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A study of the history of before-and-after images of catastrophes, bombed-out cities, and large-scale political transformations.Catastrophes, bombed-out cities, large-scale political transformations: “Image complexes” of humanitarian and ecological upheaval document the world as a sequence of catastrophes. But who decides how events are presented, determines the resolution of our visual worlds, and controls the circulation or censorship of images?Eyal and Ines Weizman trace the history of the before-and-after image from nineteenth-century photography to contemporary satellite images and discover a gap that not only conceals the devastating event: it is the human subject itself that is in danger of disappearing from the images. Does humanitarian work, the documentation and reconstruction of war crimes, in which people’s fates and rights should be at the center of attention, paradoxically enter a post-human phase? How can the gap between images become a site of critical counter-reading rather than a symbol of erasure?In the context of their current research, Eyal and Ines Weizman discuss the history, present, and future of the paradigm of the before-and-after image in an exclusive conversation with Marie Glassl.

Pynchon's Sound of Music is dedicated to cataloging, exploring, and interpreting the manifold manifestations of music in Thomas Pynchon’s work. An original mix of close and distant readings, this monograph employs a variety of disciplines—from literary studies and musicology to philosophy, media theory, and history—to explain Pynchon through music and music through Pynchon. Encyclopedic and eclectic in its approach, Pynchon’s Sound of Music discusses the author’s use of instruments such as the kazoo, harmonica, and saxophone and embarks on close readings of the most salient and musically tantalizing passages. Zooming out to a bird’s eye view, Christian Hänggi puts Pynchon’s historical musical references and allusions into perspective to trace the trends and tendencies in the development of the author’s interest in music. A treasure trove for fans and an invaluable source for future scholarship, this book includes the Pynchon Playlist, a catalog of over 900 musical references in Pynchon’s oeuvre, and an exhaustive index of more than 700 appearances of musical instruments.

A personal reflection on fragmentation, language, and place.Following one of the Turfan archaeological expeditions in the early 1900s, a fragment of a Manichaean text written in Uighur and Old Turkic found its way to the Asian Art Museum in Berlin. Originating from the Northern Silk Road region (now the Xinjiang Uighur Region in China), these “loose leaves” became a source of inspiration for Rawi Hage. Hage writes, “I was born near Byblos in Lebanon. The ancient city of Byblos is believed to be the place where the first alphabet was invented.” Encountering this rare and precious manuscript, with its layered and multicolored words, Hage reflects on the movement, uprooting, displacement, and migration of both objects and people.

Nietzsche praised Kant for having "annihilated Socratism," for exhibiting all ideals as essentially unattainable, and for having exposed himself to the despair of truth--all essential traits Nietzsche claimed for his own thinking. At the same time, the existentialist philosopher remained highly critical of Kant. This volume of Reiner Schurmann's lectures unpacks Nietzsche's ambivalence towards Kant, in particular positioning Nietzsche's claim to have brought an end to German idealism against the backdrop of the Kantian transcendental-critical tradition. Rather than simply compare the two philosophers, Schurmann's lectures help us to understand the consequences Nietzsche derived from Kantian concepts, as well as the wider horizon within which Nietzsche's ideas arose and can best be shown to apply. According to Schurmann's trenchant reading: if Nietzsche was indeed "fatal" to Western philosophy, as he claimed, he was so in large part because of the Kantian transcendental thinking from which he inherited the very elements and tools of his criticism.

