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book review
Strata, Agnese [Review of] Elena Lombardi. Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories
[…] sono chiamati a dialogare con le diverse incarnazioni letterarie di Ulisse testi e fonti della cultura passata che non si riferiscono esplicitamente alla sua figura. In tal modo, il volume soddisfa pienamente le istanze della collana editoriale in cui è collocato (Cultural Inquiry), aprendo uno spazio di ricerca e di sperimentazione in cui la riflessione critica, orientata verso le sfide e i problemi del nostro presente, fa interagire proficuamente diversi ambiti ed epoche della nostra tradizione culturale. […] il volume rappresenta un esperimento riuscito di scrittura saggistica che crea un punto di incontro per specialisti e non specialisti sul terreno comune della curiosità che non conosce barriere disciplinari. […] per la ricchezza di temi e di spunti, nonché per l’ampiezza e l’entrelacement dei riferimenti culturali, il saggio non potrà essere ignorato da chi si immetterà per ‘l’alto mare’ (Inf. 26.100) delle molteplici riletture del mito di Ulisse.
2025
book review
Darlington-Bell, Finlay [Review of] Elena Lombardi. Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories
Lombardi’s writing is simultaneously scholarly and poetic, rigorous yet profoundly idiosyncratic, a work that mirrors the journey of Ulysses (without, like the much-turned man, going too far beyond). The book presents a compelling blend of literary history, rhetorical analysis, and private reflection, interspersed with deeply engaging and sometimes provocative readings of Dante’s text. While her frank, introspective approach may not be to everyone’s liking, her Ulissino (as she calls it) stands out as a critical and philosophical performance, one that seeks not only to analyse but to recreate the intellectual and emotional journey embedded within Dante’s Commedia.
2025
Forthcoming
Book Section
Verónica Stedile Luna Editorial Writings from a Scalar Perspective: Reduction and Expansion as Publishing Procedures
Can a series of small-scale artistic publishing projects provide insight into the conditions of contemporary large-scale publishing? Building on this question, this essay analyses a series of recent Latin American artistic publishing projects that develop scalar operations of expansion and reduction in relation both to the book as a material format and to writing itself. Through procedures involving enlargement and miniaturisation, excess and scarcity, the works produced by Oficina Perambulante and DocumentA/Escénicas, as well as the publication work Líneas Móviles, can be understood as active responses to contemporary conditions of overproduction and destruction in the publishing industry.
2026. expansion; reduction; procedures; format; writing; artistic publishing projects
Forthcoming
Book Section
Angelica Stathopoulos sweet nothings
This essay meditates on the relation between minoritarian beings and minor forms. By way of thematically engaging minor points — the i, the tittle, the dot, the period, the atom — it argues both that small things can unveil and deconstruct large structures, and that minoritarian beings hold a privileged relationship to minor forms. Queer, racialized, feminine, and other minoritarian beings often tend towards smaller cases rather than accept the premises of the capital ‘I’. Aligning form, content, and subject, the essay sketches a diminutive ethics modelled on diminutive life.
2026. the i; diminution; form; subjectivity; ethics; the point; no point
Forthcoming
Book Section
Jasmine Clotilde Pisapia Dust, Death, and the Body of the Earth: Notes on the Scales of Ecological Disaster
This essay follows dust across scales of ecological disaster: from particulate matter to volcanic magnitude, and from toxic accumulation to catastrophic rupture. Drawing on long-term anthropological fieldwork in southern Italy’s toxic and volcanic worlds, it moves between satellite views, images of scientific prediction, and Georges Bataille’s writings on dust and the subterranean abyss. Dust emerges as a medium between life and death, visibility and invisibility, the infinitesimal and the cosmic.
2026. dust; environmental crisis; toxicity; timescales; anthropology; volcano; death
Forthcoming
Book Section
Claudia Peppel The Everyday in Dramatic Closeness
Does the perception of the everyday change when it is presented from an unusual perspective through shifts in scale or proportion — that is, by enlarging or reducing the size of everyday objects in relation to the viewer? This essay explores the potential transformation of domestic objects through consideration of a selection of works from the exhibition ‘The Everyday in Dramatic Closeness’, on view at ICI Berlin at the turn of 2025–26. It highlights how the exhibition sought to question perceptions and expectations of everyday life and to shed light on moments in which the everyday is perceived as unfamiliar or weird.
