different perspectives of the discussion partners complement one another. Rather than confirming any particular point of view, Natures of Data deepens understanding of the contemporary basis of biological research.

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For years now, academics worldwide have been pushing for more interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Yet for all that, the very concept of transdisciplinarity has proved remarkably tough to define, let alone to enact. This book brings together prominent voices from the debate on transdisciplinarity in a manner that is itself transdisciplinary: scholars present papers from their own discipline, and those are followed by critical replies from different disciplines. The result is a vivid debate, new insights, and a growing confidence that there is something to be gained by approaching a topic from the outside and bringing new approaches to bear.

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Theodor Adorno’s famous aesthetic theory was not merely a theory of the aesthetic; it also made a wider claim about the aesthetic implications of all theory. At the same time we have to deal with aesthetic objects and events in which an aesthetic theory is inherent, which show themselves as art. From both sides—theory and aesthetics—a link can be made to the etymological meaning of theōria, which understands the theoretical as a seeing or perspective. Featuring lucid essays by major thinkers, the book examines this link, focusing equally on the aesthetic implications of theory and the theoretical implications of aesthetic events.

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Emmanuel Levinas’s interview with Françoise Armengaud in 1988 is one of the only statements we have from the philosopher, who became influential in various disciplines through his ethics that focuses on the fine arts specifically. Presented in English for the first time here, this interview brings us Levinas’s understanding of “obliteration” as an uncanny, disruptive, and even “unavailable” concept. Discussing the work of the French sculptor Sacha Sosno, Levinas parses the complex relationship between ethics and aesthetics, examining how they play out in artistic operations and practices. In doing so, he turns away from the “ease and lighthearted casualness of the beautiful” to shed light instead on the processes of material wear and tear and the traces of repair that go into the creation and maintenance of works of art, and which ultimately give them a profound uniqueness of presence. This evocative interview uncovers a hidden thread of aesthetic thinking in Levinas’s work and introduces a new way of looking at artistic practices in general.

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At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life’s big questions, however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children—and curious grown-ups—to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Socrates to Descartes, Einstein, Marx, Freud, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging—and often funny—story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations. In Lao-Tzu, or the Way of The Dragon, we follow the ancient Chinese philosopher who founded Taoism, from the comet that announced his birth up to his inspired composition, more than fifty years later, of the Tao Te Ching, the Book of the Way. In body and mind an old sage from birth, Lao-Tzu devotes his life to deciphering the endless book of the world. But he soon becomes frustrated with the silliness of human order, impatient kings, and greedy people, and rides off on the back of a water buffalo in search of the Way. He encounters clouds that solidify under his feet, a cave guarded by a golden monkey, and the venerable Confucius himself, and ultimately finds the wisdom of the dragon already residing deep in his own heart.

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This volume tracks the crucial role of Reiner Schurmann's engagement with the work of Michel Foucault between 1983 and 1991. Drawing on Foucault's highly original reading of the philosophical tradition, Schurmann traces the status of identity and difference in Foucault's conception of history to develop a radical phenomenological understanding of anarchy. He examines the fate of philosophy after the critique of the subject and the collapse of the divide between theory and praxis, philosophy and politics. Taken together, these pivotal essays introduce the reader to Schurmann's most urgent concerns and assemble the conceptual tools that go on to lay the groundwork for his final work, Broken Hegemonies, which offers a subversive re-reading of the history of Western metaphysics outside of Foucault's genealogical approach. To the reader unfamiliar with Schurmann's work, these texts establish him as one of the most radical thinkers of the late 20th century, whose work might ev

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A new approach to the notion of ecology emphasizing its relevance for art and design. The notion of ecology not only figures centrally in current debates around climate change, but also traverses contemporary discourses in the arts, the humanities, and the social and techno sciences. In this present form, ecology refers to the multilayered and multidimensional nexus of living processes and technological and media practices—that is, to the complex relations of human and nonhuman agents. Hybrid Ecologies understands ecology as an ambivalent notion, whose very broadness simultaneously opens up new fields of action and raises provocative questions, not least concerning its genealogy. This interdisciplinary volume explores the political and social effects of rethinking community in ecological terms, with a particular emphasis on what the contemporary notion of ecology might mean for artistic and design practices. The result of the fifth annual program of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies, which was conceived in cooperation with the Chair of Philosophy | Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Hybrid Ecologies is a timely and thought-provoking study of one of the most important themes of our time.

