21 items

Openness in Medieval EuropeBook
Openness in Medieval Europe Ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum
This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.
2022. cultural inquiry; medieval culture; openness; porosity; vulnerability; subjectivity; textuality; community; enclosure; containment
Over and Over and Over AgainBook
Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory Ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini
Over the last twenty years, reenactment has been appropriated by both contemporary artistic production and art-theoretical discourse, becoming a distinctive strategy to engage with history and memory. As a critical act of repetition, which is never neutral in reactualizing the past, it has established unconventional modes of historicization and narration. Collecting work by artists, scholars, curators, and museum administrators, the volume investigates reenactment's potential for a (re)activation of layered temporal experiences, and its value as an ongoing interpretative and political gesture performed in the present with an eye to the future. Its contributions discuss the mobilization of archives in the struggle for inclusiveness and cultural revisionism; the role of the body in the presentification and rehabilitation of past events and (impermanent) objects; the question of authenticity and originality in artistic practice, art history, as well as in museum collections and conservation practices.
2022. cultural inquiry; reenactment; contemporary art; art theory; archive; museum
Queeres Kino / Queere Ästhetiken als Dokumentationen des PrekärenBook
Queeres Kino / Queere Ästhetiken als Dokumentationen des Prekären Ed. by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Philipp Hanke
Wenn queeres Kino und queere Ästhetiken das Prekäre dokumentieren, dann intendiert dies auch eine Revolution im Symbolischen. Oder anders formuliert: ihr ästhetisches Unterfangen, Rahmungen zum Vorschein zu bringen, ohne sie zu wiederholen, erweist sich, wie die hier versammelten Beiträge namhafter Film-, Medien- und Queertheoretiker*innen zeigen, als prekäre Form der Dokumentation. Die Beiträge bieten dabei zugleich einen Einblick in den gegenwärtigen Stand des queeren Kinos – seiner Filme, Videos und visuellen Installationen.
2021. Queere Ästhetik; Prekarität
The Work of World LiteratureBook
The Work of World Literature Ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson
The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.
2021. world literature
Materialism and PoliticsBook
Materialism and Politics Ed. by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva
Is materialism still relevant to critically think politics? Throughout modernity, the concept of materialism was associated with fatalism and naturalism, when it was not simply dismissed as heresy and atheism. In the nineteenth century, materialism evolved into a central concept of progressive politics, reappearing again in the past decades through renewed Marxist and Spinoza-based approaches, New Materialism, and feminist discourses. This volume inquires these contrasting uses from theoretical and historical perspectives.
2021. cultural inquiry; materialism; politics
Aura und ExperimentBook
Aura und Experiment: Naturwissenschaft und Technik bei Walter Benjamin Ed. by Cha, Kyung-Ho
Walter Benjamin forderte, die »undialektische Trennung zu überprüfen, die man zwischen Natur- und Geisteswissenschaft zu etablieren suchte«. Die Beiträge des Sammelbands widmen sich einerseits Benjamins Beschäftigung mit den Naturwissenschaften und der Technik, und erproben andererseits neue Wege in der Wissens- und Wissenschaftsforschung, die zeigen, wie seine Begriffe und Modelle für die historische und theoretische Analyse der Technik und der Wissenschaften fruchtbar gemacht werden können.
2017. Benjamin, Walter; Dialektik; Geisteswissenschaften; Historismus; Naturwissenschaften; Technik
Conatus und LebensnotBook
Conatus und Lebensnot: Schlüsselbegriffe der Medienanthropologie Ed. by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Anna Tuschling
Als bewegende Bedingungen des Lebens stehen Conatus und Lebensnot im Zentrum aktueller medienanthropologischer Diskussionen über das Verhältnis von Leben und Medien. Spinoza definierte Conatus als Prinzip, nach dem das Wesen jedes Dings darin besteht, »in seinem Sein zu verharren«. Er begründete mit diesem Prinzip eine Denktradition, in der Leben und Materie, Rationalität und Vermögen koinzidieren. Der Begriff der Lebensnot dagegen entstammt Diskursen der Physiologie, der Medizin, der Urteilsphilosophie und schließlich der Psychoanalyse, die auf verschiedene Weise körperliche Bedingungen und Notwendigkeiten mit der Angewiesenheit auf das Andere und die Anderen verschränken. Conatus und Lebensnot erlauben in besonderer Weise zu situieren, warum und wie sich das Fragen nach dem Menschlichsein in Diskursen über Medientechnik immer wieder aktualisiert und dabei zugleich verändert.
