This title will be available soon. But we can understand Descartes’ premise of equality far more basically and radically, not as an assertion of fact, but as a presuppositional act: equality is a supposition we must make in advance. For it has nothing to do with the socially acquired capacity of reason (in which we are unequal, and about which we disagree). Equality pertains to a presupposition of reason. It does not refer to a capacity of reason that we possess, but to the potential for practical training in reason, for its acquisition. In that and that alone—in this potential—are we ...

Philosophical thoughts by birds, drawn and put into words by the artist. „Birds“ was inspired by Jim Goldberg’s „Rich and Poor“, a collection of photographs of rich and poor Americans, each with a handwritten statement by the subject, thereby creating a heart gripping portrait of the USA. It was a logical step to have an ornithologist (a fictional ornithologist) portrait birds in a similar way, for they have just as much to say about the human condition. If people would only listen. “I have no idea what people think of me, I don’t think much of them, that’s for sure. Life is a bitch for ...

The arrow arrives at its destination with a clamor, its blackness marking the arrival of thought from the outside: thought as problem, thought as sabotage.

Episode 21: Breaking the Waves (Disputaziuns Susch, The Magicians of the Mountains) The third episode in the series of chapters from Disputaziuns Susch, an annual conference scheme hosted by Art Stations Foundation CH and Grazyna Kulczyk, has Elisabeth Bronfen looking at Virginia Woolfe’s ‘Breaking the Waves’ and comparing Woolfe’s feeling of ‘walking a tightrope over nothingness’ to Heidegger’s notion of individual existences as ‘being thrown’ into the world. Also the horizon (see episode two) is returning to the debate. Disputaziuns Susch, from the beginning in 2017, has been a multi-disciplinary annual endeavor, bringing together scholars and artists, philosophers and authors, neuroscientists and ...

On life and her work.

“The dark forest theory generalizes on a cosmic level the entropic nature of communication. Its trees grow roots everywhere. We patrol the forest, listening for each other’s steps, all of us hunter and prey… In this forest, one better stay silent or prepare for conflict.”

This set of five pamphlets documents a seminar given recently by Alexander R. Galloway at the Public School New York, a self-organizing educational program where class ideas are generated by the public. “French Theory Today” explores a new generation of French voices—Catherine Malabou, Bernard Stiegler, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Quentin Meillassoux, and François Laruelle—whose work has, to varying degrees, only recently emerged in the English-speaking world. Each night of the seminar consisted of a lecture followed by questions from and discussion with class participants. As Galloway suggests in the online class proposal, the goal was “not to set in aspic a ...

Bruno Latour discusses climate change, science, denialism and philosophy with Hank Scotch, W.J.T. Mitchell and Dipesh Chakrabarty.

If all things in the world can be considered as sources of aesthetic experience, then art no longer holds a privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject and the world, and any aesthetic discourse used to legitimize art must also necessarily serve to undermine it. Following his recent books Art Power and The Communist Postscript, in Going Public Boris Groys looks to escape entrenched aesthetic and sociological understandings of art—which always assume the position of the spectator, of the consumer. Let us instead consider art from the position of the producer, who does not ask what it looks like ...

This study presents an original interpretation of the meaning and complex inter-relationship of the concepts of love, sexuality, family and the law. It argues that they should be understood as forms of interplay between the subjective and the objective, necessity and contingency and unity and difference. A comprehensive elaboration of these forms is to be found in Hegel’s Science of Logic—the conclusions of which he used to organise his ethical and political thought. The argument is introduced with a discussion of the relevance of Hegel’s speculative philosophy to modernity. The authors then explore the relationship between thought, being and recognition ...

This title will be available soon. Where the rituals of academic life are concerned, there are few exercises as rudimentary, at once essential and banal, as taking notes. A student goes to class and reflexively pulls out a spiral-bound notebook, scribbling furiously to keep pace with the lecture. A scholar produces copious marginalia in an essay or book: in this sense, his or her library is not so much a collection of volumes on a shelf as an archive of palimpsests. Field notes are the preferred literary genre of anthropologists, linguists, and sociologists venturing beyond the walls of the ivory tower; ...

Here is a definition of paraphrase: (1) A rewording of something written or spoken by someone else, esp. with the aim of making the sense clearer; a free rendering of a passage. And here is a paraphrase of the definition of paraphrase: (1a) A restatement of someone else’s writing or speech, particularly to clarify the meaning; an approximate version. Can there be a definition, in turn, of paraphrase (1a)? No: a definition captures the general linguistic potential of a word or phrase, abstracted from any particular statement. A paraphrase reprises a particular statement, as (1a) reprises (1). For the same reason, there cannot be ...