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Antonin Artaud’s journey to Ireland in 1937 marked an extraordinary—and apocalyptic—turning point in his life and career. After publishing the manifesto The New Revelations of Being about the “catastrophic immediate-future,” Artaud abruptly left Paris for Ireland, remaining there for six weeks without money. Traveling first to the isolated island of Inishmore off Ireland’s western coast, then to Galway, and finally to Dublin, Artaud was eventually arrested as an undesirable alien, beaten by the police, and summarily deported back to France. On his return, he spent nine years in asylums, remaining there through the entire span of World War II. During his fateful journey, Artaud wrote letters to friends in Paris which included several “magic spells,” intended to curse his enemies and protect his friends from the city’s forthcoming incineration and the Antichrist’s appearance. (To André Breton, he wrote: “It’s the Unbelievable—yes, the Unbelievable—it’s the Unbelievable which is the truth.”) This book collects all of Artaud’s surviving correspondence from his time in Ireland, as well as photographs of the locations he traveled through. Featuring an afterword and notes by the book’s translator, Stephen Barber, this edition marks the seventieth anniversary of Artaud’s death.

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In this lecture course, Reiner Schürmann develops the idea that, in between the spiritual Carolingian Renaissance and the secular humanist Renaissance, there was a distinctive medieval Renaissance connected with the rediscovery of Aristotle. Focusing on Thomas Aquinas’s ontology and epistemology, William of Ockham’s conceptualism, and Meister Eckhart’s speculative mysticism, Schürmann shows how thought began to break free from religion and the hierarchies of the feudal, neo-Platonic order and devote its attention to otherness and singularity. A crucial supplement to Schürmann’s magnum opus Broken Hegemonies, Neo-Aristotelianism and the Medieval Renaissance will be essential reading for anyone interested in the rise and fall of Western principles, and thus in how to think and act today.

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In 1920, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, dramatist Nikolai Evreinov directed a cast of 10,000 actors, dancers, and circus performers as well as a convoy of armored cars and tanks in The Storming of the Winter Palace. The mass spectacle, presented in and around the real Winter Palace in Petrograd, was intended to recall the storming as the beginning of the October Revolution. But it was a deceptive reenactment because, in producing the events it sought to reenact, it created a new kind of theater, agit-drama, promulgating political propaganda and deliberately breaking down the distinction between performers and spectators.Nikolaj Evreinov: "The Storming of the Winter Palace" tells the fascinating story of this production. Taking readers through the relevant history, the authors describe the role of The Storming of the Winter Palace in commemorating Soviet power. With a wealth of illustrations, they also show how photographs of Evreinov's theatrical storming eventually became historical documents of the October Revolution themselves.

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Founded in 1904, Frankfurt's Weltkulturen Museum houses a remarkable collection of ethnographic artifacts from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. This book raises questions about the relationship between the museum's educational and scientific aims and global trade.

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Affect, or the process by which emotions come to be embodied, is a burgeoning area of interest in both the humanities and the sciences. For Timing of Affect, Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bosel, and Michaela Ott have assembled leading scholars to explore the temporal aspects of affect through the perspectives of philosophy, music, film, media, and art, as well as technology and neurology. The contributions address possibilities for affect as a capacity of the body; as an anthropological inscription and a primary, ontological conjunctive and disjunctive process; as an interruption of chains of stimulus and response; and as an arena within cultural history for political, media, and psychopharmacological interventions. Showing how these and other temporal aspects of affect are articulated both throughout history and in contemporary society, the editors then explore the implications for the current knowledge structures surrounding affect today.

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The digital drawings of Yves Netzhammer invite viewers into a fascinating world of figures that appear both human and animal, while simultaneously blurring the distinction between object and living thing. By turns nightmarish or playful and cartoon-like, the creative cosmos depicted in Netzhammer's drawings imagines an alternate reality, in which precise lines bind impossible combinations of objects with careful clarity. Netzhammer ranks among the most renowned Swiss contemporary artists, his work comprising animation, video and sculptural installations, objects, and drawings. Concave Thoughts is a comprehensive resource on his work and imagery as well as an opulent art book.

