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Humanities

Nothing is at home
Nothing is at home

Malte Fabian Rauch

Phenomena in Exile

Philosophy is found wanting. It is considered anachronistic, some say dead. The tradition is in ruins. And, what is worse, they say, these are ruins of its own making. But it bears noting that debris has proved to be a productive site. For finding things. Marcel Duchamp’s work, for example, can make an appearance as a phenomenology. And phenomenology itself, for another example, can dispel its origin, the transcendental subject – Kant’s old doublet. What this adds up to is a...
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  • art
  • phenomenology
  • art theory
  • Modernism
  • 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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Current Texts
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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

 

Topics
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • chromatics / colour science
    • semiotics and semiology
    • color
    • image and imagery
    • monochrome
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • literary studies
    • astonishment
    • history of knowledge
    • poetology of knowledge
    • potentiality
    • idleness
    • poetics
    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • experiment
    • epistemology
  • Observing the Spectator

    Observing the Spectator

    • observer
    • mirror
    • optical illusion
    • gaze
  • The Subject of Capitalism

    The Subject of Capitalism

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

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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

Alexander García Düttmann

What does “emancipatory” mean today?

Pretending one more time that the world can still be saved and asking whether art contains an emancipatory potential can be a meaningful endeavour only if illegitimate attempts at appropriating this emancipatory potential are thwarted. Its usurpation, which amounts to its abolition, must be prevented. Critique that deserves its name must first and foremost struggle against false pretenders, not against those who do not even claim to be pretenders. The efficiency of critique’s propaedeutic character should be sought in this struggle against false pretenders. If one fears that its negativity may entail a dangerous impotence and if for this reason one wishes to supplement it with a justifying and constructive “affirmationism”, mindful of the fact that it was once meant to prepare the outline of a metaphysics purged of precritical dogmatism, then one risks forgetting that critique ceases to hurt and can no longer trigger an impulse the instant that...

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  • aesthetics
  • critical theory
  • political aesthetics
  • contemporary art
  • morals

 

Should we abandon the cosmopolitan idea?
Should we abandon the cosmopolitan idea?

Zairong Xiang (ed.)

minor cosmopolitan

Around the turn of the millennium, academics and politicians predicted that the world would grow together as one and that people would become less bound by national affiliations. Almost twenty years later, there is little left of this vision. This is not such a surprise when we consider that the cosmopolitan ideal (as articulated during the European Enlightenment) wholeheartedly embraced the promises of a globalising economy, yet has remained oblivious to, and even complicit with, capitalist exploitation, slavery, and colonialism....
  • politics
  • globalization
  • art theory
  • cosmopolitics
  • art
Current Texts
Blood!

Ines Kleesattel

Blood!

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  • feminism
  • subjectification
  • painting
  • art history
  • gender
  • gaze
  • body