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 answe…
David Graeber is not only one of today's most important living thinkers, but also one of the most influential. He is also one of the very few engaged intellectuals who has a proven track record of effective militancy on a world scale, and his impact…
Between 1946 and 1953, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation sponsored a series of conferences aiming to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary community of scholars and researchers who would join forces to lay the groundwork for the new science of c…
Eadweard Muybridge is among the seminal originators of the contemporary world's visual form. Projectionists examines mostly unknown aspects of Muybridge's work: his period as a touring projectionist who enthralled audiences with unprecedented moving…
Affect, or the process by which emotions come to be embodied, is a burgeoning area of interest in both the humanities and the sciences. For Timing of Affect, Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bosel, and Michaela Ott have assembled leading scholars to explo…
After the Crisis offers a platform for discussions between some of today's leading artists, writers, theorists, curators, and historians aimed at questioning the very status of photography today. Contributors come from the realms of critical theory,…
Modernist and contemporary literature are marked by a preoccupation with time, specifically with the passage of time characterized by starts and stops and suspended states of waiting. Acclaimed novelist Tom McCarthy brings out a temporal pattern, a…
Since its beginnings in the 1990s, artistic research has become established as a new format in the areas of educational and institutional policy, aesthetics, and art theory. It has now diffused into almost all artistic fields, from installation to e…
"Born too late to see the war and too early to forget it." So writes Reiner Schurmann in Origins, a startlingly personal account of life as a young man from postwar Germany in the 1960s. Schurmann's semi-autobiographical protagonist is incapable of…
This volume tracks the crucial role of Reiner Schurmann's engagement with the work of Michel Foucault between 1983 and 1991. Drawing on Foucault's highly original reading of the philosophical tradition, Schurmann traces the status of identity and di…
Art today is often practiced in perfect conformity with the neoliberal zeitgeist, often even denying its own radical potential. What is Contemporary Art? lucidly examines the relationship between art and politics in our time. Addressing the heart of…
The Sea as Mirror traces the pressing and repressed material and symbolic presence of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean from Plato to Heidegger. To do so, Wu Yi employs the maritime as a lens to understand the drive of philosophy as both…
Following his release from the Rodez asylum, Antonin Artaud decided he wanted his new work to connect with a vast public audience, and he chose to record radio broadcasts in order to carry through that aim. That determination led him to his most exp…
In this book, Reiner Schurmann argues that what is most original about Marx is his philosophical axis. Extending his highly original engagement with the history of philosophy, Schurmann draws out this axis, which determines and localizes his theorie…
"Here Lies" preceded by "The Indian Culture" collects two of Antonin Artaud's foremost poetic works from the last period of his life. He wrote both works soon after his release from the psychiatric hospital of Rodez and his return to Paris, and they…
Siegfried Kracauer was one of the foremost representatives of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and his influence is felt in the work of many of the period's preeminent thinkers, including Theodor W. Adorno, who once claimed he owed more to K…
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 willi…
This book tries to bring together the work of Marx, Freud and Lacan. It does this not by enumerating what might stereotypically be considered to be the central theses of these authors and then proceeding to combine them a method that is inevitably d…
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 will…
As the world teeters on the brink of crisis and potentially catastrophic change, outlooks for the future have come to be characterized by anxiety. The skepticism that meets utopian visions of the future has given rise to collective nostalgia for see…
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 Par…
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 insta…
Who is throwing melons and pumpkins from the highest tower in Pisa? It's the mad scientist Galileo Galilei, confounding the old ideas of the Greeks around Aristotle. This strange old fellow does science everywhere, even in the taverns When Galileo m…
Matthew Weiner's Emmy-winning series Mad Men has earned wide critical acclaim in its seven seasons. What is it about these impeccably dressed men and women of midcentury Madison Avenue that fascinates us? Decades later, when Weiner's iconic characte…
Staging an exhibition as choreography, as drama, as opera, as a place where reality, politics, aesthetics, art, film, and music can address the issues of our day through documentaries, dialogues, science, activism, and creativity: This is the dream,…
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 mo…
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 a…
Beyond the universal story of human incapability, there is a new quality of idiocy today. While the old idiot derived knowledge from isolation, the new idiot refuses all understanding of the world. This new idiot appears merely as the figure of the…
Vision is not just a simple recognition of what passes through our field of sight, the reflection and observation of light and shape. Even before Freud posited dreams as a way of "seeing" as we sleep, the writings of philosophers, artists, and scien…
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 C…
Upon the "discovery of childhood," as named by Philippe Ari s, bourgeois culture and modern literature marked out an arcane realm that, while scarcely accessible for adults, acted as a space for projections of the most contradictory kind and diverse…
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…
Computer-based technologies for the production and analysis of data have been an integral part of biological research since the 1990s at the latest. This not only applies to genomics and its offshoots but also to less conspicuous subsections such as…
Why is a horse called a horse and not a giraffe or a flapdoodle? Why did Plato go from being called Aristocles, after his grandfather, to being called Plato, which means muscleman? Where do any names come from? In this delightful book, readers young…
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. Unde…
A concern for "this" world lies at the heart of discussing the relation between philosophy and ethics. Kathrin Thiele elaborates in this book that in such endeavor one has to argue against two common misperceptions. Instead of understanding philosop…
The ideas of "art as research" and "research as art" have risen over the past two decades as important critical focuses for the philosophy of media, aesthetics, and art. Of particular interest is how the methodologies of art and science might be mer…
Once considered a stepchild of social theory, legal criticism has recently received a great deal of attention, perpetuating what has always been an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand, law is praised for being a cultural achievement, on the oth…
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! Plato & Co. introduces children--and curious grown-ups--to the lives and work of…
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 r…
In 1920, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, dramatist Nikolai Evreinov directed a cast of 10,000 actors, dancers, and circus performers as well as a convoy of armored cars and tanks in The Storming of the Winter Palace. The mass spe…
Jerome Bel's Disabled Theater - a dance piece that features a company of professional disabled actors - has polarized audiences worldwide. Some have celebrated the performance as an outstanding exploration of representation; others have criticized i…
El Hadji Sy is one of the most significant figures in African contemporary art. Since the late 1970s, the Senegalese artist and curator has helped shape the country's thriving art scene through his innovative painting and performance art. But El Sy…
