User account

Humanities

Essays on Photography by Siegfried Kracauer
Essays on Photography by Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer, Philippe Despoix (ed.), ...

The Past's Threshold

There can be no doubt, however, that in Kracauer’s texts published at the turn of the 1920s and the 1930s from his position as an editor of the cultural pages at the daily newspaper Frankfurter ­Zeitung, then in the 1950s during his American period, he sketches out a theorisation of photography that can be described as groundbreaking. But it is also true that most of his works overlap, in more than one way, with this medium of reproduction or that...
  • History of photography
  • media theory
  • photography
  • Siegfried Kracauer
  • film
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:...

OPEN
ACCESS
DE

 

Topics
  • minima oeconomica

    minima oeconomica

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

    • economy
    • discourse history
    • economization
    • economics
    • financial markets
    • financial crisis
  • The Subject of Capitalism

    The Subject of Capitalism

    • capitalism
    • subjectification
    • cognitive capital
    • migration
  • Observing the Spectator

    Observing the Spectator

    • optical illusion
    • observer
    • mirror
    • gaze
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • epistemology
    • idleness
    • literary studies
    • potentiality
    • poetology of knowledge
    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • experiment
    • astonishment
    • history of knowledge
    • poetics
Current Texts
Blood!

Ines Kleesattel

Blood!

OPEN
ACCESS
DE
  • body
  • art history
  • gender
  • gaze
  • subjectification
  • painting
  • feminism
Current Texts

Mengia Tschalaer

The sexual asylum story

Successful asylum claims generally require generating a racialist, colonialist discourse that impugns the nation-state from which the asylum seeker comes. While to impugn the asylum seeker’s place of origin may well be a necessity for the purpose of asylum, it is problematic if it serves to confirm the moral and political superiority of the West through the myth of the ideal victim. In order to avoid the cookie-cutter victimhood framework that refers to idealizations around “Us” and “Them,” Europe must adopt a reflexive approach to queer asylum that allows for recognizing its own stereotypes in regard to homosexuality, race, and gender, so as not to reproduce colonial and imperialistic narratives of vulnerability, sex, and desire through Eurocentric asylum regimes.

OPEN
ACCESS
DE
  • gender
  • identity
  • migration
  • performativity
  • queer theory

 

“Aboard ship! ye philosophers!”
“Aboard ship! ye philosophers!”

Wu Yi

The Sea as Mirror

A genealogy of philosophy in the form of a geology of the diluvial, so to speak. I’ve asked: how does the ocean, as a physical presence, a dynamic relationship, and an unsettling imaginary, challenge and reinvent philosophy as it understands itself to be and defines itself against? The method I’ve hitherto practiced is one simple and well-suited to the purpose: to de-sublimate and re-sublimate the variously over-sublimated layer of sense in philosophy with one’s own being, flesh and blood, and...
  • the sea
  • history of philosophy
  • literary studies
Current Texts

Marcus Quent

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

It was Gilles Deleuze who in various contexts underlined that what we most lacked was “belief in the world.” The odd remark appears, for example, in a conversation in 1990 with the Italian Marxist Antonio Negri about revolutionary emergence and the political force of minorities. In this dialogue Negri examines his interlocutor’s thought in the light of the “problem of the political,” which connects the various stages of the philosopher’s intellectual biography. Deleuze’s remark here is the reprise of a motif that would be familiar to readers of his second book on cinema, which appeared in 1985, in which Deleuze contends that the “power of modern cinema” is based on its ability to “give us back” our lost “belief in the world.”

At the end of the conversation Negri asks his dialogue partner about the possibility of present-day processes of subjectivization. After initially emphasizing the “rebellious spontaneity” of such processes, Deleuze...

OPEN
ACCESS
DE