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Humanities

Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti
Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti

Georges Didi-Huberman, Mira Fliescher (ed.), ...

The Cube and the Face

The Cube, as we can see, isn’t one. It is an ­irregular polyhedron which catalogues describe as having twelve sides — that nice figure, twelve, a destinal figure if ever there was one, which willfully evokes Mallarmé’s throw of the dice, at the very moment that the clock strikes twelve at midnight, in the dark house of Igitur. One can imagine that Giacometti wanted to give a unique volume to the twelve facets — six and six — of two cubes added together: a unique architecture...
  • face
  • abstract art
  • art theory
  • art history
  • Alberto Giacometti
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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Current Texts
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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  • linguistics
  • science fiction
  • communication
  • communication media
  • semiotics and semiology
  • utopia

 

Topics
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • poetics
    • idleness
    • astonishment
    • potentiality
    • literary studies
    • poetology of knowledge
    • experiment
    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • epistemology
    • history of knowledge
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

    • Theory of fiction
    • autofiction
    • autobiography
    • fiction
    • memory
  • minima oeconomica

    minima oeconomica

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

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

    The Subject of Capitalism

    • cognitive capital
    • subjectification
    • migration
    • capitalism
Current Texts
Humanity is a metahuman concept.

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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  • re-enactment
  • postmodernism
  • transhumanism
  • realism
  • art theory
  • artistic practice

 

A praxeological history of the credit card
A praxeological history of the credit card

Sebastian Gießmann

Towards a Media History of the Credit Card

In every good American tale of entrepreneurship there is at least one hero, and an initial magical scene of invention has to be told. So it does not come as a surprise that the story of Diners Card as a New York neighborhood technology has been told as an anecdote ever since the 1950s. By now, we know that Frank MacNamara did not conceive of the idea while lacking the cash (or the wallet) to pay for his business dinner...
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  • money
  • ethnomethodoloy
  • history of media
  • credit
  • actor-network-theory
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.

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  • migration
  • performativity
  • gender
  • queer theory
  • identity