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Humanities

Art in a False Present
Art in a False Present

Anselm Franke (ed.), Tom Holert (ed.)

Neolithic Childhood

The impression that “Neolithic Childhood” is a monographic project, dedicated to a single personality from history, is deceptive. Einstein himself was deeply wary of the monograph genre. In the early 1930s, he wrote that it served the “normalization” of art, because it ensured that “a person and their work are too sharply separated and that both are removed from significative relations.” 1 He emphatically shifted those “significative relations”—the social, political, economic, religious, epistemological, anthropological, and psychological contexts that determine a...
  • art theory
  • avant-garde
  • 1930s
  • ethnology
  • art history
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
  • communication
  • science fiction
  • utopia
  • communication media
  • semiotics and semiology
Current Texts

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

“So many egoists call themselves artists,” Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny on May 15, 1871. Even though that is not always obvious, ‘I’, the first person, is the most unknown person, a mystery that is constantly moving towards the other two, the second and third persons, a series of unfoldings and smatterings that eventually gelled as ‘Je est un autre’. That is why ‘apocryphal’ is a literarily irrelevant concept and ‘pseudo’ a symptom, the very proof that life, writing, is made up of echoes, which means that intrusions and thefts (Borges also discusses them) will always be the daily bread of those who write.

Words from others, words taken out of place and mutilated: here are the alms of time, that squanderer’s sole kindness. And so many others, mostly others who wrote, and many other pages, all of them apocryphal, all of them echoes, reflections. All this flows together into—two centuries...

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Topics
  • The Subject of Capitalism

    The Subject of Capitalism

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

    minima oeconomica

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

    • financial markets
    • financial crisis
    • economics
    • discourse history
    • economy
    • economization
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

    • Theory of fiction
    • fiction
    • autofiction
    • autobiography
    • memory
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • semiotics and semiology
    • chromatics / colour science
    • color
    • image and imagery
    • monochrome
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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  • performativity
  • migration
  • gender
  • identity
  • queer theory

 

Aesthetic Practices in the Global South
Aesthetic Practices in the Global South

Liliana Gómez (ed.)

Performing Human Rights

This book aims to show how arts perform human rights and how aesthetic engagements with human rights violations testify to art’s capacity to create alternate worlds, which with their creative modes do provide alternate semantics to the legal failures and the state’s official silence. This book shares the conviction that, after all, artistic articulations allow ethico-aesthetic considerations of “questions that are broader than the law and the institutions of the political, precisely because they are prior to law … and...
  • Human rights
  • collective memory
  • violence
  • justice
  • Think Art