2017. Conatus; Lebensnot; Medienanthropologie; Medienwissenschaft; Mensch / Technik; Mensch / Tiere; Spinoza, Benedictus de - Ethik
Re-Book
Re-: An Errant Glossary Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer
What’s in a prefix? How to read a prefix as short as ‘re-’? Does ‘re-’ really signify? Can it point into a specific direction? Can it reverse? Can it become the shibboleth of a ‘postcritical’ reboot? At first glance transparent and directional, ‘re-’ complicates the linear and teleological models commonly accepted as structuring the relations between past, present, and future, opening onto errant temporalities.
2019. cultural inquiry, critical theory, temporality, prefix
PhantasmataBook
Phantasmata: Techniken des Unheimlichen Ed. by Martin Doll, Rupert Gaderer, Fabio Camilletti, and Jan Niklas Howe
Nach mehr als neunzig Jahren spukt das »Unheimliche« noch immer. Quer über verschiedene wissenschaftliche Disziplinen gehört es zu den schillerndsten Termini gegenwärtiger Theoriebildung. Es bezeichnet eine seltsame Nähe zwischen Wissen und Nichtwissen, erscheint als etwas Vertrautes in fremder Gestalt oder als etwas Fremdes mit vertrauten Eigenschaften. »Phantasmata. Techniken des Unheimlichen« setzt bei Sigmund Freuds psychoanalytischem Modell an, verfolgt seine historische Genese und zeichnet seine heterogene Entwicklung nach.Der besondere Fokus liegt auf der Verschränkung des »Unheimlichen« mit »Techniken«: Zum einen werden literarische, mediale und soziale Praktiken der Evokation des Unheimlichen untersucht; zum anderen wird gefragt, inwiefern diese Techniken wiederum als Denkfiguren zum Verständnis epistemologischer, ästhetischer und politisch-sozialer Bedingungen des Unheimlichen beitragen können. Im Zentrum stehen dabei die markierten Spannungen zwischen dem Gewohnten und dem Ungewohnten, Vertrauten und Unvertrauten, Bekannten und Unbekannten.Unter diesen Aspekten versammelt der Band Forschungsbeiträge aus Medien-, Literatur-, Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, Philosophie, Psychoanalyse und Soziologie.
2011. Freud, Sigmund – Das Unheimliche; Psychoanalyse; Phantasmata; Erzähltechnik
Tension/​SpannungBook
Tension/​Spannung Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Tension appears in many contexts and carries diverse meanings. It tends to be viewed as something to be avoided and reduced in politics; to be explained, worked through, and resolved in therapy or science; to be endured and sustained in modern art; or to be sought after and enjoyed in popular culture. This volume brings together contributions from several academic and artistic fields in order to question the self-evidence of the deceptively simple term ‘tension’ and explore the possibility of productive transfers among different forms und understandings of tension. Refusing the temptation of a stabilizing synthesis, it establishes a dense web of approaches, providing a new critical paradigm for further inquiry.
2010. tension; Spannung; tension (aesthetics); tension (politics); tension (physics); interdisciplinarity
The Scandal of Self-ContradictionBook
The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities, Geographies, Traditions Ed. by Luca Di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, and Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was both a writer and filmmaker deeply rooted in European culture, as well as an intellectual who moved between different traditions, identities and positions. Early on he looked to Africa and Asia for possible alternatives to the hegemony of Western Neocapitalism and Consumerism, and in his hands the Greek and Judeo-Christian Classics morphed into unsettling multistable figures constantly shifting between West and East, North and South, the present and the past, rationality and myth, identity and otherness. The contributions in this volume, which belong to different intellectual and disciplinary fields, are bound together by a fascination for Pasolini’s ability to recognize contradictions, to intensify and multiply them, as well as to make them aesthetically and politically productive. What emerges is a ‘euro-eccentric’ and multifaceted Pasolini of great interest for the present.
