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Claire Fontaine

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

We call this method “materialist” in reference to the wonder, thaumazein, experienced by the early Greek philosophers, who observed nature with an emotionally scientific approach, looking for resemblances and connection between every form of life but keeping close to the phenomena they studied. We call it “magic” because we believe that this term will help us fight the intellectual and perceptive ravages of a capitalist vision of the world, helping us rediscover the power of the living and the cultural...
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  • nature
  • materiality
  • contemporary art
  • political aesthetics
Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result in a circularity that leaves the drawing of boundaries and raising of barriers solely to programming, instead of restoring them to our ethical conscience and understanding of what the social could mean today. The machine, by contrast, remains alien to any mechanical limitation—just as its inability to decide lies in the impossibility of self-calculation. The nucleus of digital culture should instead be sought where the cultural of culture is located:...

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Topics
  • The Subject of Capitalism

    The Subject of Capitalism

    • subjectification
    • capitalism
    • cognitive capital
    • migration
  • minima oeconomica

    minima oeconomica

    Analysen und Kritik moderner Ökonomie, deren Wissenschaft und Legitmation im Zeitalter der Finanzialisierung

    • economics
    • financial crisis
    • discourse history
    • economy
    • financial markets
    • economization

 

Political Reflections on Choreography, Dance and Protest

Political Reflections on Choreography, Dance and Protest


Oliver Marchart

Dancing Politics

The human body is the most important medium through which a public space is curved out of the social. Of course, this does not always have to occur in form of a militarized collective marching in-sync through the streets. Very often it is precisely the vulnerability of bodies which is used as a ­performative medium of protest (up to the extreme point where people decide to publicly set themselves on fire). Taking this word of caution into account, we may...
ABO
  • Hannah Arendt
  • Jean-Luc Nancy
  • Occupy Wall Street
  • acting
  • activism
Current Texts
On Gestational Communism

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

On Gestational Communism

ABO DE
  • communism
  • motherhood
  • critique of neoliberalism
  • community
  • birth
  • family
  • social movements