Irmgard Emmelhainz – författare

Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures is an homage to a constellation of women writers, feminists, and creators whose voices draw a map of our current global political-environmental crisis and the interlinked massive violence, enabled by the denigration of life and human relationships. In a world, in which ""a woman's voice"" exists in bodies called in to occupy important positions in corporations, government, cultural and academic institutions, to work in factories, to join the army, but whose bodies are systematically rendered vulnerable by gender violence and by the double burden imposed on us to perform both productive and reproductive labor, I ask what is the task of thought and form in contemporary feminist situated knowledge? Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures is a collection of essays rethinking feminist issues in the current context of the production of redundant populations, the omnipresence of the technosphere and environmental devastation, toxic relationships, toxic nationalisms, and more.These reflections and dialogues are an urgent attempt to resist the present in the company of the voices of women like bell hooks, Sarah Ahmed, Leslie Jamison, Lina Meruane, Leanne Simpson, Chris Kraus, AlaÍde Foppa, Lorena Wolffer, Sayak Valencia, Pip Day, Veronica GonzÁlez, Eimear McBride, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena Poniatowska, Susan Sontag, Margaret Randall, Simone Weil, Arundhati Roy, Marta Lamas, Paul B. Preciado, Dawn Paley, Raquel GutiÉrrez, etc. Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures continues the discussion on how to undo misogyny and dismantle heteropatriarchy's sublimating and denigrating tricks against women, which are intrinsically linked to colonialism and violence against the Earth.

Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures is an homage to a constellation of women writers, feminists, and creators whose voices draw a map of our current global political-environmental crisis and the interlinked massive violence, enabled by the denigration of life and human relationships. In a world, in which ""a woman's voice"" exists in bodies called in to occupy important positions in corporations, government, cultural and academic institutions, to work in factories, to join the army, but whose bodies are systematically rendered vulnerable by gender violence and by the double burden imposed on us to perform both productive and reproductive labor, I ask what is the task of thought and form in contemporary feminist situated knowledge? Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures is a collection of essays rethinking feminist issues in the current context of the production of redundant populations, the omnipresence of the technosphere and environmental devastation, toxic relationships, toxic nationalisms, and more.These reflections and dialogues are an urgent attempt to resist the present in the company of the voices of women like bell hooks, Sarah Ahmed, Leslie Jamison, Lina Meruane, Leanne Simpson, Chris Kraus, AlaÍde Foppa, Lorena Wolffer, Sayak Valencia, Pip Day, Veronica GonzÁlez, Eimear McBride, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena Poniatowska, Susan Sontag, Margaret Randall, Simone Weil, Arundhati Roy, Marta Lamas, Paul B. Preciado, Dawn Paley, Raquel GutiÉrrez, etc. Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures continues the discussion on how to undo misogyny and dismantle heteropatriarchy's sublimating and denigrating tricks against women, which are intrinsically linked to colonialism and violence against the Earth.

Translated from Spanish for the first time, and with a new introduction to the English edition, The Sky Is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine is comprised of sixty short entries detailing life in and reflections on the Occupied Territories of Palestine in the twenty-first century. In this collection, Irmgard Emmelhainz operates in the committed literature tradition of Walter Benjamin and Andre Gide in Moscow in the 1920s, and Susan Sontag and Juan Goytisolo in Sarajevo in the 1990s—writers and cultural observers grappling with the political processes of others, elsewhere.  In order to render the issue of representation, of speaking on behalf of the Palestinian ordeal in all its complexity, The Sky Is Incomplete is composed as a collage, gathering diary entries, letters, experimental passages, script, poetry, art criticism, political analysis, and other genres to convey an opaque view of the Palestine Question. Beyond representation in the sense of giving testimony or speaking on behalf of the Palestinians, however, the author’s parting point is relational: The Sky Is Incomplete is about encounters—with friends, mentors, interlocutors, lovers, children, activists, and soldiers (Israeli and Palestinian).

