Descent to Revolution draws on a discourse of revolutionary action, revolutionary language and revolutionary theory to thread together and situate revolution in the present moment. It features interviews, commissioned texts and work by five international artist collectives that use urban spaces and social spheres as primary means of engagement. It examines how slow, incremental shifts in social behavior generate knowledge and action that lead to long-term changes in how we engage with one another and our environments. The publication includes a commissioned text by Claire Fontaine and extensive interviews with Red76 and REINIGUNGSESELLSCHAFT.

DIAPHANES 8/9 looks into curious loops of reproduced present, the integral of circular I-effects, the other side of the social Möbius strip. Is the self nothing but an echo? An effect without cause? The human being a message, an autoreply in the jargon of social-memes? Who or what massages the backchannel so astoundingly self-similarly, like an invisible hand? Tom McCarthy makes a plea for the inauthentic, for an ethics without subjects. Shengze Zhu tells of intimacy and loneliness in the live-streaming communities of China, and Zoran Terzić asks about strategies against grand generalization by generic rationality. Christopher Meerdo consigns Bin Laden’s ...

Federica showed up for her appointment with the person who had agreed to purchase her soul. Thus begins Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Massimiliano Geraci’s novel Morte ai Vecchi (Death to the old), in which a device called KapSoul delivers “waves of empathic excitement” to young people before they descend into orgiastic violence against the elderly. The first serial installment of the translated novel is published in this issue of e-flux journal, with further installments coming in the near future. Also in this issue, Jonas Staal illuminates the Martian designs of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, with their unabashedly extractive colonial ambitions. But Staal also reminds ...

Where do artifacts go when they are destroyed? They enter a void of historical erasure, of fabricated narratives and convenient amnesia. We used to call that place a museum. But what happens when a museum is itself destroyed, when it is burned or looted, when icons and artifacts turn to dust or fall back into the hands of people? Can we still access them, and do we even want to? As Boris Groys points out in this issue:.. Editorial Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Becoming Revolutionary: On Kazimir Malevich Boris Groys The Insurgents, Part I: Community-Based Practice as Military Methodology Nato Thompson Visions of Eternity: Plastic ...

All things have borders that make them what they are. Some borders are spatial, like the edge of a painting, and some are chronological, like the end of a play. In this issue, Vivian Ziherl and Maria Iñigo Clavo both attempt to translate modernity from a historical, chronological teleology into a spatial geography. Ziherl does this by drawing our attention to the persistence, within contemporary space, of that supposedly historical borderline, the frontier, while Clavo provides a taxonomy of the various prefixes, like post-, pre-, and anti-, that have been appended to the “modern” in order to conceal its violent ...

Indentured to the past, we drag our inherited identities through a forest of networks bursting with mysterious intellectual fruit. We’re not sure which concepts are poisonous and which are safe. History is like a mistranslated phrasebook full of old-fashioned illustrations which everyone makes fun of on the internet. Attempts at organization feel fanciful and absurd: eclectic inventories of apocalypse-kitsch. In “A Palace of Unsaids,” Rob Goyanes considers the work of mourning under twenty-first century conditions. Does it matter if we show up to the wrong shift at the memorial-factory as long as we do our time?… Editorial Editors Armed Response: Translation as Judicial ...

Gervasia Broxon is the second title in the collection “Entretiens pour un film” directed by Camille Dumond. It is based on the film Scuola Senza Fine by Adriana Monti, which bears witness to the experience of a group of Italian women in the 1970s who, at the age of 40, 50 or 60, returned to school. For 150 hours, in the company of feminist teachers, they learn writing, history and philosophy, but above all, they learn to think about their learning and the emancipation it brings them. They will learn to think about themselves in the world around them. Based on the subjects ...

In this volume, passionate texts from the last decade by artist and theory collective Claire Fontaine are brought together with an extended concluding essay and foreword. Moving across militant, aesthetic and poetic registers these texts consider what resistance might look like in the age of human capital, where all dimensions of the self are infiltrated and conscripted by capital in its pursuit of value. Their answer is the human strike – a strike against the demands on the self imposed by power – in the interest of ‘changing ourselves’, becoming who we want to become. This strike has been happening ...

“Weep no more, citizens; they breathe, these celebrated men for whom we cry; our patriotism reanimates them” Presented in honor of Marat and Le Pelletier, “Citizen Sade” wrote this memorial address at the height of violence during the French Revolution, just after the start of the Reign of Terror. The text, effusive and cloyingly patriotic, brings to question the Sade’s own political position – a provocative impulse all the more remarkable given the addresses audience: the gathered Section des Piques, amongst the most hardline Jacobin districts of Paris. Though frequently cited and made infamous as the inspiration for Peter Weiss’ influential ...

This book is a tale of seduction. It reveals how to win the resistance of closed doors that we all face each day. We can read that a lock is not a hostile obstacle to our desire but a new potential lover, whose interiority we have to see with the eyes of the soul and whose qualities and defaults we have to imagine. A world of silent dialogues between unanimated beings and humans discloses itself in these pages. Chapter after chapter, a disquieting light is shed on the triad of the artist, the consumer and the lock-picker, all belonging to ...

This booklet was released at the launch of the campaign Wages For Wages Against on March 2017 during the exhibition Speak, Lokal at Kunsthalle Zürich. It attempts to answer a simple question: why are artists not paid when they provide a service to an institution, in the form of an exhibition or else? It gathers a series of interviews with Harry Burke (artist & Curator at Artists Space, NY), Bathazar Lovay (artist & Director of Fri Art Fribourg), Bea Schlingelhoff (artist & Head of BFA at ZHdK, Zürich), Lise Soskolne (artist & Organizer of W.A.G.E., New York) and Judith Welter (Director ...