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What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a 'pirate' library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects-drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital-that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a 'double character.' They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are 'operational' in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the 'commons.' In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a 'thinking tool'-in other words, the book's interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.

Une clinique psychiatrique perchée en haut d'une montagne. Ce lieu futuriste tout en transparence dispose d'une entrée, mais il est impossible d'en sortir. Interdiction de surcroît de regarder à travers les parois de verre : les patients comme le personnel soignant y doivent se confronter à leur propre solitude. Ainsi, le docteur Franz von Stern, s'efforce tant bien que mal de rédiger le rapport sur sa propre personne exigé par la direction. Mais la conviction de cet homme, à la fois schizophrène et bionique - puisque affublé d'un deuxième cortex et d'un médiator greffé - que remuer son passé constitue la première des pathologies psychiques, sera bouleversée par l'arrivée d'une patiente étrangère à ce microcosme aux usages bien rodés…Entre Orwell et Foucault, l'auteure dépeint une vision aussi jouissive que féroce d'un monde « new-age » fasciné par la technologie, où le culte du « bien-être » devient l'une des formes les plus raffinées et redoutables de contrôle social.Ce second roman d'Angelika Meier, jubilatoire et inventif, évite l'écueil du « roman à thèse » ainsi que tout académisme. La même année, encensé par la critique, ce « roman anti-psychiatrique par excellence » a été sélectionné pour le prestigieux Prix du livre allemand.

How did the will come to dominate the self-understanding of the modern subject? What lies at the root of the megalomania of desire that defines human experience in the age of global technology? In Modern Philosophies of the Will, Reiner Schürmann traces a philosophical archeology of the willing subject from Ancient Greece into the 20th century. Through a series of original readings of Kant, Schelling, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Schürmann uncovers the strategic interplay of submission and command that sets the stage for the will's epochal "triumph," while hinting at possibilities of subverting its mastery over both the self and the world. With an appendix offering a polemical critique of Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind, as well as an editorial afterword contextualizing these lectures in Schürmann's broader work, this volume will be of value to specialist and student alike.

In this lecture course, Reiner Schürmann reads Marx's work as a transcendental materialism. Arguing that what is most original in Marx is neither his political or sociological nor his economic thinking, but his philosophical axis, Schürmann shows that Marx conceives being as polyvalent praxis. With patient rigor, Schürmann delineates this notion of praxis from the interpretations proposed by Louis Althusser and the Frankfurt School, as he traces Marx's move beyond the dualism that has governed ontology since Descartes. Stepping out of this dualism, however, Marx does not espouse a monism either-be it an immobile one as Parmenides', or a dynamic one as Hegel's. On the problem of universals, Marx's transcendental materialism is nominalistic: being as action is irreducibly manifold. Extending his highly original engagement with the history of philosophy, Schürmann in the course of these lectures draws out the philosophical axis in Marx's work, which determines and localizes his theories of history, of social relations and of economy. On this view, Marx's unique place in philosophy stems from the fact that the grounding of phenomena is seen by him not as a relation that produces cognition, as in Kant; nor as a relation of material sensitivity, as in Feuerbach; but the grounding occurs in labor, in praxis, in the satisfaction of needs. Whereas the Marxist readings of Marx conceive history, classes and social relations as primary realities, Schürmann brings out a radically immanent understanding of praxis in Marx that introduces multiplicity into being. Following Schürmann's own suggestion, this edition is complemented by a reprinting of his Anti-Humanism essay, in which he reads Marx alongside Nietzsche and Heidegger as spelling out the dissociation of being and action. This rupture puts an end to the epochal economy of presence and returns principles to their own precariousness. As a whole, this volume brings out one of the less appreciated facets of Schürmann's work and offers an interpretation of Marx that resonates with the readings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, Antonio Negri and François Laruelle.

In the last two years of his life, following his release from the Rodez asylum, Antonin Artaud decided he wanted his new work to connect with a vast public audience, and chose to record radio broadcasts in order to carry through that aim. That determination led him to his most experimental and incendiary project, To have done with the judgement of god, 1947-48, in which he attempted to create a new language of texts, screams, and cacophonies: a language designed to be heard by millions, aimed, as Artaud said, for 'road-menders'. In the broadcast, he interrogated corporeality and introduced the idea of the 'body without organs', crucial to the later work of Deleuze and Guattari. The broadcast, commissioned by the French national radio station, was banned shortly before its planned transmission, to Artaud's fury. This volume collects all of the texts for To have done with the judgement of god, together with several of the letters Artaud wrote to friends and enemies in the short period between his work's censorship and his death. Also included is the text of an earlier broadcast from 1946, Madness and Black Magic, written as a manifesto prefiguring his subsequent broadcast. Clayton Eshleman's extraordinary translations of the broadcasts activate these works in their extreme provocation.

Eadweard Muybridge is among the seminal originators of the contemporary world's visual form, with its concentrated image-sequences of bodies in movement and its ocular obsessions. This book examines an almost unknown dimension of Muybridge's work, as a moving-image projectionist, who toured Europe's cities to enthral beyond-capacity audiences with unprecedented projections and who built a moving-image auditorium - long before cinemas were created - in which to project his work at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. That final invention of Muybridge's was both an all-engulfing catastrophe and the vital precursor for the following century's worldwide manias for projection. Based on entirely new research into Muybridge's travels, audiences, auditoria and projectors, this book explores his initiating role in moving-image projection and also maps Muybridge's driving inspiration for subsequent artists and filmmakers preoccupied with the volatile entity of projection, from 1890s Berlin to contemporary Japan, via further spectacular World's Exposition events and cinemas' overheated projection-boxes.The book looks closely at the enigmatic figure of the moving-image projectionist, from its origins in Muybridge's experiments, across glass, celluloid and digital projections, to the contemporary moment. Moving-image projection formed a crucial determinant in the imagining of new corporealities and new urban spaces, through its irrepressible capacity to envision future bodies and cities. The cinema projectionist - a solitary figure of compulsion and restlessness, inhabiting a profession touched with the multiple addictions and deaths of the moving image - was once a pivotal presence for global cinema audiences but is now consigned to near-obsolescence.The book investigates contemporary urban projections as aberrant manifestations derived from Muybridge's first conjurations of projection's power for its spectators. Throughout, the book interrogates the strange figure of the projectionist, embodied first of all by Muybridge himself. The Projectionists will attract and fascinate all lovers of cinemas, photography and moving-image cultures.

This volume of Reiner Schurmann's lectures unpacks Nietzsche's ambivalence towards Kant, in particular positioning Nietzsche's claim to have brought an end to German idealism against the backdrop of the Kantian transcendental-critical tradition.

This new anthology takes stock of our empirical and historical understanding of the two-sided nature of media and tracks the recent turn in media studies to examining practice itself.