2012. Pasolini, Pier Paolo; Beyond Europe: Pasolini and the Western Heritage (Conference, German-Italian Centre for European Excellence, 2011); classical antiquity; Greek myths; afterlife (literary); reception; critique of capitalism; Eurocentrism, critique of; Europe, founding myth; contradictory thinking; multistable figures
Metamorphosing DanteBook
Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart
After almost seven centuries, Dante endures and even seems to haunt the present. Metamorphosing Dante explores what so many authors, artists and thinkers from varied backgrounds have found in Dante’s oeuvre, and the ways in which they have engaged with it through rewritings, dialogues, and transpositions. By establishing trans-disciplinary routes, the volume shows that, along with a corpus of multiple linguistic and narrative structures, characters, and stories, Dante has provided a field of tensions in which to mirror and investigate one’s own time. Authors explored include S. Beckett, W. Benjamin, A. Gide, D. Jarman, L. Jones/A. Baraka, J. Joyce, W. Koeppen, J. Lacan, Th. Mann, J. Merrill, E. Montale, P.P. Pasolini, G. Pressburger, R. Rauschenberg, Ch. Wright, V. Woolf.Manuele Gragnolati teaches Dante Studies at the University of Oxford, where he is Fellow of Somerville College. Fabio Camilletti is Assistant Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Warwick. Fabian Lampart is Privatdozent in German Literature at the University of Freiburg.
2011. Alighieri, Dante – Divina Commedia; Alighieri, Dante – Vita nuova; productive reception; influence
Situiertes Wissen und regionale EpistemologieBook
Situiertes Wissen und regionale Epistemologie: Zur Aktualität Georges Canguilhems und Donna J. Haraways Ed. by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Wie wird das Leben zum Objekt des Wissens? Und wie gestaltet sich das Verhältnis von Leben, Wissenschaft und Technik? Donna J. Haraway und Georges Canguilhem verstehen diese Fragen als politische Fragen und Epistemologie als eine politische Praxis. Die besondere Aktualität von Canguilhems Denken leitet sich aus der von ihm gestellten Frage her, wie sich eine Geschichte der Rationalität des Wissens vom Leben schreiben lässt. Niemand hat die politische Intention dieser Frage besser verstanden als Foucault, der in Canguilhems Nachfolge den Menschen als Lebewesen und dessen Geschichte als Teil der Geschichte der Rationalisierung des Lebens problematisierte. Haraway bezieht sich nicht explizit auf Canguilhem, schließt jedoch in ihrer Auseinandersetzung mit der amerikanischen feministischen Wissenschaftskritik, der Actor-Netzwerk-Theorie, der Philosophie des Pragmatismus und Whiteheads relationistischen Philosophie an die von ihm gestellte Frage an. In dem vorliegenden Band diskutieren namhafte PhilosophInnen, EpistemologInnen und MedienwissenschaftlerInnen aus Frankreich, Belgien und Deutschland offenliegende und verborgene Bezüge, Relationen und Differenzen zwischen dem Konzept des „situierten Wissens“ Haraways und der „regionalen Epistemologie“ Canguilhems. Es ist eine Diskussion, die zugleich interdisziplinär und international ist und damit in doppelter Weise versucht, dem Anspruch der Situiertheit und der Regionalität des Wissens gerecht zu werden.
2013. Canguilhem, Georges; Haraway, Donna Jeanne; Foucault, Michel; Biowissenschaften; Epistemologie; Erkenntnistheorie; Feministische Philosophie; Irrtum (Erkenntnistheorie); Politik; Rationalität; Regionalität; Situiertes Wissen
Multistable FiguresBook
Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potential of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Multistable figures offer an intriguing model for arbitrating conflicting positions. Moving back and forth between the different aspects under which something can be seen, one recognizes that mutually contradictory descriptions can be equally valid and that disputes over the correct account can be resolved without dissolving differences or establishing a higher synthesis. Yet, the experience of a gestalt switch also offers a model for radical conversions and revolutions – that is, for irreversible leaps to incommensurable alternatives foiling ideals of rational choice while providing the possibility and necessity of decision. Accentuating the temporal dimensions of multistable figures, this multidisciplinary volume illuminates the critical potentials and limits of multistability as a complex figure of thought.
2014. Aesthetics; aspect seeing; critical thinking; figure of thought; heuristic; knowledge, theory of: multistable figures; multistability; science
Denkweisen des SpielsBook
Denkweisen des Spiels: Medienphilosophische Annäherungen Ed. by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Reinhold Görling
Gibt es eine spezifische Medialität des Spiels, die es sinnvoll macht, das Verhältnis jeden Ereignisses zu seiner Umgebung als Spiel zu beschreiben? In welcher Weise können Technik, Spiel und Ästhetik neu gedacht werden? Immer dann, wenn Technik mit mechanischen Bewegungen verbunden wird, sehen wir sie im Gegensatz zum Spiel. Wenn Technik jedoch mit Ästhetik assoziiert wird, taucht das Spiel als Teil der Technik auf. Spiel bringt Dinge in Relation und verändert sie dadurch. Wenn Materie als rhythmische Bewegung gedacht wird und Spiel auf Wiederholung basiert, rückt der Spielbegriff ins Zentrum einer medienwissenschaftlichen Auslegung der relationalen Beschaffenheit von Zeit und Raum. Vor dem Hintergrund der Aktualität, welche die Spieletheorien von Huizinga und Caillois in den Game Studies erlangten, unternimmt der vorliegende Band eine medienphilosophische Befragung des Spielbegriffs. Er behandelt dabei das Spiel unter Bezugnahme auf Fragen der Neuen Materialismen und wirft zugleich einen neuen Blick auf das Spiel in der Psychoanalyse.