2026. everyday life; domestic objects; dramatic closeness; change of size; zooming in and out; perception
Forthcoming
Book Section
Filippo Bosco, Federica Di Blasio, Marietta Kesting, and Lisa Messeri The Pleasure of the 1:1 Scale: A Short Interview with Lisa Messeri
Filippo Bosco, Federica Di Blasio, Marietta Kesting, and Lisa Messeri, ‘The Pleasure of the 1:1 Scale: A Short Interview with Lisa Messeri’, in Scale: New Critical Essays, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Marietta Kesting, Cultural Inquiry, 40 (ICI Berlin Press, 2026), pp. 375-82 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-40_lm>
2026. place-making; planetary scale; 1:1; simulation; god trick; façade; AI surrogacy
Forthcoming
Book Section
José Antonio Magalhães Scale and World-Orders: An Effort at Diplomacy between Prometheans and Gaians
This essay distinguishes and mediates between two contemporary cosmopolitical tendencies (at once theoretical, political, and aesthetic) figured as conceptual characters with contrasting approaches to scale: Promethean engineers, who make and apply models, and Gaian bricoleurs, who give and follow examples. These are prima facie associated respectively with large scales/upscaling and small scales/nonscalability. Through their interface, scalarity is neither universalized nor rejected, but circumscribed to contingent world-orders.
2026. cosmopolitics; political ecology; nonscalability; accelerationism; neorationalism; Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo; Latour, Bruno
Forthcoming
Book Section
Filippo Bosco, Kirill Chepurin, Franco Costantini, Tobi Haslett, Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Marietta Kesting, Jasmine Clotilde Pisapia, Angelica Stathopoulos, and Verónica Stedile Luna Lipglossary Ed. by Angelica Stathopoulos and Verónica Stedile Luna
This ‘lipglossary’ was composed by the Georges Bataille reading group, who met regularly throughout the academic years of 2024–26 at the ICI Berlin to discuss major and minor Bataillean themes and texts, focusing in particular on the scalar implications of his philosophical, aphoristic, and erotic writings. The Da Costa Encyclopédique, a critical dictionary published by the secret society Acéphale, has served as a source of inspiration for this glossary, where the concrete and the abstract, the base and the ephemeral converse, with the effect of dimming the self-certainty of those very coordinates.
2026. Bataille, Georges; critical dictionary; Acéphale
Forthcoming
Book Section
Magdalena Krysztoforska The Measure of Generality: On the Scalar Dynamics of AI Model Evaluation Practices
The notion of ‘generality’ has featured prominently in recent discourse around AI, where the technology is increasingly presented as general-purpose, or as showcasing general intelligence. In order to interrogate the purported scientific basis for such claims and their rhetorical currency, this essay examines practices of model evaluation and benchmarking in AI through the critical lens of scale, highlighting numerous scalar conflations and distortions prevalent in AI research.
2026. artificial intelligence; machine learning; model evaluation; benchmark datasets; general-purpose technology; scaling laws; diagrams
Forthcoming
Book Section
Marietta Kesting Scaling Sleep: Modes of Suspension, Reduction, and Intensification
This essay examines the (non)scalability of sleep of humans and animals during the everynight (versus the everyday). Starting with the efficacious trope of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, it explores fictional and real (both historical and current) experiments with intensities, variations, and durations of sleep. While, in capitalist societies and military settings, sleep has been considered a useless and passive state to be downscaled or eliminated, some now attempt the opposite. Interscalar jumps between animal and human scales are discussed with regard to how a state similar to hibernation might reduce energy consumption on interstellar flights.
2026. sleep; Sleeping Beauty; intensity; (non)scalability; suspension; hibernation; space travel
Forthcoming
Book Section
Nicolas Helm-Grovas (subject in parentheses)
This essay takes the figure of brackets or parentheses as a starting point for reflecting — in dialogue with Rebecca Comay, Hollis Frampton, Yvonne Rainer, Ian White, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Doris Lessing, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Marina Vishmidt, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Alex Farrar, and others — on links between form, social relations, and the subject. Beginning from a minor detail of textual infrastructure, it thinks across scales, from the grammatological one of the tiny mark to discursive, psychological, and social scales.
