Essay

Writing as a shifting space in which to embody the singular relationship that artists—and art critics—can have with words, texts and language.

Refusing the digital world of late capitalism.

Starting with a bold re-reading of Jacques Rancière, this essay unfolds a philosophy of experimentation, at the crossroads of life, politics and aesthetics, in search of new ways to explore, arrange and map the possible.

Michel Guet's intellectual diary, from his commitment to "Banalytique" (an experimental movement that emerged from French post-situationnism in the early 1980s in response to the triumph of the "colonization of reality by market value" and the injunctions to make work totally profitable) to the social critique of art and the vertigo of a planet on fire.

An essay that intellectually deepens the historically traced furrows of colonial aberrations, crossing political science, philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis.

At the crossroads of design, art, architecture and popular culture, Alexandra Midal investigates the techniques developed by artists, designers and revolutionaries to conceal information and messages, through the lens of the coded language of flowers.

Translated into French for the first time, Vivian Sobchack's Le corps du film – Une phénoménologie de l'expérience filmique offers a new perspective to the phenomenological tradition through an interrogation of our cinematographic experience and, more generally, of our relationship to screens.

A series of propositions and encounters in service to an aesthetic, critical, and poetic experience of living life led by death.

On the advanced knowledge economy, which perpetuates patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and the threat of climate change devastation for both human and nonhuman entities.

A critical exploration of the values and qualities inherent in independent educational organizations and the hurdles in the way of remaining "alternative" with the passing of time.

Two lectures from art historian and curator Griselda Pollock address feminist questions and art education in the 1980s and today.

Without ever giving a lesson in painting, Alain Gunst lists 32 reasons for painting that, “bad” or “not so bad”, take malicious pleasure in mocking an art world.

An education turned around by art: famous English anthropologist Tim Ingold invites us to consider the arts as the very basis of an education in the 21st-century, an education that might begin to address the profound social and ecological crises we face.

Three perspectives (philosophical, sociological and artist's word) on the meaning of the avant-garde, and its relationship to the counter-culture.

A specialist in French philosophy and literature, and a key intermediary in Japan for the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Artaud, Beckett and Genet, Uno Kuniichi publishes in French his fundamental text on Antonin Artaud, a revised, recomposed and expanded version of his thesis, written under the direction of Gilles Deleuze in 1980.

The role of jazz as a catalyst in rock, pop, funk, new wave, hip-hop, and techno.

A Hypothesis of Resistance contains five essays on Asynchronicity, Rehearsal, Undetectability, The Present Tense, and Duration.

An experience of introspection, an epistemological reflection and an act of resistance in the face of depersonalization, around the question of the name.

An essay by Yoann Sarrat on two works by Jean-François Bory and Kathy Acker.

The increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, and the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere: an essay on poetical therapy.

The Place of the Symbolic brings together Reiner Schürmann's essays on the nexus between art and politics.

Sonia Boyce engages with the artist and sound theorist Brandon LaBelle, who guides us through the artist's poetics, considering sound as a form of radical inclusion, a medium capable of generating interaction, narratives and new understanding.

An essay on historical thinking through an examination of the unstudied minor genre of the newspaper weather map.

In this prophetic 1978 essay, legendary science fiction author Philip K. Dick explores the nature of reality, the power of media, and the authenticity of human experience, offering startling insights that resonate eerily with our modern world.

A very personal essay that provides a clear introduction to Gilles Deleuze's thinking through his relationship with cinema, seen as a field of experimentation (existential, conceptual and aesthetic) to resist death, disaster and the stupefaction produced by the “modern fact”.

A philosopher's journey into the heart of New York artistic life.

A new collection of writings by the composer and mathematician Spencer Gerhardt, considering among other topics the rich points of contact between minimalist musical aesthetics and intuitionistic mathematics.

This history of art collecting traces a multiplicity of aesthetic attitudes through the prism of certain key figures in the history of taste. Over the course of the chapters, we discover how art collecting reflects—or responds to—an individual's character.

A wide-ranging study of the visual and theoretical practice of Anni Albers, a pivotal figure between two continents and two modernities, as part of a general history of art, design and textile production in the European and American women's avant-gardes.

A philosophical reflection on the place of sound, from musical aesthetics to sound habitat, at the crossroads of sound, music and technology studies, and phenomenology.

If discourse is the foundation of democracy, how can the design of our cities empower and enable discourse? In 1981, Richard Sennett delivered six lectures about this relationship, and issued a call to action that remains relevant today.

An essay-length book arguing for the autonomy of art in the present.

A theory of passive vitalism.

Jean-Christophe Thomas analyzes François Bayle's complete work in 52 recurring features (book augmented with 151 sound examples to download).

This book brings together Bernhard Rüdiger's theoretical texts on the questions of language and form in contemporary art, seen from the perspective of the possibility of thinking them within the paradigm of shock or awe.

A history of stupidity (deliberate and sometimes even claimed), regression and superficiality in the arts.

The notion of primitivism rethought to highlight the role of the African referent in the development of the artistic and literary avant-garde in Europe.

Parker and Pollock's seminal volume of feminist art history.

The first attempt to map that ensemble of subcultures, popular narratives, and visual and auditory languages we now recognize as "internet aesthetics".

A stunning look at Stravinski's The Rite of Spring, recreated by choreographer Dominique Brun with thirty dancers in 2013.

Art, empathy and political solidarity.

The Significance and Relevance of Early Modern Indian Painters to the Contemporary Indian Art, written in 1971, reevaluates the legacies of painting inherited by the artist Nilima Sheikh.

Indian artist Kiran Subbaiah reevaluates the history of Modernism, through its ideals of growth and progress, as one steeped in contradictions around industrialisation and its effects on society.