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Unique digital drawings from one of Switzerland’s most prolific artists of today. Since early in his career, the Swiss artist Yves Netzhammer has used digital drawings as the basis of his work, which oscillates between sculpture and the moving image. Lines drawn into a space in abeyance visualize his figurative thought and beguile the viewer into bizarre, comical, and eerie associations. Netzhammer’s refined and precise pictorial rhetoric plays a subtle game that permits the viewer a variety of interpretations and continually evades the deceptive moment of unambiguity. This results in images in which complexity and levity, formal strictness, or conceptual proliferation come to the front depending on one’s point of view.Convex Thoughts is a bibliographical space that complements its predecessor, Concave Thoughts—together they are a guide for dreamers and musers, an endless storyboard from an art at the highs and lows of its time.

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The Sea as Mirror traces the pressing and repressed material and symbolic presence of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean from Plato to Heidegger. To do so, Wu Yi employs the maritime as a lens to understand the drive of philosophy as both a response to and moment within the impetus of Western colonization. Yi examines how philosophy has again and again constructed itself as a genre in opposition to the movement of deterritorialization and fluidity of mimesis. She does so via the method (meta, “after” + hodos, “way, journey”) of a series of essayings (in the original sense of trial, measure, attempt) across a geopolitical topography of discourses. These include philosophical texts drawn from a constellation of historical topoi at the critical moments of their encounter with the maritime: Plato and Euripedes’s work from fifth-century Athens; Augustus and Plautus’s writings from republican and early imperial Rome; Shakespeare’s creations from Elizabethan England; Kant and Rousseau’s texts from enlightenment continental Europe; and the thinking of Husserl and Heidegger from interwar Germany of the twentieth century. For each historical topos, Yi juxtaposes different representations of and responses to the maritime through the reading of a philosophical text vis-à-vis the reading of a literary text. In so doing, she lays bare the deep political and moral ambiguity attributed to the ocean in Western philosophical and literary imaginaries.

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Critique is a form of thinking and acting. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as concepts such as the break, marginalization, tearing, and opening indicate. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated that generate critical statements less through traditional argument and more through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects, and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.

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Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital was never realized, yet it has haunted the imagination of many filmmakers, historians, and philosophers to the present day. Dance of Values aims to conjure the phantom of Eisenstein’s Capital, presenting for the first time material from the full scope of the film project’s archival body. This “visual instruction in the dialectical method,” as Eisenstein called it, comprises more than five hundred pages of notes, drawings, press clippings, diagrams, negatives, theoretical reflections, and extensive quotations. Dance of Values explores the internal formal necessity underlying Eisenstein’s artistic choices, and argues that its brilliant adaptation of Marx’s Capital relied on the fragmentary and nonlinear state of its material. Published here for the first time, sequences from Eisenstein’s archival materials are presented in this volume not as mere illustrations but as arguments in their own right, a visual theorization of value.

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Media is a kind of gatekeeper, connecting disparate entities and shielding them from one another at the same time. When we speak of media, we often refer to those entities themselves--to persons, organizations, artifacts, signals, and inscriptions--referencing directors, artists, newspapers, films, iPhones, paper, ink, notes, beats, color, and soundwaves. But as the middle or between, the essence of media itself seems to be distributed across the mix of entities involved, and its location and agency are hard to pin down. This new anthology takes stock of our empirical and historical understanding of the two-sided nature of media and tracks the recent turn in media studies to examining practice itself. A unique discussion of the intersection of media theory and practice theory, Connect and Divide explores how distributions of knowledge, labor, and power may be hidden in what remains untraceable about media, shedding vital light on the social implications of media theory today.

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“The devil is at our heels . . . . at the heart of the city’s aberrations.” Picture a lost city in northern England during the momentous winter of 1978—the final winter before the onset of the Thatcher era, at the peak of the punk rock movement. A notorious serial killer—the Yorkshire Ripper—terrorizes the city’s women, unhindered by an aimless police force. Violent outbursts of gang warfare transect the city’s streets while an immense insane asylum overlooks the chaos from the outskirts. This innovative and disturbing novel follows a group of teens as they engulf themselves in punk-rock cacophonies and the accompanying riots that erupt in the city’s decrepit hotel ballrooms and subterranean nightclubs. Written in a captivating, immersive first-person voice that meshes raw corporeality and urban insurgency, White Noise Ballrooms deploys recent history to piercingly illuminate the contemporary moment.

