An essay on Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind", published here in a Spanish translation.

'Samuel Beckett and Contemporary French Philosophy' explores the productive relationship between literature and philosophy, tracing the key ideas that inform Beckett's work and the ways in which these ideas are central to the French philosophy that developed in Beckett's wake. Forged within a similar cultural nexus both writer and philosophers pursue questions of epistemology and ontology within an exploration of the nature and function of language. Reacting against the rule-bound parameters of conceptual frameworks such as empiricism and structuralism, the chapter (...) argues that both Beckett and key French philosophers such as Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze and Blanchot seek to establish an understanding of subjectivity that takes into consideration the somatic and the contingent within the context of writing. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to engage with the inherent humanism of bioethics and consider the possibility of thinking bioethics otherwise - beyond the belief in the intrinsic dignity and superior value of the human, and beyond the rules and procedures rooted in this belief. It is also to challenge what we may call the ‘cognitivist pretence’ of humanism, i.e. the conviction that the human can be distinguished from other forms of life by the inherent ‘truth’ and teleology of (...) his being which is to be revealed to him, and which he can uniquely grasp. The human as both a discrete subject and an object of bioethics becomes thus a critical point of interrogation in this study. What I want to outline in response is a non-systemic bioethics of relations which does not abdicate its ethical responsibility or its political commitment, although it questions many of the premises of established moral and political theories. Indeed, I want to ‘put to the test the pretentious belief that only a liberal and humanistic view of the subject can guarantee basic elements of human decency: moral and political agency and ethical probity’. But my project is more genealogical than futurologist. By revisiting the story of bioethics’ emergence as a separate discipline, I want to consider the following question: what if the cyborg rather than the human had been adopted as its foundation? Or, to put it another way, what would a bioethics for humans, animals and machines look like? (shrink)

Since the 1950s, art and philosophy have continued to return to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his assertion of the primacy of perception. Influenced by Husserl and Heidegger and an associate of Sartre and de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty developed a range of evocative concepts that have informed the production, criticism and theory of art. The only phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage with the sciences and psychology as well as art, literature, linguistics and politics, his (...) exploration of the situated character of embodied perception and how it unfolds over time in social, historical and political contexts reveals a concept of the self that is "caught up in things, that has a front and a back, a past and a future". (shrink)

This paper looks at the development of certain Foucauldian concepts and themes within the work of the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. Where Agamben is well-known for his critique of biopower in Homo Sacer, his recent work a more complex engagement with Foucault both in terms of his subject matter, governmentality and economy, and his critical methodology, most notably, his reaffirmation of the value of Foucault’s archaeological method. Focusing on three of Agamben’s recent publications, Signatura Rerum: Sul Metodo, Il regno e (...) la gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell'economia e del governo and What is an Apparatus?, the article looks first at Agamben’s development of Foucault’s archaeological method within his own concept of the signature. It then goes on to consider Agamben’s identification of an economic theology in contradistinction to Schmitt’s political theology and how Agamben’s discussion of collateral damage might be related to Foucault’s notion of security as developed in Security, Territory, Population. Finally, the article considers how Agamben links Foucault’s notion of ‘dispositif’ [apparatus] to an economic theology of government, calling for the development of counter-apparatuses in a similar way to Foucault’s call for ‘resistances.’ The article concludes by considering both the benefits and the limitations of Agamben’s engagement with Foucault. (shrink)

This article proposes that Ranciere offers an accurate account of contemporary art’s self-understanding of its politicality, explaining his widespread appreciation and influence by the sector. For this reason the critique of Ranciere’s notion of politics and the demonstration of its deliberate disavowal of specific political determination allow for a systemic argument against contemporary art’s critical ambitions as in any way politically adequate.