Antonin Artaud’s last large-scale work, published in its complete form in English for the first time.Drawings on texts and letters dating from 1946, some of them written while he was still confined at the Rodez psychiatric hospital, Artaud devoted the months of November 1946 to February 1947 to completing his book through a long series of vocal improvisations titled Interjections, dictated at his pavilion on the edge of Paris. He cursed the assassins he believed were on their way there to steal his semen, to make his brain go “up in smoke as under the action of one of those machines created to suck up filth from the floor,” and finally to erase him. The publisher who had commissioned the book, Louis Broder, was horrified at reading its incandescent, fiercely obscene, and anti-religious manuscript and refused to publish it. Ambitious and experimental in scale, fragmentary and ferocious in intent, it was not published until 1978, in an edition prepared by Artaud’s close friend Paule Thévenin. Artaud commented that it was an “impossible” book, and that “nobody has ever read it from end to end, not even its own author.”Clayton Eshleman, together with his translation collaborators such as David Rattray, began to work soon after 1978 on an English-language edition, with extracts appearing especially in Eshleman’s poetry magazine, Sulfur. This volume presents his translations with additional ones by Paul Buck, and Catherine Petit it in its complete form in English for the first time.

Une clinique psychiatrique perchée en haut d’une montagne. Ce lieu futuriste tout en transparence dispose d’une entrée, mais il est impossible d’en sortir. Interdiction de surcroît de regarder à travers les parois de verre : les patients comme le personnel soignant y doivent se confronter à leur propre solitude. Ainsi, le docteur Franz von Stern, s’efforce tant bien que mal de rédiger le rapport sur sa propre personne exigé par la direction. Mais la conviction de cet homme, à la fois schizophrène et bionique – puisque affublé d‘un deuxième cortex et d‘un médiator greffé – que remuer son passé constitue la première des pathologies psychiques, sera bouleversée par l‘arrivée d’une patiente étrangère à ce microcosme aux usages bien rodés… Entre Orwell et Foucault, l’auteure dépeint une vision aussi jouissive que féroce d’un monde « new-age » fasciné par la technologie, où le culte du « bien-être » devient l’une des formes les plus raffinées et redoutables de contrôle social. Ce second roman d’Angelika Meier, jubilatoire et inventif, évite l’écueil du « roman à thèse » ainsi que tout académisme. La même année, encensé par la critique, ce « roman anti-psychiatrique par excellence » a été sélectionné pour le prestigieux Prix du livre allemand.

A translation into French of a work by the twentieth-century avant-garde Italian writer Alice Ceresa.A family gathers for the father’s funeral: the patriarch is dead, leaving the throne of the family hierarchy vacant. Yet, the survivors remain prisoners of the hollow rituals of a bygone community. In language that is at once restrained and magical—devoid of both sentimentality and autobiographical realism—Alice Ceresa lays bare the mechanisms of a timeless social reality. Dissected through her poetry, life transforms into a parody of a social prison—one from which the father’s death nonetheless signals an escape: "Then the family will finally explode," and the path will be clear for the daughters, who "will surely rule the world."

At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life's big questions, however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children and curious grown-ups to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Socrates to Descartes, Einstein, Marx, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging and often funny story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations. Sprawled in his favorite armchair, Dr. Freud notices a peculiar phrase in pages of his notebook: "preaching to the fishes." What could he have meant by this? If there's one thing he has learned working as a psychoanalyst, it's that the best way to make sense of yourself is through your dreams and so he settles down for a nice long nap. But no sooner does his head hit the pillow than he begins to hear voices! A frightened fish with a childhood memory lodged in its throat coaxes Dr.Freud into the cold water, where his ideas come to life through an unforgettable cast of characters, including a loquacious carp and three frogs Id, Ego, and Superego locked in fierce competition for a single waterlily.

Breaking Bad is known for its grim and gritty outbursts of anger and violence. In the chaotic story of a meth-dealing high school chemistry teacher, time seems to collapse, and we feel as though the lives of the characters are moving inevitably closer to their ends. This warped perspective wends its way through virtually every aspect of the story, intensifying the meaning we attach to the characters' precarious lives. Hoping to cultivate a deeper understanding of the series, Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even offers a new way of approaching the program though its complex treatment of time. With its grotesque portrayal of life on the brink of death, argues Gertrud Koch, we can best view Breaking Bad as a black comedy between Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux and film noir. Koch takes readers through the ways in which this is accomplished through the show's various visual elements and masterful temporal and narrative structuring. Full of fascinating insights, the book will appeal to the show's many fans, as well as anyone interested in film studies, media studies, or popular culture.