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Never-before-published writing from a key twentieth-century philosopher. In 1962, Reiner Schürmann began studying at the Dominican school of theology Le Saulchoir, outside Paris. That experience radically shaped his life and work, enabling him to begin to develop many of the ideas for which he would later be known: letting be, life without why, ontological anarchy, and the tragic double bind. Ways of Releasement contains never-before-published material from Schürmann's early period as well as a report Schürmann wrote about his encounter with Heidegger; a précis of his autobiographical novel, Origins; and translations and new editions of later groundbreaking essays. Ways of Releasement concludes with an extensive afterword setting Schürmann's writings in the context of his thinking and life.

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In the mid-1970s, Sylvère Lotringer created Semiotext(e), a philosophical group that became a magazine and then a publishing house. Since its creation, Semio-text(e) has been a place of stimulating dialogue between artists and philosophers, and for the past fifty years, much of American artistic and intellectual life has depended on it. The model of the journal and the publishing house revolves around the notion of the collective, and Lotringer has rarely shared his personal journey: his existence as a hidden child during World War II; the liberating and then traumatic experience of the collective in the kibbutz; his Parisian activism in the 1960s; his time of wandering, that took him, by way of Istanbul, to the United States; and then, of course, his American years, the way he mingled his nightlife with the formal experimentation he invented with Semiotext(e) and with his classes. Since the early 2010s, Donatien Grau has developed the habit of visiting Lotringer during his trips to Los Angeles; some of their dialogs were published or held in public. This book is an entry into Lotringer's life, his friendships, his choices, and his admiration for some of the leading thinkers of our times. The conversations between Lotringer and Grau show bursts of life, traces of a journey, through texts and existence itself, with an unusual intensity.

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A journey through the United Fruit Company’s photo archive and its documentation of corporate expansion into the Caribbean. The establishment of the United Fruit Company as a global political agent with its banana plantations was met with considerable resistance. Now the company’s photographic records are the focal point of Archive Matter as it examines photography’s historical and political impact through the argument that this overlooked, but important, archive made capitalist expansion into the Caribbean possible. Author Liliana Gómez examines the images from within their “optical unconscious” and via the archive’s silences and omissions. The implication of these silences, Gómez argues, is the attempt to conceal the violence embedded within the realities of the plantations’ daily operations and corporate efforts to “modernize” the Caribbean.

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An exploration of the digital revolution in traditional audiovisual media. Over the last two decades, the field of audiovisual media has changed dramatically. Until recently, there was only a small number of technologies, distribution channels were few, and moving images were largely limited to cinemas, televisions, galleries, or art museums. Also, both the producers and the audiences of such content clearly identified as human beings. Those days are over. The digitization of image production and distribution ushered in a massive disruption to the traditional landscape of the moving image that had existed since the advent of the audiovisual industry. Touching on discussions such as child producers, the marketing interests of big corporations, and the origins of new media formats and practices, Display, Distribute, Disrupt​ maps the new conditions for creative work in the ever-widening sphere of audiovisual media.

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Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) remains one of the most influential and yet least understood figures in the history of German thought and literature. Throughout his life, he had major influence on figures as diverse as Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, and a host of others. Hamann is also one of the most difficult-to-read authors in the German language, writing in an ultracondensed, hyperallusive language for which he became infamous—and which his detractors constantly used to dismiss him. Today, Hamann has been picked up by literary theorists as a precursor of the linguistic turn. The Last Mask focuses on Hamann’s final work, Entkleidung und Verklärung (1786), which was consciously conceived of as an “Abschluss” of his “kleine Autorschaft” and a final defense against his critics. Equally philological and theoretical, it identifies a number of previously unnoticed manuscript alterations that help answer some long-standing questions in Hamann scholarship as well as open new doors for inquiry. Importantly, the manuscripts show that Hamann is one of the earliest theorists of the virtual in our sense of the word today, using the word “virtualiter” to describe his own theory. He links this theory with the concept of the mask or disguise, and conceives of texts as fabrics or textiles composed of threads and strings. The philological focus is on Hamann’s understanding of intertextuality, and on the basis of his dominant string images his notion of virtuality is brought into conversation with Deleuze’s idea of a plane of immanence through the image of a skein of immanence, a knotted bundle of thread which solidifies into a three-dimensional virtual space—a new perspective in contemporary discussions surrounding the nature of virtuality.