How can the human speak in the shadow of the post-humanist critique? This essay arises out of a prolonged moment of doubt, a cognitive and affective confusion over the ontology and status of what goes under the name of “man.” Now, that confusion is of course nothing new. It has been inherent to the disciplinary inquiry within the humanities conducted under the aegis of philosophical positions broadly associated with post-structuralism over the last few decades. The early twenty-first century attempts on (...) the part of humanities scholars to turn to a more serious engagement with those hard sciences that deal with different human parts and particles – anatomy, neurology, genetics – have contributed even further to this uncertainty, as has the discovery that the typical signal points of the human such as language, tool use, culture, and emotions are to be found across the species barrier. Rather than aim at ascertaining the identity of the human/non-human animal, in all its biodigital configurations, what I am predominantly concerned with in this essay is discussing how this transformed understanding of the human can help us not only think better about ourselves and others who may or may not be like us, but also live better with others - machines, humans, and other animals. The emphasis in this investigation falls on the pragmatics of the “how” as much as on the nature of that “we.” My focus here is therefore primarily ethical rather than ontological. And yet the very inquiry into ways of living a good life must be accompanied by the assessment not only of who will do the living but also of who will be involved in the process of judging its goodness, and in structuring a theoretical discourse around our biological and political forms of existence. In a certain sense this essay is an attempt to return to the human “after the cyborg.” This attempt is underpinned by an intellectual and, dare I say it, personal imperative to find a way out of what I see as the posthumanist impasse of some strands of contemporary cultural theory, whereby the widespread acceptance of the notions of transhuman relationality, interspecies kinship, and machinic becoming by many humanities scholars seems to have diminished the need for a more rigorous interrogation of the singularity of trans-species and intra-species difference. It is thus armed with doubt and singularity as my analytical tools, coupled with the intransigent use of the “I” pronoun which simultaneously undermines and reasserts the humanist pretence of this piece of writing, that I set out to explore these issues. Obviously, there is also a possibility that this posthuman, all-too-human interrogation is just another exercise in narcissism, a desperate attempt to return to the self and hang on to a fantasy of human exceptionalism. In this context, Jacques Derrida’s query, “Is there animal narcissism?,” becomes something of an accusation, aimed perhaps at those of us who are still obsessed by Descartes’ question: “But as for me, who am I?.”. (shrink)

This article examines the notion of subversive discourse found in both the Brazilian dancemartial art known as capoeira and the recent urban phenomenon called parkour, looking in detail at the origins and influences of the two disciplines. With reference to capoeira, I argue that the linguistic structure which underpins the game provides the space for each capoeirista to develop his or her own creative expression or ‘personality’ within the framework of the discipline. When looking at parkour, I consider the ways (...) in which it embodies both the notion of flesh in Merleau-Ponty’s later writings and how through such an understanding of their bodies and the space around them, practitioners of parkour, known as traceurs, are able to engage in what Foucault refers to as ‘technologies of the self ’. (shrink)

Masculinity? This book attempts to answer this one-word question by revisiting key philosophical concepts in the construction of masculinity, not in order to re-write or debunk them again, but in order to provide a radically new departure to what masculinity means today. This new departure focuses on an understanding of sexuality and gender that is neither structured in oppositional terms nor in performative terms, but in a perpendicular relation akin to that which brings space and time together. In doing so, (...) this book doesn’t aim to establish yet another theory within the field of masculism or men’s studies, but to put forward a personal account of how a revised understanding of the relationship between space, time, and gender can thoroughly alter concepts of masculinity. virility and patriarchy. (shrink)

This thesis presents a critical analysis of Deleuze’s philosophy of language, using and examining Russian and Italian futurist manifestos to draw out the ‘futurist’ aspects of Deleuze’s language and thought. These aspects constitute a poetics of Deleuze as well as a poetics of the avant-garde, presenting in both areas the celebrated, utopian state of language as dynamic, performative matter. The way in which futurist manifestos often attempt to perform and demand their aims simultaneously, and the temporal problems which arise due (...) to this, is an operation which can be perceived in Deleuze’s writing. The difference between writing which describes a linguistic practice and writing which performs this linguistic practice is a temporal gap requiring a double operation of description and enactment, which the performative manifesto purports to fulfil. In both Deleuzian and futurist poetics, however, the fulfilment of this double operation can lead to problematic territory. Deleuze presents several linguistic practices in The Logic of Sense which can also be located in the writings of both Russian and Italian futurists, despite the differing political and aesthetic programmes of these variants of the movement. The common element identified and examined in this thesis is an accelerative drive to eliminate the temporal gap between items in an analogical equation so that synonymy is no longer an inexact science; the conjunction and the copula are truncated and cleave together, resulting in radical linguistic becoming. My argument is that minute technical linguistic modifications such as these operate synecdochically within futurist and Deleuze’s poetics, standing for their creators’ entire conceptual systems. Ultimately, the paradoxes inherent in the relationship between the radical fluidity of futurist nonsense and the radical fixity of its ensuing formalism provide a new way of thinking about Deleuze’s approach to language. (shrink)

