Essay

The rehabilitation of the idea of the “far.”

Protestation devant les libertaires du présent et du futur sur les capitulations de 1980 ("A protest aimed at the libertarians of the present and the future, about the surrenders of 1980") was published in 1981. It was only signed with the word Incontrôlé ("Uncontrolled"), didn't bear the name of any publisher, and was printed on stolen paper.

The Nightmare of Participation calls for a format of conflictual participation—no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking.

A collection of influential essays by Boris Groys.

The societal efficacy of art.

Criminal news item as current version of the ready-made: relations between the history of avant-gardes and the aesthetics of murder.

Towards the art world's inner contradictions between symbolic meaning and monetary value.

An analysis of some major contemporary works that challenge the traditional values of art.

An essay on the concept of utopia today, more relevant than ever at the time of the economic, social, ecological and intellectual crisis.

A history of television that's both technical and sensitive: between personal memories and a chronology of advances and innovations, Alain Bourges plunges us into the world of television in his own way.

As a Weasel Sucks Eggs examines the enigmatic relation of melancholia to an early kind of cannibalism, which psychoanalysis, in particular, stressed. It contains readings of, amongst others, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Sigmund Freud, G. W. F. Hegel, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf.

A study of the concept of otherness in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology (with a special project by Olafur Eliasson).

Drawing on fresh readings of Marxist and post-modern thought, renowned German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen compares the abstract and climbing values of artworks with the plunging value of music—a traditionally immaterial art—in order to formulate a broad reflection on the current “crisis of value in the arts.”

An extensive essay, Varieties of Audio Mimesis is many things: an investigation of the metaphoric relationship between music and landscape, a study of the poetics of onomatopoeia, and a theory of sound in the arts.

Essays and interviews on 20th century avant-gardes in France (from Dada to sound poetry, avant-garde reviews, happenings and events, Fluxus, Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé, Gil J. Wolman, Camille Bryen...).

Essays and interviews by the American curator and critic: a portrait of the American art scene over the last few decades.

Written texts and films, interviews, symposia, and essays by a central figure in the history of the New York avant-garde.

A film-maker and curator's reflection on moving image and its viewer.

A compendium of texts containing famous exhibition case studies, involving some of the more thought-provoking artists, architects, and scientists of our time. A must-have for anyone interested in the unusual strategies of a curator-at-large.

A collection of conferences for an exibition.

Art as a set of practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context: the manifesto that has renewed the approach of contemporary art since the 1990s.

From “polemical” texts to extensive theoretical essays, passing through Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman or John Baldessari, these writings have proved to be among the most challenging ones.

A study on Richter's work with illustrations.

Limited edition signed by Birgit Pelzer and Gerhard Richter.

A study of German Renaissance painters and the social movements of the time.

Anselm Kiefer's universe revisited by the philosopher Jean-Noël Vuarnet.

A critical text on Niele Toroni's work, with exhibitions views and documents.

Over a decade’s worth of essays: movies of America in parallax view.

The Photograph Looked Back at Me is a series of prose miniatures, each born from an image the author cannot turn away from: a ghostly plant printed in a book about Chernobyl; a miner's face obscured by smoke, hanging in a Kyiv gallery; a picture of Katja Petrowskaja's parents, from an old family album.

A pioneering study of the relation between the fine arts and philosophy in France, from the aftermath of the 1789 revolution to the end of the nineteenth century, when a philosophy of being called "monism"—the concept of a unity of matter and spirit—emerged and became increasingly popular among intellectuals, artists and scientists.

A detailed overview and history of "ero-guro-nansense", an editorial, artistic and literary movement of iconoclastic and subversive magazines in Japan in the 1925-1930s, ancestor and precursor of the post-war Japanese underground.

The first major study of the Japanese avant-garde collective emblematic of the post-war artistic revival, bringing together composers, visual artists, musicians, poets, critics and technicians who in the 1950s explored various forms of interdisciplinary collaboration, questioning the classical frameworks of artistic presentation, the relationships between sound and image, time and space.

The history of NHK electronic music studio and the making of an international "center" for contemporary music: a wide-ranging, totally unprecedented study of the role and position of a Japanese avant-garde music institution founded in 1955 within international production until the late 1960s, based on first-hand documentation.

An aesthetic and political reflection on contemporary monumental and commemorative art, at a time of critical revision of history.

Eyal and Ines Weizman explore the history of the before-and-after image, from its origins in 19th-century Paris to today's satellite surveillance.

In this essay, Thierry de Duve leaves the aesthetics and history of the art to approach, under the religious prism, two anthropological questions that the mutation of the symbolic order in progress makes pressing: the difference of the sexes and the future of the politics of emancipation.

The Heideggerien deconstruction of metaphysics by Reiner Schürmann.

A collection of essays about the end of the world and its representation in XXI-century culture / a manifesto for the imagination of another relationship with the end.

A reflection on our present, through a series of portraits of contemporary artists.

A counter-history of contemporary art, where experience becomes form, and aesthetics is redefined as a radical relationship with the living.

Drawing on a material, cultural and social history of art, Hugo Daniel proposes to understand the recognition and redefinition of drawing by the avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960s, between the questioning of artists, the evolution of critics and the projects of gallery owners and curators, to show how drawing is understood as a complex reality, in act.

The choreographic in cinema.