2026. punctuation; form; brackets; infrastructure; gaps; writing; metalanguage; translation
Forthcoming
Book Section
Tobi Haslett Fanon Degree Zero
This essay investigates ‘writing’ as a motif in Frantz Fanon’s oeuvre. From the critique of négritude and Sartre in Black Skin, White Masks to the figure of the native intellectual in The Wretched of the Earth, writing both possesses an elevated class character and dramatizes the antinomies of racial existence. The native petty bourgeoisie, equipped with ‘intellectual and technical capital’ bestowed upon it by the colonizer, must redirect those capacities towards emancipatory ends. Fanon’s own texts, which synthesize psychiatry, existentialism, phenomenology, political economy, and literary criticism, issue from precisely the petty bourgeois stratum that he subjects to ruthless examination. His writing thus performs its own historical predicament, as well as the various spatial and temporal scales at which anticolonial revolt transpires.
2026. Fanon, Frantz; Barthes, Roland; writing; petty bourgeoisie; colonialism; anticolonial revolt
Forthcoming
Book Section
Joshua DiCaglio Contemplating Scale: An Interview with Joshua DiCaglio
The interview reflects on how DiCaglio’s framing of scale as ‘situated dislocation’ can help reorient preconceived notions of ‘agency’, ‘the political’, or ‘the human’. Highlighting the limits of the descriptive authority of scientific epistemologies, and the illusions of individual control underpinning widespread notions of political action, DiCaglio points to the practice of contemplation as a way of embracing uncertainty and making space for alternative conceptions of agency.
2026. scale theory; mysticism; contemplation; rhetoric of science; science studies; cybernetics
Forthcoming
Book Section
Yuri Di Liberto Scale and Discourse: On the Seismographic Connections between Processes
In this intervention, I examine the macro-micro relationships or effects that can be established between processes of different scales, particularly processes attributable to heterogeneous temporal scales. I then describe the agency that material processes — such as economic or climatic ones — can have in facilitating the production of specific human discourses or acts.
2026. scale; discourse; pre-discourse; subject; timescale; statement; chance
Forthcoming
Book Section
Federica Di Blasio Affects of Multiscalarity: Rhetorics of the Too Big and Too Small across the Global and the Planetary
This essay engages with a rhetorical understanding of scale and argues that disorientation pairs with multiscalarity when emphasis is put on the gap between scales big and small. This ‘scalism’ travels across heterogeneous discourses: in theoretical accounts of globalization, we see it operating behind local/global binaries; in theorizations of the planetary, it has been used to justify the relegation of the political.
2026. scale rhetorics; scalism; global and planetary; local–global; politics of the planetary; scale and affect
Forthcoming
Book Section
Cat Dawson ‘A Subtle System of Feints’: Gender, Medical Photography, and the Essential Void of Sex
This essay studies a selection of regulatory projects related to sex and gender to describe the role that scale plays in categorizing and ordering bodies. It uses a series of medical photographs by the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld as its historical point of departure to show that sex is the incoherent product of a series of effects constructed in aggregate from multiple scales. The essay concludes by exploring ways that strategies to curtail trans life and rights can be appropriated to not only redress transantagonisms but also to contribute to broader struggles for justice.
2026. scale; sports; medical photography; transgender; Las Meninas; Foucault, Michel; Hirschfeld, Magnus; sexology; sex; gender
Forthcoming
Book Section
Franco Costantini The Scale of Love
This essay seeks to demonstrate the capacity of lyric poetry to convey a heterodox ontology. In particular, I bring into dialogue medieval treatises with poetic texts in vernacular languages (mainly Dante’s Paradiso) through the concepts of analogy (Simone Weil) and ‘human cosmo-morphism’ (Max Scheler). The hierarchical order of the scala naturae is disrupted by poetic language, which configures an open space where angels and flowers, human souls and animals coexist on the same ontological plane.
2026. poetry; nature; Dante; ontology; attention; scala naturae
Forthcoming
Book Section
Kirill Chepurin Solar Figuration: Thinking the Human at the Scale of the Universe with Georges Bataille
This essay reads Georges Bataille as a thinker of thresholds, crossings, and ephemeral solar forms, tracing figures of chance in his writing from the wildflower to the volcano to humanity as a planetary and cosmic movement. Dwelling with terms such as ‘figuration’, ‘precipice’, ‘threshold’, ‘signal’, and ‘voiding’, it probes what provisional obstacles and cross-scalar mediations can briefly refract or delay the Bataillean pull towards dissolution.