Is writing about peace after the Rwandan Genocide self-defeating? Whether it is the intensity of the massacres, the popularity of the genocide, or the imaginary forms of cruelty, however one looks at it, everything in the Rwandan Genocide appears to defy once again the possibility of thinking peace anew. In order to address this problem, this book investigates the work of specific French and Rwandese philosophers in order to renew our understanding of peace today. Through this path-breaking investigation, peace no (...) longer stands for an ideal in the future, but becomes a structure of inter-subjectivity that guarantees that the violence of language always prevails over any other form of violence. This book is the very first monograph in philosophy related to the events of 1994 in Rwanda. (shrink)

‘Tympaniser’, Alan Bass tells us, is an ‘archaic verb meaning to ridicule publicly’ or to decry. In the essay fronting Margins of Philosophy called ‘Tympan’ Derrida decries the philosophy that would own its limits, absorbing ‘the margin of its own volume’. While it is Derrida’s late work on the ‘animal question’ that has brought his insistence on the nourishment of the limits between species as limitrophy to wider attention, it is also named as the general condition of the interface of (...) the limits in the much earlier text, ‘Tympan.’ There, in dislocating the tympanum, the margins of philosophy are eaten. Equally, given the rhythmic address of the tympanum, we might say that the margins of philosophy are beaten. Struggling within the strictures of a small town amateur dramatic rehearsal, Selma, the lead protagonist in Dancer in the Dark, makes a plea for more rhythm. But there is no license for tap-dancing in The Sound of Music. This chapter considers Dancer’s persistent play on rhythmic sounds as that which trip Selma’s fantasy song and dance numbers as a ‘tympanising’ of the limits, notably of the limits of the law in both juridical and symbolic senses, as they also work the edges of the film’s two styles. In a provocative analysis of this film, Cary Wolfe suggests that we might understand Selma’s vocal style as a refusal of the phallic imposition of language, and that her virtually suicidal submission to the death sentence construed as a Lacanian ‘feminine’ act, allow for a notion of a ‘posthuman feminine’. ‘Tympan Alley’ redirects Wolfe’s tantalising term ‘posthuman feminine’ through a more consistently Derridean line of thought. It draws on Derrida’s late work on the animal, in which it is polemically clear that deconstruction has never been confined to the signifier nor to the human, and sounds out the implications of his early work on b/eating the limits through Selma’s percussive ear. (shrink)

Issue theme - Process:Music. At the beginning there was an encounter, accidental or not. In Zagreb, in the early 1960's, Orson Welles was shooting parts of The Trial based on the writing of Franz Kafka. A kind of rumor, a tale, was burned into the memory of a city that at the time feverishly invested itself into modernism. Among those newly founded institutions the Zagreb Music Biennale has played a significant role. Almost four decades later, in April 2009 the Process:Music (...) program within the 25th Music Biennale, has sought to take a step back, to orient itself in regard to the meeting that has brought together two major 20th century artists and a city, by mere coincidence or not. Six invited musicians and philosophers had not been given any strict specification whatsoever, just a formal indication in the guise of a rumor, gossip, hearsay or a tale to tackle an encounter that has materialized itself as a movie. Their interventions and new, additional, contributions in this issue of Frakcija Journal represent philosophical, musical and cinematic accounts inspired by and taken over by a tale, gossip, hearsay or a even a lie. Momentarily. By chance, or not. (shrink)

