Center for Discursive Inquiry

Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy

Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy

Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy, ed., Arne De Boever, Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. (Special issue of boundary 2

This issue brings together three lectures on aesthetics delivered by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler in Los Angeles in 2011 with articles by scholars of Stiegler’s work. Aesthetics, understood as the theoretical investigation of sensibility, has been central to Stiegler’s work since the mid-1990s. The lectures featured here explicitly link Stiegler’s interest in sensibility to aesthetic theory proper as well as to art history. In “The Proletarianization of Sensibility,” “Kant, Art, and Time,” and “The Quarrel of the Amateurs,” Stiegler expounds his philosophy of technics and its effects on human sensibility, centering on how the figure of the amateur—who loves what he or she does—must be recovered from beneath the ruins of technical history. The other contributors engage the topics covered in the lectures, including the figure of the amateur, cinema, the digital, and extinction.

Contributors: Stephen Barker, Ed Cohen, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Arne De Boever, Benoît Dillet, Alexander R. Galloway, Mark B. N. Hansen, Jason R. LaRivière, Gerald Moore, Daniel Ross, Bernard Stiegler.

The publication arose from a series of lectures and responses organized by Arne De Boever.

Cold War/Cold World: Knowledge, Representation and the Outside in the Cold War and Contemporary Art

Cold War/Cold World: Knowledge, Representation and the Outside in the Cold War and Contemporary Art
Cold War/Cold World: Knowledge, Representation and the Outside in the Cold War and Contemporary Art, eds., Amanda Beech, Robin Mackay, James Wiltgen, London: Urbanomic Press, 2017.
 
If the term 'Cold World' describes a world of infinite complexity, algorithmic capital, and the technological sublime, in many ways the dread experienced during the Cold War, when clear oppositions were laid out between nation states, is echoed in the hall of mirrors that is contemporary globalization. In this Cold World, whose repercussions in many ways amplify, relay and replay those of the Cold War, our collective consciousness is being overtaken by a flood of difference, uncertainty, and the dread of the incompatibility of an alien yet constructed world. Technological subjectivation, political malaise, cultural dysphoria, and ecological crisis abound against an experiential and experimental horizon that prompts many to pose, and to stage, in myriad forms, a fundamental question: 'What will we make of ourselves?'
  

Contributors: Éric Alliez, Maurizio Lazzarato, Amanda Beech, Robin Mackay, Christine Wertheim, Brian Evenson, Reza Negarestani, Joshua Johnson, Patricia Reed.

Publication arises from: the work of the Cold World/Cold War Research Group.

Contrapuntal Media (CPM) vol. 2

Contrapuntal Media (CPM) vol. 2

Contrapuntal Media (CPM) is a pamphlet series published through the MA Aesthetics and Politics program housed in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. CPM seeks to be an aesthetic medium for provocative, polemical points that incite counterpoints. CPM features research-in-progress that is presented publicly with minimal editorial intervention or attention to the formalities of scholarly publishing.

Contrapuntal Media, Vol. 2
Contrapuntal Futures, Spring 2019
Edited by Arne de Boever

Contrapuntal Media, Vol. 1

Contrapuntal Media, Vol. 1

Contrapuntal Media (CPM) is a pamphlet series published through the MA Aesthetics and Politics program housed in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. CPM seeks to be an aesthetic medium for provocative, polemical points that incite counterpoints. CPM features research-in-progress that is presented publicly with minimal editorial intervention or attention to the formalities of scholarly publishing.

Contrapuntal Media, Vol. 1
Art and Reason, Spring 2018
Edited by Arne de Boever

Feminaissance

Feminaissance

Feminaissance, ed., Christine Wertheim, Les Figues Press, 2010

Identity is dead. The 21st-century subject is an unstable fiction with no identifiable features or group affiliations. He’s a man without inherent qualities, a post-human ideal. But those who have long been hailed as Other exist in a different relation to this ideal. Unlike those traditionally self-possessed |s, these Others may find themselves split between a yearning to be contemporary and unqualified, and a longing for a continued allegiance to their qualitative, albeit constructed, group identity. With an awareness of this more ambiguous and refined notion of selfFeminaissance approaches questions of femininity and its relation to writing. Topics include: collectivity; feminine écriture; the politics of writing; text and voice; the body as a site of contestation, insurgence and pleasure; race and writing; gender as performance; writing about other women writers; economic inequities; monstrosity; madness; and aesthetics.

ContributorsDodie BellamyCaroline BergvallMeiling ChengWanda ColemanBhanu KapilChris KrausSusan McCabeTracie MorrisEileen MylesMaggie NelsonVanessa PlaceJuliana SpahrChristine WertheimStephanie YoungLidia Yuknavitch.

The publication was generated by a conference of the same name organized by Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim held at MOCA in 2008.  

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