Computer games have become ubiquitous in today's society. Many scholars have speculated on the reasons for their massive success. Yet we haven't considered the most basic questions: Why do computer games exist? What specific circumstances led to the creation of this entirely new type of game? What sorts of knowledge facilitated the requisite technological and institutional transformations? With Computer Game Worlds, Claus Pias sets out to answer these questions. Tracing computer games from their earliest forms to the unstoppable commercial and cultural phenomena they have become today, Pias then provides a careful epistemological reconstruction of the process of playing games, both at computers and by computers themselves. The book makes a valuable theoretical contribution to the ongoing discussion about computer games.

“The devil is at our heels . . . . at the heart of the city’s aberrations.”Picture a lost city in northern England during the momentous winter of 1978—the final winter before the onset of the Thatcher era, at the peak of the punk rock movement. A notorious serial killer—the Yorkshire Ripper—terrorizes the city’s women, unhindered by an aimless police force. Violent outbursts of gang warfare transect the city’s streets while an immense insane asylum overlooks the chaos from the outskirts.This innovative and disturbing novel follows a group of teens as they engulf themselves in punk-rock cacophonies and the accompanying riots that erupt in the city’s decrepit hotel ballrooms and subterranean nightclubs. Written in a captivating, immersive first-person voice that meshes raw corporeality and urban insurgency, White Noise Ballrooms deploys recent history to piercingly illuminate the contemporary moment.

Media is a kind of gatekeeper, connecting disparate entities and shielding them from one another at the same time. When we speak of media, we often refer to those entities themselves--to persons, organizations, artifacts, signals, and inscriptions--referencing directors, artists, newspapers, films, iPhones, paper, ink, notes, beats, color, and soundwaves. But as the middle or between, the essence of media itself seems to be distributed across the mix of entities involved, and its location and agency are hard to pin down. This new anthology takes stock of our empirical and historical understanding of the two-sided nature of media and tracks the recent turn in media studies to examining practice itself. A unique discussion of the intersection of media theory and practice theory, Connect and Divide explores how distributions of knowledge, labor, and power may be hidden in what remains untraceable about media, shedding vital light on the social implications of media theory today.

When we look at the cultural public sphere through the lens of digitalization, a paradoxical picture emerges. In some ways, the digital age seems to have brought the goals of the Enlightenment to their fullest fruition, giving us boundless and instantaneous access to every kind of knowledge and art. But the internet and its platforms also frequently bring chaos, immersing us in a sphere of often unverified information whose scope is unimaginable. This book takes a tour through the current debates on digital culture, bringing together a wide array of perspectives from aesthetic theory, cultural studies, electronic media, and the arts.

At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life’s big questions, however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children—and curious grown-ups—to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Socrates to Descartes, Einstein, Marx, Freud, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging—and often funny—story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations.In Lao-Tzu, or the Way of The Dragon, we follow the ancient Chinese philosopher who founded Taoism, from the comet that announced his birth up to his inspired composition, more than fifty years later, of the Tao Te Ching, the Book of the Way. In body and mind an old sage from birth, Lao-Tzu devotes his life to deciphering the endless book of the world. But he soon becomes frustrated with the silliness of human order, impatient kings, and greedy people, and rides off on the back of a water buffalo in search of the Way. He encounters clouds that solidify under his feet, a cave guarded by a golden monkey, and the venerable Confucius himself, and ultimately finds the wisdom of the dragon already residing deep in his own heart.