Writing in 1996 and thus prior to Derrida’s extensive treatment of the ‘animal question’ though simultaneous with her own book of anecdotal stories entitled Dog Love, Marjorie Garber suggests that the turn to animals in cultural studies is wholly describable as an effect of transference and that this transference concerns the displacement of an idealised humanism no longer tenable in such studies. Assuming that this transference occurs for the humans involved onto animals, here dogs, Garber does not imagine a counter-transference. (...) She does not ask the question whether animals also transfer. Within her terms such a question would surely founder in anthropomorphism. Yet after Derrida we can no longer assume that we know in advance the grounds of the human that anthropomorphism is said to project. The anchorage of a human/animal division in a corresponding division between response and reaction is one to which Derrida has given specific attention as it surfaces in writings on subjectivity from Descartes to Lacan. A kind of first-degree metaphysics of presence is interrupted by the psychoanalytic insistence upon an Unconscious: the ability to conduct a spontaneous and self-sufficient response is marred by a transference that classically expresses a repetition modelling a new edition of an old desire. However, Derrida argues that human self-presence – or self-presence as human – is problematically reinstated in the ethical conditions of the analytic session during which the analyst must attend to the so-called ‘Full Speech’ of the Unconscious. The analyst, like Garber, presumes to know who transfers onto whom. This paper investigates the necessarily combined question of animal transference and technology through C. J. Cherryh’s astounding science-fiction. In How we became Posthuman N. Katherine Hayles glosses aspects of Cherryh’s usage of the virtual technology she calls ‘tape’ in her major novel Cyteen, yet she positions it as largely anachronistic: the novel was written in the eighties after all. This paper assumes that there is something more to tape – and the transference it both facilitates and figures. In Cherryh’s related novel Forty Thousand in Gehenna, a political experiment lands 40,000 humans including their emotionally unstable cloned companion ‘azi’ temporarily upon the strategically situated planet Gehenna. When all supplies run out including the ‘tape’ designed to condition and maintain the azi, all must learn to live and to become differently including with the assumed to be irrelevant indigenous species. Mystifying all with their continual insistence on shifting substantial quantities of earth around to no apparent end, the indigenous lizards’ practice of writing on Gehenna’s surface is not recognized as such until the ‘rescue’ mission belatedly arrives, to a dramatically altered species-scape, some generations later. In his later work, Derrida hyphenates the inorganic, repetitious and reactive machine with the organic, spontaneous and responsive event thus indexing their non-exclusive relation: this paper makes clear that the organic components of such a machine-event cannot be assumed to circumscribe the human. (shrink)

Writing of Freud’s vexed attempts to step beyond the pleasure principle, Derrida remarks that there is ‘no legacy without transference’. Lynn Hershmann’s digital feature 'Conceiving Ada' concerns a contemporary computer scientist’s attempt to rescue a ‘forgotten woman’ from a history that restricted her genius. Emmy’s efforts to save the titular Ada, Countess of Lovelace, to both her computer’s hard drive and to her unborn daughter’s DNA are presented and critically discussed as the confirmation of a new feminist present. Yet the (...) film indulges its digital fantasy as one in which the technological capacity to archive has been perfected and thus past lives can be accessed, known and saved without loss or alteration – the dream of communication that Derrida has addressed as precisely the incalculability of address. It even figures the agent that Emmy devises with which to reach Ada as a bird, one whose flight is contracted always to return like a homing pigeon. In light of the postal principle’s persistent destinerrance, this paper speculates on the fort-da of Conceiving Ada: Emmy’s drive to make Ada present - to make Ada da, the effort to seal tele as telos – the telos that ‘should’ have been hers, and the enticing transference this film solicits between feminine subjects as the gloss over its troubled ambitions. (shrink)

This paper developed aspects of my 'Wind up: the machine-events of tape' publication with particular focus on Cornelia Vismann's analysis of technologies of law for presentation at a colloquium in memory of her work, organised jointly by Birkbeck department of Law and Research Architecture at Goldsmiths.

Thesis 1: The new does not arrive from some ‘other place’, but is produced from the very matter of the world, after all what else is there? And where else can the new come from? The new then involves a recombination of already existing elements in and of the world. The new would then be a repetition, but with difference. As such the new must be distinguished from fashion, which involves a repetition of the same, that is, does not really (...) involve a radical recombination of elements. However, the new is not opposed to fashion, but rather accelerates certain of its operating logics, namely the production of difference. After all, there must be a certain amount of difference for fashion to be what it is. Fashion in this sense is the near enemy of art. Here is my first question: is it enough to affirm a recombination of matter in order to produce something new? For example, a new art? Would this not merely involve playing with that which is already here, already has reality as it were? Or, following Deleuze, would not such a recombination involve playing with that which is ‘possible’, the latter being a mirror-image or isotope of the real, in fact being the same, conceptually speaking, only lacking reality. Or to phrase this question in a slightly different manner: is there really such a difference between the new in art and the new in fashion? And if there is such a difference, as I think there is, then what else is needed to produce the new? (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have arguably gone further than anyone in contemporary philosophy in affirming a philosophy of creation, one that both establishes and encourages a clear ethical imperative: to create the new. In this remarkable undertaking, these two thinkers have created a fresh engagement of thought with the world. This important collection of essays attempts to explore and extend the creative rupture that Deleuze and Guattari produce in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. The essays in this volume, all (...) by leading thinkers and theorists, extend Deleuze and Guattari's project by offering creative experiments in constructing new communities - of ideas and objects, experiences and collectives - that cohere around the interaction of philosophy, the arts and the political realm. Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New produces new perspectives on Deleuze and Guattari's work by emphasising its relevance to the contemporary intersection of aesthetics and political theory, thereby exploring a pressing contemporary problem: the production of the new. (shrink)