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Upon the “discovery of childhood,” as named by Philippe Ariès, bourgeois culture and modern literature marked out an arcane realm that, while scarcely accessible for adults, acted as a space for projections of the most contradictory kind and diverse ideological purposes: childhood. As this book reveals, from the eighteenth century onwards, the child increasingly came into focus in literature as a mysterious creature. Now the child seems a strange being, constantly unsettling and alienating, although exposed to ongoing territorialization. This is possible because the space of ‘childhood’ is essentially blank and indefinite. Modernity, therefore, has discovered it as a zone, in the words of Friedrich Schiller of “boundless determinability."

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Staging an exhibition as choreography, as drama, as opera, as a place where reality, politics, aesthetics, art, film, and music can address the issues of our day through documentaries, dialogues, science, activism, and creativity: This is the dream, the idea, and the mission of the “refaire le monde” exhibition trilogy at Helmhaus Zürich. The exhibition involves some eighty different authorial voices, bringing diverse attitudes and actions into the safe space of the museum. This book is both a documentation of these new values and new worlds and a guide to them. It is people-focused, positing the arts as the model for a new human reality. Refaire le monde features many artists, including: Ursula Biemann, Pascale Birchler, Corina Gamma, Vincent Glanzmann, Fabrice Gygi, A. C. Kupper, Asia Andrzejka Merlin, Gianni Motti, Tanja Roscic, Heidi Specogna, Bertold Stallmach, and many more, as well as all those who participated in various parallel events.

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The invisibilization of political violence, its material traces, and spatial manifestations, characterizes conflict and post-conflict situations. Yet, artists, writers, and human rights activists increasingly seek to challenge this invisibility, contesting the related historical amnesia through counter-semantics and dissonant narratives. Adopting “performance” as a concept that is defined by repetitive, aesthetic practices—such as speech and bodily habits through which both individual and collective identities are constructed and perceived—this collection addresses various forms of performing human rights in transitional situations in Spain, Latin America, and the Middle East. Bringing scholars together with artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, Performing Human Rights addresses these instances of omission and neglect, revealing how alternate institutional spaces and strategies of cultural production have intervened in the processes of historical justice and collective memory.

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Resonating at the heart of Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 is the question whether art has present, past, and future functions. The modernist assertion of the autonomy of art was intended to render superfluous art’s social and religious functions. But what if the functionlessness of art comes under suspicion of being instrumentalized by bourgeois capitalism? This was an accusation that informed the anti-modernist critique of the avant-garde, and particularly of Surrealism. The objective throughout the crisis-ridden present of the 1920s to the 1940s was to reaffirm a once ubiquitous, but long-lost functionality—not only of art.The publication accompanying the exhibition examines the strategies deployed in this reaffirmation. These include the surrealist Primitivism of an “Ethnology of the White Man” together with the excavation of the deep time of humanity—into the “Neolithic Childhood” mapped out by the notoriously anti-modernist Carl Einstein (1885-1940) as a hallucinatory retro-utopia. The volume brings together essays by the curators and academics involved in the project, primary texts by Carl Einstein and a comprehensive documentation of the exhibition including lists of works, texts on as well as images of numerous exhibits and finally installation views. At the center of the volume, a glossary discusses Carl Einstein’s own theoretical vocabulary as well as further associated terms, such as Autonomy, Formalism, Function, Gesture, Hallucination, Art, Metamorphosis, Primitivisms, Totality.With contributions by: Irene Albers, Philipp Albers, Joyce S. Cheng, Rosa Eidelpes, Carl Einstein, Anselm Franke, Charles W. Haxthausen, Tom Holert, Sven Lütticken, Ulrike Müller, Jenny Nachtigall, David Quigley, Cornelius Reiber, Erhard Schüttpelz, Kerstin Stakemeier, Maria Stavrinaki, Elena Vogman, Zairong Xiang, Sebastian ZeidlerWith reproductions of artworks by: Jean (Hans) Arp, Willi Baumeister, Georges Braque, Brassaï, Claude Cahun, Lux T. Feininger, Max Ernst, Florence Henri, Barbara Hepworth, Hannah Höch, Heinrich Hoerle, Paul Klee, Germaine Krull, Helen Levitt, André Masson, Alexandra Povòrina, Gaston-Louis Roux, Kalifala Sidibé, Louis Soutter, Yves Tanguy, Toyen, Jindřich Štyrský, Raoul Ubac, Paule Vézelay and others.