2026. Bataille, Georges; figuration; threshold; communication; humanity; cosmos; the sun
Forthcoming
Book Section
Filippo Bosco The Hurricane in the Room: Drawing, Marginality, and Scale in Monica Bonvicini’s 75 mph
This essay analyses drawings related to Monica Bonvicini’s A Violent, Tropical, Cyclonic Piece of Art Having Wind Speeds of or in Excess of 75 mph. Consisting of two fans blowing air at unbearable speed in a white-cube space, the installation presented a strategy of expansion, compression, and multiscalarity. Bonvicini’s drawings provide a way to read this strategy, featuring collages juxtaposing advertisements, standard architecture manuals, and theory. A framework based on the concept of marginality is developed to analyse scalar frictions, manipulations of figurability, and the reversion of outside and inside, visibility and exclusion, perspective and opacity.
2026. installation; architecture; drawing; collage; marginality; friction; figurability; gender
Forthcoming
Book Section
Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Marietta Kesting Introduction
The concept of scale has become ubiquitous in the humanities, and yet it remains ambivalent, with frequently contradictory effects. While scale refers to scientifically defined measures, it is a shifting, relational term and requires a fluid mode of inquiry and manifold analytical approaches such as reduction and expansion, zooming and focusing, dislocation and recontextualization. The introduction sketches how the contributions to the volume Scale: New Critical Essays have come out of sustained conversations across multiple fields — including artificial intelligence, anthropology, philosophy, literary studies, art, and queer theory — and establish a network of relations crossing the local and cosmic, individual and social, human and non-human, and modern and pre-modern.
2026. scale; scalability; scalarity; planetary scale; expansion; reduction; scale invariance; Anthropocene; postcolonialism; situated knowledge; politics of scale; diminutive; marginal
Forthcoming
Book Section
Filippo Bosco and José Antonio Magalhães Diagrams
Filippo Bosco and José Antonio Magalhães, ‘Diagrams’, in Scale: New Critical Essays, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Marietta Kesting, Cultural Inquiry, 40 (ICI Berlin Press, 2026), p. v-x <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-40_bm>
2026
Forthcoming
cover imageBook
Scale: New Critical Essays Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Marietta Kesting
The concept of scale has become ubiquitous in the humanities, and yet it remains ambivalent, with frequently contradictory effects. While scale refers to scientifically defined measures, it is a shifting, relational term and requires a fluid mode of inquiry and manifold analytical approaches such as reduction and expansion, zooming and focusing, dislocation and recontextualization. The contributions to Scale: New Critical Essays come out of sustained conversations across multiple fields — including artificial intelligence, anthropology, philosophy, literary studies, art, and queer theory — and establish a network of relations crossing the local and cosmic, individual and social, human and non-human, and modern and pre-modern.
2026 | Cultural Inquiry, 40. scalability; scalarity; planetary scale; expansion; reduction; scale invariance; Anthropocene; postcolonialism; situated knowledge; politics of scale; diminutive
book review
Agliozzo, Andrea [Review of] Pasolini: Dialogues avec la France / Dialoghi con la Francia
La Francia rappresenta uno dei luoghi in cui si manifesta la tensione che attraversa l’intera produzione pasoliniana: come dare forma al reale senza ridurlo a schema, come pensare la razionalità senza separarla dalla vita. Su questo sfondo si colloca il ricco volume Pasolini: Dialogues avec la France / Dialoghi con la Francia. Nato da un convegno del centenario del 2022, il libro mostra come il rapporto tra l’autore e la Francia – e della Francia con Pasolini – non si arresti a fascinazioni estetiche o simboliche, ma occupi un posto centrale nella sua elaborazione teorica, sviluppata in un corpo a corpo con il razionalismo europeo che Pasolini riconosce come nodo insieme necessario e insostenibile. I quattordici saggi in italiano e in francese seguono le metamorfosi di un confronto strutturale e contraddittorio, ricostruendo con precisione una pluralità di configurazioni in movimento, in cui la Francia emerge come luogo di interlocuzione che reagisce alle offensive dell’autore, lo discute, lo contraddice, assumendolo come problema. …
2026
3,312 resources