This paper stages an encounter between the philosophical systems of Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze specifically as these relate to the production of subjectivity, or what I call the finite/infinite relation. I attempt to demonstrate that for Badiou a bar of sorts between the finite and the infinite remains determining, whereas for Deleuze – and specifically with his actual/virtual couplet – this bar no longer operates. The paper is at times quite technical in its excavation of the systems in question; (...) however, the introduction and conclusion foreground what is at stake in this confrontation: a certain militant orientation to that which is beyond the world versus an ethical and experimental attitude that is located firmly within the world. (shrink)

Jean Paulhan was a legendary editorial figure of twentieth-century French literature, assisting and publishing many of the most important writers of his lifetime. He was also the author of several volumes of fiction and numerous essays dealing with literature, art, rhetoric, and language. Yet he published his own work in a manner that deliberately kept it inconspicuous, or as Maurice Blanchot put it, "in the margins." A critics' critic, he gave his texts the same scrupulous attention he gave to others, (...) and was recognized as a discreet master. But when he was sufficiently upset or angry, as he was when French politics endangered the intellectual freedom of French writers and writing, he published ferociously. This volume is the first English translation of these major essays, presenting in one book the development of his thinking on his most studied subject: how language works, or, to echo Blanchot again, how literature is possible. Much of contemporary literary theory finds its modern antecedents in Paulhan's essays. He reflected on large questions such as the philosophy and psychology of literature, while at the same time showing a concern for detail and aesthetic accomplishment. He constantly emphasized the act of reading as an activity and literature as the engagement and provocation of such activity. Beloved by writers because he took the problems of writing with the utmost seriousness, his own personal style was marked by self-effacement and irony. (shrink)

As we settle further into the era of digital media and globalized visual culture, it might be tempting to think that photography holds no more than historical interest. Yet it continues to feature in debates with considerable significance for the present.1 The terms by which it was negotiated in the twentieth century – the print, the negative and the mechanical-optical apparatus, the affective experience of a moment stilled, and any truth that its rendering promises – have been technically and culturally (...) displaced and expanded. New instabilities have become familiar and have distanced us from how photography was understood, even in the fairly recent past. The current historical conjuncture is marked by a widespread suspicion that existing theories – including those that turned, in the 1970s, to Marxism, feminist critique, semiotics or psychoanalysis so as to politicize and contest mainstream photographic culture – might no longer be adequate to photography’s contemporary situation. That photography still matters, however, can be evidenced, prosaically and contingently, by noting the increasing number of new scholarly journals and exhibitions devoted to its past, present and future in recent years.2 There is, in this – as Fred Ritchin is only the latest to note – a sense that the undoing of photography’s prior certainties constitutes an ending and an enlargement. The fate of photography provides an ‘expansive filter’ through which to chart the ‘chaos of possibilities that emerge and recede, back up and move forward, crisscrossing each other.’3 Expectations of the new and the old, the obsolete and as yet only anticipated, are thrown into temporal disarray as its openness to reformation gives the photographic past a futural slant. (shrink)

