Crisis and Astonishment

Children’s picture books from the Romantic period. Theatrical stages inspired by Spinoza. Scenes from the Thirty Years’ War reimagined by artificial intelligence. What narrative cannot achieve, Alexander Kluge transposes into the logic of images. The first half of the nineth volume of the “Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch” contains a compilation of Kluge’s most recent image experiments that wrestle with crisis and astonishment in the transatlantic public spheres of the twenty-first century. For Kluge, astonishment not only provokes philosophical reflection but also serves as an essential tool for critically grappling with the society of the spectacle. In addition to dialogues with Oskar Negt, Stefan Aust and painter Katharina Grosse, this volume contains scholarly essays on technology and the new space race, cinema and iconoclasm, revolution and Kluge’s aesthetic politics, and decolonialism and ecocriticism.