When a meteor crashes into greaser Rockabilly’s backyard, a ripple of strange events ensues. The tattoo of a pin-up girl on his back comes to life and begins to exert her murderous control over the suburb in which he lives. His precocious teenage neighbor Suicide Girl begins spontaneously lactating, and her pet lizard goes missing. A disturbed neighbor begins to pace the block to quiet his unseemly thoughts. Meanwhile, the neighborhood dog, Bones, suddenly able to think human thoughts, begins to hatch a plan.With economic language and well-crafted timing, Rockabilly leads us on a hair-raising journey, artfully deconstructing archetypes of suburban America. Taking us past garish lights of strip malls and empty strips of desert, this dystopian novel presents a unique take on trash aesthetics, the philosophy of tattoo art, and American pop culture.

Resonating at the heart of Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 is the question whether art has present, past, and future functions. The modernist assertion of the autonomy of art was intended to render superfluous art’s social and religious functions. But what if the functionlessness of art comes under suspicion of being instrumentalized by bourgeois capitalism? This was an accusation that informed the anti-modernist critique of the avant-garde, and particularly of Surrealism. The objective throughout the crisis-ridden present of the 1920s to the 1940s was to reaffirm a once ubiquitous, but long-lost functionality—not only of art.The publication accompanying the exhibition examines the strategies deployed in this reaffirmation. These include the surrealist Primitivism of an “Ethnology of the White Man” together with the excavation of the deep time of humanity—into the “Neolithic Childhood” mapped out by the notoriously anti-modernist Carl Einstein (1885-1940) as a hallucinatory retro-utopia. The volume brings together essays by the curators and academics involved in the project, primary texts by Carl Einstein and a comprehensive documentation of the exhibition including lists of works, texts on as well as images of numerous exhibits and finally installation views. At the center of the volume, a glossary discusses Carl Einstein’s own theoretical vocabulary as well as further associated terms, such as Autonomy, Formalism, Function, Gesture, Hallucination, Art, Metamorphosis, Primitivisms, Totality.With contributions by: Irene Albers, Philipp Albers, Joyce S. Cheng, Rosa Eidelpes, Carl Einstein, Anselm Franke, Charles W. Haxthausen, Tom Holert, Sven Lütticken, Ulrike Müller, Jenny Nachtigall, David Quigley, Cornelius Reiber, Erhard Schüttpelz, Kerstin Stakemeier, Maria Stavrinaki, Elena Vogman, Zairong Xiang, Sebastian ZeidlerWith reproductions of artworks by:Jean (Hans) Arp, Willi Baumeister, Georges Braque, Brassaï, Claude Cahun, Lux T. Feininger, Max Ernst, Florence Henri, Barbara Hepworth, Hannah Höch, Heinrich Hoerle, Paul Klee, Germaine Krull, Helen Levitt, André Masson, Alexandra Povòrina, Gaston-Louis Roux, Kalifala Sidibé, Louis Soutter, Yves Tanguy, Toyen, Jindřich Štyrský, Raoul Ubac, Paule Vézelay and others.

Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital was never realized, yet it has haunted the imagination of many filmmakers, historians, and philosophers to the present day. Dance of Values aims to conjure the phantom of Eisenstein’s Capital, presenting for the first time material from the full scope of the film project’s archival body. This “visual instruction in the dialectical method,” as Eisenstein called it, comprises more than five hundred pages of notes, drawings, press clippings, diagrams, negatives, theoretical reflections, and extensive quotations. Dance of Values explores the internal formal necessity underlying Eisenstein’s artistic choices, and argues that its brilliant adaptation of Marx’s Capital relied on the fragmentary and nonlinear state of its material. Published here for the first time, sequences from Eisenstein’s archival materials are presented in this volume not as mere illustrations but as arguments in their own right, a visual theorization of value.

We know Isaac Newton as a brilliant polymath, inventor of the calculus and the person who first began to suss out the fundamental laws of physics. But in this delightful account of his life and thought aimed at young readers, we learn oh, so much more about Newton and his secret life . . . on the dark side of the moon.Newton and the Club of Astronomers invites us on a wildly imaginative journey to join Newton as he meets with the famous (and definitely secret) Club of Astronomers in their clubhouse on the hidden side of the moon. At the Club's meetings, we learn about Newton's discoveries and understand his pioneering thoughts about gravity, planetary orbits, and much, much more. Whimsical and fanciful, yet firmly rooted in Newton's actual ideas and discoveries, Newton and the Club of Astronomers is the perfect introduction for curious children to one of the great figures of scientific history.