What is Empire? What is not? Where is it? Where is it not? The most general backand- forth questions to begin. We could start by asking whether there is now anything outside the Empire of capital. Hardt and Negri declare as their initial task “to grasp the constitution of the order being formed today” (2000, 3). It is undoubtedly helpful to see an increased arsenal of concepts available for the difficult task of naming the conjuncture at which contemporary capitalism currently (...) sits, but a deft handling of concepts requires careful contextualization and consideration. Notions of difference, hybridity, travel, subsumption, dialectic, multitude, and rights are, in various ways, all conjured with terms. There will be reason to examine the tricks more closely. It is also very good news to find these concepts discussed in a “postmodernist” text that does not pretend that the political heroes of the working class are never-tobe- mentioned ghosts. Stalin, Lenin, Luxemburg, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh are cited on occasion; names airbrushed out of the academy far too often are at least given recognition here. A kind of camouflage-oriented airbrushing wafted for many years throughout Western scholarship as demonic and un-American activities were reified and simplified and the notion of Marxism, and the future of Communism, became a congealed orthodoxy. Such misrepresentation is hard to dislodge, and it is welcome news that now at least some attempt to rework the terms has arrived. (shrink)

In this practice-led research I aim, through text and visual artworks, to examine the dynamic, vitalist body of ‘emergent forms’ and becomings in art. From a theoretical standpoint, I focus my examination on Classical Bergsonism and the unique implications it holds for the figure in time. I probe Henri Bergson’s insistence upon the notion that life and reality are in constant flux in order to explore how this central claim could shed light on the status of the dynamic or shifting (...) figure in art. My investigation examines the space in-between the virtual Bergsonian body, (a formless body of dynamic vital energy which lies just beyond the scope of representation), and the body accessible through representations of the figure (a formed body defined by static anatomies and defined outlines). Bergson claims that all codified forms and representations fall short of the way creatures live in time. His claims are founded in the notion that the real is inaccessible to the rational mind, thus creating the need for an alternative form of cognition – namely, the intuition. Relating to this, through my artwork I search for signs of the amorphous created by the body which access what could be termed as a 'Bergsonian vision' of the real. Drawing upon Bergson’s concepts of ‘ontological becoming’, ‘duration’, intuition, élan vital, and ‘flux’, my investigation explores how manifestations of the figure existing at the periphery of codified semiotics may be interpreted in a way which embraces and validates intuition as an indispensable mode of consciousness. Interwoven throughout this discussion is an exploration of the aesthetics which Bergson’s philosophy promotes. I examine how the movements of Futurism, Cubism, and Surrealism approached the task of interpreting the dynamic, unbound figure through the lens of ‘unconscious vision’. Alongside this, I examine the role which photography has specifically played in extending perception into the territory of Bergsonian becoming. Finally, uniting Bergson’s concept of the intuition as an ideal mode of philosophical inquiry with insights provided by Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, I consider the concept of the ‘intuition image’ and how it may provide access into pure possibility. This discussion is facilitated an examination of my own practice, which draws upon the tradition of non-objective photography and Benjamin’s ‘unconscious optics’, while engaging the subjects of the nebulous figure, movement, time, and transformation. (shrink)

The essay analyses discrepancies within Giorgio Morandi's oeuvre between still life and landscape paintings. It turns to readings on spatiality from Martin Heidegger's 'Being and Time' to allow for re-interpretation of Morandi's work though, for example, the Heideggerian distinction between readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand. The essay then considers how such approaches can apply to representations of architecture, and ends by feeding these back once again into the reading of Morandi's work.

This chapter draws on the Zapatista's slogan 'Asking, We Walk', the ancient 'right to ramble' in the UK, and an archive of walks through the muddled jurisdictions of Southwark in South London, to propose practices of walking and asking not as cartographic gestures, but as part of the production of constituent power. Moving away from the notion of political constituency as an electoral unit that counts bodies within a given territory, the chapter proposes a more dynamic notion of constituency composed (...) simultaneously of bodies, knowledge and questions on the move. (shrink)

Ambient attitudes charts the post-critical attitudes of recent contemporary practice. The book draws on the fields of recent political philosophy and contemporary art to outline a new politics of indifference, dispersal and disengagement. Combining new modes of resistance with readings of contemporary artistic work, the book outlines key motives of the affirmative turn: from analysis to invention, from irony to humor and from specificity to whatever. The book writes together Toni Negri and Robert Walser, Liam Gillick and Giorgio Agamben, Gabriel (...) Orozco and Don Delillo, Andreas Slominski and Gilles Deleuze to outline the politics implicit in these turns. (shrink)