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When we look at the cultural public sphere through the lens of digitalization, a paradoxical picture emerges. In some ways, the digital age seems to have brought the goals of the Enlightenment to their fullest fruition, giving us boundless and instantaneous access to every kind of knowledge and art. But the internet and its platforms also frequently bring chaos, immersing us in a sphere of often unverified information whose scope is unimaginable. This book takes a tour through the current debates on digital culture, bringing together a wide array of perspectives from aesthetic theory, cultural studies, electronic media, and the arts.

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Une clinique psychiatrique perchée en haut d’une montagne. Ce lieu futuriste tout en transparence dispose d’une entrée, mais il est impossible d’en sortir. Interdiction de surcroît de regarder à travers les parois de verre : les patients comme le personnel soignant y doivent se confronter à leur propre solitude. Ainsi, le docteur Franz von Stern, s’efforce tant bien que mal de rédiger le rapport sur sa propre personne exigé par la direction. Mais la conviction de cet homme, à la fois schizophrène et bionique – puisque affublé d‘un deuxième cortex et d‘un médiator greffé – que remuer son passé constitue la première des pathologies psychiques, sera bouleversée par l‘arrivée d’une patiente étrangère à ce microcosme aux usages bien rodés… Entre Orwell et Foucault, l’auteure dépeint une vision aussi jouissive que féroce d’un monde « new-age » fasciné par la technologie, où le culte du « bien-être » devient l’une des formes les plus raffinées et redoutables de contrôle social. Ce second roman d’Angelika Meier, jubilatoire et inventif, évite l’écueil du « roman à thèse » ainsi que tout académisme. La même année, encensé par la critique, ce « roman anti-psychiatrique par excellence » a été sélectionné pour le prestigieux Prix du livre allemand.

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What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a so-called pirate library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art plays an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic, and that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a double character. They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are operational in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the commons. In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a thinking tool—in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.

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At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life’s “big questions,” however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children—and curious grown-ups—to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Socrates to Descartes, Einstein, Marx, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging—and often funny—story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations. Kierkegaard and the Mermaid takes a “leap into the absurd,” exploring the existential philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard from the bottom of the sea, through the eyes of a princess with a fish’s tail. Though living in a coral palace and betrothed to the handsomest and tenderest of all the water sprites, our heroine soon finds herself heartbroken. She must look deep into the world of the spirit to find out what it all means.

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Interdisciplinary studies that combine the current of materialist thinking with discussions of ecologies and environmentalization. Placed at the intersection of art, media, and cultural studies as well as economic theory, Liquidity, Flows, Circulation investigates the cultural logic of environmentalization. As flows, circulations, and liquidity resurface in all aspects of recent culture and contemporary art, this volume investigates the hypothesis of a genuine cultural logic of environmentalization through these three concepts. It thus brings together two areas of research that have been largely separate. On the one hand, this volume takes up discussions about ecologies with and without nature and environmentalization as a contemporary form of power and capital. On the other hand, it takes its cue from Fredric Jameson’s notion that each stage of capitalism is accompanied by a genuine cultural logic. The volume introduces this current of materialist thinking into the ongoing discussions of ecologies and environmentalization. By analyzing contemporary art, architecture, theater, films, and literature, the fifteen contributions by scholars and artists explore different fields where liquid forms, semantics flow, or processes of circulation emerge as a contemporary cultural logic.

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During the 17th and 18th centuries, foreign material culture was introduced into France and Switzerland and integrated into European interiors and decorative arts. Scholars have emphasized this era’s emerging taste for the exotic in order to explain the unprecedented craze for lacquer, porcelain, and textiles that imitated non-Western techniques and iconography. Yet what constituted the exotic during the age of Enlightenment? How was the place of foreign material culture negotiated? And how did it impact European identities? Exotic Switzerland? moves from questions about the nature of exoticism to explore exoticism in practice. The physical relocation of material fragments in European interiors is the core of this volume. Finally, the contributors also explore the rise of disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology through collection, publication, and print culture.

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