Translated from Spanish for the first time, and with a new introduction to the English edition, The Sky Is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine is comprised of sixty short entries detailing life in and reflections on the Occupied Territories of Palestine in the twenty-first century. In this collection, Irmgard Emmelhainz operates in the committed literature tradition of Walter Benjamin and Andre Gide in Moscow in the 1920s, and Susan Sontag and Juan Goytisolo in Sarajevo in the 1990s—writers and cultural observers grappling with the political processes of others, elsewhere.  In order to render the issue of representation, of speaking on behalf of the Palestinian ordeal in all its complexity, The Sky Is Incomplete is composed as a collage, gathering diary entries, letters, experimental passages, script, poetry, art criticism, political analysis, and other genres to convey an opaque view of the Palestine Question. Beyond representation in the sense of giving testimony or speaking on behalf of the Palestinians, however, the author’s parting point is relational: The Sky Is Incomplete is about encounters—with friends, mentors, interlocutors, lovers, children, activists, and soldiers (Israeli and Palestinian).

Elucidates how neoliberalism rules all areas of life and operates as a form of common sense, taking Mexico as a case study.As one of the first countries to implement a neoliberal state apparatus, Mexico serves as a prime example of the effects of neoliberal structural economic reform on our sensibility. Irgmard Emmelhainz argues that, in addition to functioning as a form of politico-economic organization, neoliberalism creates particular ways of seeing and inhabiting the world. It reconfigures common sense, justifying destruction and dispossession in the name of development and promising to solve economic precarity with self-help and permanent education. Pragmatism reigns, yet in always aiming to maximize individual benefit and profit, such common sense fuels a culture of violence and erodes the distinction between life and death. Moreover, since 2018, with the election of a new Mexican president, neoliberalism has undergone what Emmelhainz calls "post-neoliberal conversion," intensifying extractavism and ushering in a novel form of moral, political, and intellectual hegemony rooted in class tensions and populism. Integrating theory with history and lived reality with art, film, and literary criticism, The Tyranny of Common Sense will appeal to academics and readers interested in the effects of neoliberalism and, now, post-neoliberalism in Mexico from a broader, global perspective. Originally published in Spanish in 2016 as La tiranía del sentido común: La reconversión neoliberal de México, the English edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to encompass a critical vision of the current regime.

Elucidates how neoliberalism rules all areas of life and operates as a form of common sense, taking Mexico as a case study.As one of the first countries to implement a neoliberal state apparatus, Mexico serves as a prime example of the effects of neoliberal structural economic reform on our sensibility. Irgmard Emmelhainz argues that, in addition to functioning as a form of politico-economic organization, neoliberalism creates particular ways of seeing and inhabiting the world. It reconfigures common sense, justifying destruction and dispossession in the name of development and promising to solve economic precarity with self-help and permanent education. Pragmatism reigns, yet in always aiming to maximize individual benefit and profit, such common sense fuels a culture of violence and erodes the distinction between life and death. Moreover, since 2018, with the election of a new Mexican president, neoliberalism has undergone what Emmelhainz calls "post-neoliberal conversion," intensifying extractavism and ushering in a novel form of moral, political, and intellectual hegemony rooted in class tensions and populism. Integrating theory with history and lived reality with art, film, and literary criticism, The Tyranny of Common Sense will appeal to academics and readers interested in the effects of neoliberalism and, now, post-neoliberalism in Mexico from a broader, global perspective. Originally published in Spanish in 2016 as La tiranía del sentido común: La reconversión neoliberal de México, the English edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to encompass a critical vision of the current regime.

This book offers an examination of the political dimensions of a number of Jean-Luc Godard’s films from the 1960s to the present. The author seeks to dispel the myth that Godard’s work abandoned political questions after the 1970s and was limited to merely formal ones. The book includes a discussion of militant filmmaking and Godard’s little-known films from the Dziga Vertov Group period, which were made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin. The chapters present a thorough account of Godard’s investigations on the issue of aesthetic-political representation, including his controversial juxtaposition of the Shoah and the Nakba. Emmelhainz argues that the French director’s oeuvre highlights contradictions between aesthetics and politics in a quest for a dialectical image. By positing all of Godard’s work as experiments in dialectical materialist filmmaking, from Le Petit soldat (1963) to Adieu au langage (2014), the author brings attention to Godard’s ongoing inquiry on the role filmmakers can have in progressive political engagement.