At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life’s “big questions,” however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children—and curious grown-ups—to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Socrates to Descartes, Einstein, Marx, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging—and often funny—story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations.Kierkegaard and the Mermaid takes a “leap into the absurd,” exploring the existential philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard from the bottom of the sea, through the eyes of a princess with a fish’s tail. Though living in a coral palace and betrothed to the handsomest and tenderest of all the water sprites, our heroine soon finds herself heartbroken. She must look deep into the world of the spirit to find out what it all means.

Vienna, 1714: Late in life, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the universal genius of his time, puts down his pen and declares his description of the universe to be complete. In the evening, he sits in his study room among letters, books, and manuscripts as his young friend Theodor comes for a visit. Theodor is bothered by one question: Why is there evil? And why do people commit crimes? With an example from ancient Greek mythology, Leibniz develops his theory about the best of all possible worlds. With this vivid “story within a story” Jean Paul Mongin successfully imparts the complex philosophical ideas of Leibniz to young readers.At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life’s “big questions,” however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children—and curious grown-ups—to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Socrates to Descartes, Einstein, Marx, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging—and often funny—story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations.

Emmanuel Levinas’s interview with Françoise Armengaud in 1988 is one of the only statements we have from the philosopher, who became influential in various disciplines through his ethics that focuses on the fine arts specifically. Presented in English for the first time here, this interview brings us Levinas’s understanding of “obliteration” as an uncanny, disruptive, and even “unavailable” concept. Discussing the work of the French sculptor Sacha Sosno, Levinas parses the complex relationship between ethics and aesthetics, examining how they play out in artistic operations and practices. In doing so, he turns away from the “ease and lighthearted casualness of the beautiful” to shed light instead on the processes of material wear and tear and the traces of repair that go into the creation and maintenance of works of art, and which ultimately give them a profound uniqueness of presence. This evocative interview uncovers a hidden thread of aesthetic thinking in Levinas’s work and introduces a new way of looking at artistic practices in general.

Theodor Adorno’s famous aesthetic theory was not merely a theory of the aesthetic; it also made a wider claim about the aesthetic implications of all theory. At the same time we have to deal with aesthetic objects and events in which an aesthetic theory is inherent, which show themselves as art. From both sides—theory and aesthetics—a link can be made to the etymological meaning of theōria, which understands the theoretical as a seeing or perspective. Featuring lucid essays by major thinkers, the book examines this link, focusing equally on the aesthetic implications of theory and the theoretical implications of aesthetic events.

In this lecture course, Reiner Schürmann develops the idea that, in between the spiritual Carolingian Renaissance and the secular humanist Renaissance, there was a distinctive medieval Renaissance connected with the rediscovery of Aristotle. Focusing on Thomas Aquinas’s ontology and epistemology, William of Ockham’s conceptualism, and Meister Eckhart’s speculative mysticism, Schürmann shows how thought began to break free from religion and the hierarchies of the feudal, neo-Platonic order and devote its attention to otherness and singularity. A crucial supplement to Schürmann’s magnum opus Broken Hegemonies, Neo-Aristotelianism and the Medieval Renaissance will be essential reading for anyone interested in the rise and fall of Western principles, and thus in how to think and act today.

