Publications

Radical Desires

Hauke Branding, Julian Volz

Publisher: Diaphanes

Despite a historically rich tradition of thinking about the relation between sexuality, desire and revolution, there is little engagement with desire’s radicality today. This volume attends to the radicality of desire as a starting point for overcoming heteropatriarchal capitalism by turning to the specific radical homosexual critique as it was first formulated in France in the 1970s in the writings of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes and the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire, as well as in the conceptions of their most important protagonists, Monique Wittig and Guy Hocquenghem. Radical Desires seeks to emphasize the anti-identitarian character of the French gay liberation movement, as well as its implicit and explicit critique of gender and sexual binaries.

At the same time, the volume is also interested in intersectionally expanding this critique by confronting it with anticolonial and queer of color perspectives. As French gay liberation activists’ relations to North African men were often problematic, several contributions engage with the latent orientalist and racist tropes that appear in the movement’s writings. By aiming to go beyond a mere historicization of these ambivalences and exploring which contemporary problems appear in a different light as a result, Radical Desires highlights the (dis-)continuous relationship between current debates and those in 1970s France.

To explore the multiplicity of forms with or in which these critiques were expressed, the volume places theoretical perspectives in conversation with artistic perspectives on Queer liberation in a transnational context.

With contributions by Friederike Beier, Antoine Idier, Émilie Notéris, Lukas Betzler, Mohammad Shawky Hassan, Sido Lansari, Todd Shepard and Julian Volz.

On Withdrawal

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila, Rebecca Hanna John, Ulrike Jordan, Thorsten Schneider, Judith Sieber, Nele Wulff

Publisher: Diaphanes

What forms does withdrawal—meaning either that which withdraws itself or which is being withdrawn—take in artistic and cultural practices? What movement(s) does it create or follow in specific contexts, and with what theoretical, material, and political consequences? The contributors of this book address these questions in a variety of writing practices, each focusing on specific scenes. These scenes are organized under three parts that structure the chapters: Passivity, Failure, and Refusal; Disappearance and Remembrance; Resilience and Resistance. Through interviews, artistic and literary texts, visual contributions, and academic texts, the authors explore various modalities of withdrawal ranging from a silencing of critical voices to a political and aesthetic strategy of refusal. The enforced disappearance of government opponents, for instance, may be implemented as a means of state violence, but withdrawing may also mean the decision not to participate in such violence, either through forms of passivity or refusal. Moreover, in the neoliberal logic of resilience, the relationship between subjective agency and imposition from the outside remains tense. The aim of this book is to tackle these tensions, as well as the ambiguities and complexities of withdrawal.

Judgement Practices in the Artistic Field

Elisabeth Heymer, Hubert Locher, Stephanie Marchal, Melanie Sachs-Resch, Beate Söntgen

Publisher: Edition Metzel

Judging is a practice that has come under suspicion. Who authorises and entitles whom to judge, and under what conditions does this happen? What are the premises and criteria of judgment, and in how far are they generalizable? Despite these important questions the artistic field is still dominated by judgments today. The volume examines the diverse sites and shapes of these judgments. There are manifold practices of selection and evaluation in play in the different stages of the process of judgment, as well as in the art world’s day-to-day operations of exhibiting, collecting or reviewing. Which patterns of reasoning and justification, and which styles and genres are being used in art-critical judgement? And in how far are judgment practices effective agents of cultural education, as in the formation of taste? Through a study of exemplary cases, the present volume undertakes a survey of the practices of judgment that determine the field of art, with respect to their genesis, their forms and their effects.

Im Zeichen des Zweifel(n)s. Madame Realism oder: Die Funktion der Fiktion in der Kunstkritik

Isabel Mehl

Publisher: Edition Metzel

Emanzipation und Gewalt. Feministische Rechtskritik mit Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida und Gilles Deleuze

Liza Mattutat

Publisher: J.B. Metzler

The Post-Socialist Internet How Labor, Geopolitics and Critique Produce the Internet in Lithuania

Migle Bareikyte

Publisher: transcript

How is the Internet produced as an infrastructure in post-socialist Lithuania? Migle Bareikyte contributes to the growing field of STS and media studies with a distinct focus on Eastern Europe. She situates the Internet development in Lithuania's telecom industry with the exploration of its labor practices, geopolitical imaginaries, and critical negotiations from a bottom-up perspective. Bareikyte further explores how fieldwork-based research can foster new theorizations of media infrastructures. Finally, she argues for a situated investigation of new places and actors beyond the United States and Western Europe–such as post-socialist regions–in order to explore the diversity of media infrastructures.

Why Art Criticism? A Reader

Beate Söntgen Julia Voss

Publisher: Hatje Cantz

How is art criticism to be understood within an expanding artistic field? A look at its history and its manifestations within globalized conditions shows the variety of the genre, of the criteria and of the styles of writing. This reader is an attempt to bring a diverse range of art-critical voices and perspectives into conversation with each other, with texts from the 18th century to the present. The editors Beate Söntgen and Julia Voss have invited colleagues from various geographical and intellectual backgrounds to present and discuss the art critics of their choice, choosing one example from their respective bodies of work to comment upon. How have these writers approached art criticism? Which styles do they employ? What makes them extraordinary? What can we learn from their writings today, and why is it important in its contemporary context?