2017. Ästhetik; Mechanik; Medialität; Medienphilosophie; Medienwissenschaft; Spiel ; Spieltheorie
De/Constituting WholesBook
De/Constituting Wholes: Towards Partiality Without Parts Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Manuele Gragnolati
How can the power of wholes be resisted without essentializing their parts? Drawing on different archives and methodologies, including aesthetics, history, biology, affect, race, and queer, the interventions in this volume explore different ways of troubling the consistency and stability of wholes, breaking up their closure and making them more dynamic. Doing so without necessarily presupposing or producing parts, an outside, or a teleological development, they indicate the critical potential of partiality without parts.
2017. Wholeness; Partiality; Haunting; Plasticity; Totality (Philosophy); Malabou, Catherine
Possibilities of LyricBook
Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue
Opening to passion as an unsettling, transformative force; extending desire to the text, expanding the self, and dissolving its boundaries; imagining pleasures outside the norm and intensifying them; overcoming loss and reaching beyond death; being loyal to oneself and defying productivity, resolution, and cohesion while embracing paradox, non-linearity, incompletion. These are some of the possibilities of lyric that this book explores by reading Petrarch’s vernacular poetry in dialogue with that of other poets, including Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Shakespeare. In the Epilogue, the poet Antonella Anedda Angioy engages with Ossip Mandel’štam and Paul Celan’s dialogue with Petrarch and extends it into the present.
2020. lyric poetry; desire; pleasure; affect; Petrarch, Francesco; Dante Alighieri; Shakespeare, William; Mandelstam, Osip
WeatheringBook
Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer
Weathering is atmospheric, geological, temporal, transformative. It implies exposure to the elements and processes of wearing down, disintegration, or accrued patina. Weathering can also denote the ways in which subjects and objects resist and pass through storms and adversity. This volume contemplates weathering across many fields and disciplines; its contributions examine various surfaces, environments, scales, temporalities, and vulnerabilities. What does it mean to weather or withstand? Who or what is able to pass through safely? What is lost or gained in the process?
2020. cultural inquiry; critical theory; weathering; ecology; exposure
Dante’s ModernityBook
Claude Lefort Dante’s Modernity: An Introduction to the Monarchia Ed. by Christiane Frey, Manuele Gragnolati, Christoph F. E. Holzhey, and Arnd Wedemeyer
One of the most prominent political philosophers of the twentieth century reads Dante’s Monarchia, showing the surprising relevance of this radical fourteenth-century treatise that defends the necessity of universal monarchy and its independence from the Church for modern political theory. Judith Revel’s accompanying essay submits Lefort’s encounter with Dante to a transformative mis/reading and ties it to current debates on the question of the common.
2020. Alighieri, Dante – Monarchia; Lefort, Claude; political theory; modernity
Book Series Cultural InquiryBook
Book Series Cultural Inquiry: Further Open Access Volumes
Some of the volumes in the series Cultural Inquiry that were published with Turia + Kant from 2010–18 are available as open access in the ICI Berlin Repository. See the relation tabs for the links.
2010
Cultural InquirySeries
Cultural Inquiry Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Manuele Gragnolati
The series ‘Cultural Inquiry’ is dedicated to exploring how diverse cultures can be brought into fruitful rather than pernicious confrontation. Taking culture in a deliberately broad sense that also includes different discourses and disciplines, it aims to open up spaces of inquiry, experimentation, and intervention. Its emphasis lies in critical reflection and in identifying and highlighting contemporary issues and concerns, even in publications with a historical orientation. Following a decidedly cross-disciplinary approach, it seeks to enact and provoke transfers among the humanities, the natural and social sciences, and the arts. The series includes a plurality of methodologies and approaches, binding them through the tension of mutual confrontation and negotiation rather than through homogenization or exclusion. Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the Founding Director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Manuele Gragnolati is Professor of Italian Literature at the Sorbonne Université in Paris and Associate Director of the ICI Berlin.
2010