Antonin Artaud’s journey to Ireland in 1937 marked an extraordinary—and apocalyptic—turning point in his life and career. After publishing the manifesto The New Revelations of Being about the “catastrophic immediate-future,” Artaud abruptly left Paris for Ireland, remaining there for six weeks without money. Traveling first to the isolated island of Inishmore off Ireland’s western coast, then to Galway, and finally to Dublin, Artaud was eventually arrested as an undesirable alien, beaten by the police, and summarily deported back to France. On his return, he spent nine years in asylums, remaining there through the entire span of World War II.During his fateful journey, Artaud wrote letters to friends in Paris which included several “magic spells,” intended to curse his enemies and protect his friends from the city’s forthcoming incineration and the Antichrist’s appearance. (To André Breton, he wrote: “It’s the Unbelievable—yes, the Unbelievable—it’s the Unbelievable which is the truth.”) This book collects all of Artaud’s surviving correspondence from his time in Ireland, as well as photographs of the locations he traveled through. Featuring an afterword and notes by the book’s translator, Stephen Barber, this edition marks the seventieth anniversary of Artaud’s death.

For years now, academics worldwide have been pushing for more interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Yet for all that, the very concept of transdisciplinarity has proved remarkably tough to define, let alone to enact. This book brings together prominent voices from the debate on transdisciplinarity in a manner that is itself transdisciplinary: scholars present papers from their own discipline, and those are followed by critical replies from different disciplines. The result is a vivid debate, new insights, and a growing confidence that there is something to be gained by approaching a topic from the outside and bringing new approaches to bear.

In Necroperformance, Dorata Sajewska proposes an innovative perspective for looking back at the formative process of Polish modernity, delving into repressed areas of experience connected with World War I and the ensuing emancipatory movements. Underpinning modern Polish nationhood, she reveals, is not only a Romantic myth of independence but also the up-close horrors of fratricidal warfare and the pacifist aspirations of those confronted with its violence.Searching for traces of memory in precarious bodies inflicted with the violence of war, Necroperformance implores us to acknowledge the fragility of life as it actively reinforces an attitude of respect for the right to live. Sajewska constructs here an alternative culture archive, conjuring it from compoundly-mediatized historical remnants--bodies, documents, artworks, and cultural writings--that demand to be recognized in non-canonical reflection on our past. Her chief objective is to understand the social impact of remains and their place in culture, and by examining the body and corporality in artistic practices, social and cultural performances, she strives to identify both the fragmentariness of memory and the discontinuity of history, and finally, to reinstate the body's (or its documental remains') historical and political dimension.

This book was originated within the research environment Architecture of Embodiment, which inquires into architecture from an enactivist perspective and through aesthetic practices. This research environment does not primarily aim to formulate answers to its main research question—how does architecture condition the emergence of sense?—but to provide the adequate conceptual, methodological, and communicative conditions to address it. Ultimately, it aims to destabilize its objects of research in order to disclose new intelligibilities of the issues under inquiry. In this sense, Architecture of Embodiment, as an environment, intends to fulfill a fundamental cognitive function of research through aesthetic practices.​Architectures of Embodiment is a constellation of coexisting autonomous artifacts: texts by Alex Arteaga, Mika Elo, Ana García Varas, Lidia Gasperoni, Jonathan Hale, Susanne Hauser, Dieter Mersch and Gerard Vilar in dialogue with one another through comments and comments on the comments. It is conceived as a dialogical research dispositive: an invitation to participate in an open-ended process of research within a growing ecology of research practices.

In this book, Reiner Schürmann argues that what is most original about Marx is his philosophical axis. Extending his highly original engagement with the history of philosophy, Schürmann draws out this axis, which determines and localizes his theories of history, social relations, and economy. Whereas Marxist readings of Marx conceive history, classes, and social relations as primary realities, Schürmann brings out a radically immanent understanding of praxis that introduces multiplicity. This edition is complemented by a reprinting of Schürmann’s Anti-Humanism essay, in which he reads Marx alongside Nietzsche and Heidegger as spelling out the dissociation of being and action. Reading Marx showcases underappreciated facets of Schürmann’s work and offers an interpretation of Marx that resonates with the readings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, Antonio Negri, and François Laruelle.