Philosophy

A compelling read on the status of the object in contemporary art and design.

71 contributions from 74 authors, artists, architects, and educators published by e-flux between February–March 2024: Charles Tonderai Mudede, Anna Kornbluh, Adeline Chia, Juan José Santos, Xin Wang, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, Salmaan Craig, Maddie Hampton, Jamila Squire, Seth Wheeler, Evan Calder Williams, Anya Sirota, Claudio Medeiros, Victor Galdino, Jason Read, Luis Camnitzer, Ecosistema Urbano, Noah Simblist, Hide and Seek Audiovisual Art, Denny Mwaura, Oriab Toukan, Antonia Majaca, Sylvie Fortin, Hallie Ayres...

This first issue of e-flux 's bimonthly publishing project presents the pieces published by e-flux in December 2023 and January 2024. The metadata gives some indication of its breadth, spanning 48 pieces, 52 authors, and over 150,000 words. Following its wider editorial ambitions to co-articulate multiple discourses, the Index removes the identity cards anchoring these pieces to their original provenance, and instead "meta-edits" them into nine emergent thematic strands.

A manifesto for an activist neuroaesthetics, to make the processes of digital dominion and governmentalization—which are becoming more and more prominent in late-stage cognitive capitalism (or neural capitalism)—opaque, visible, and known (contributions by Franco Bifo Berardi, Yann Moulier Boutang, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Warren Neidich, Slavoj Žižek...).

Thinking design with philosophy (a teaching manual).

This publication extends an exhibition program that examines the environmental challenges facing the art world and its institutions, drawing on the concept of “destructive plasticity” theorized by philosopher Catherine Malabou.

The ultra-blackness manifesto: a Deleuzian reading of the philosophical and socio-political stakes of the current electronic music scene (publication marking the reactivation of the influential label Mille Plateaux, with texts by an ensemble of international musicians, artists and theorists: Frédéric Neyrat, Achim Szepanski, Holger Schulze, Gerriet K. Sharma, Bernd Herzogenrath, Corry Shores, Marcus Schmickler, Thomas Brinkmann, Thomas Köner...).

A science of sensitive experience prolonged by a theory of atmospheres, at the origins of philosophical aesthetics.

Oliver Marchart traces trajectories of artistic activism in theater, dance, performance, and public art, and investigates the political potential of urbanism, curating, and “biennials of resistance.”

The contemporary return to universal claims and concepts in the fields of art, architecture, and urbanism.

The first English translation of Jacques Rancière's early philosophical text "The Dialectic of Reason and Private Interest", originally published in 1963. Written under the influence of Louis Althusser, the text is discussing the forms of law in Karl Marx's writings on the "debates on the law on thefts of wood".

Second volume of a special issue devoted to the rediscovery of Charles Fourier's oeuvre by the Surrealists. This volume focuses on André Breton's passionate interest in Fourier, through correspondence (Pierre Naville, Georges Sirot, Jean Gaulmier, Émile Lehouck) and texts by Georges Bataille and Raoul Vaneigem.

A three-year survey with patients, families, caregivers and associations who fight off the Huntington's disease using the tools and lessons stemming from the arts and humanities.

This collection of more than thirty texts, which were originally published between 1790 and the present day, explores man's rich relationship with material things. Devised largely in response to the gradual breakdown of the divide between art and design that began over a century ago, this book sheds light on the ways that the concept of the thing as idea has been considered over time.

Exploring the relationship between the Situationist International and the museum.

First volume of a special issue devoted to the rediscovery of Charles Fourier's oeuvre by the Surrealists. This volume focuses on the pioneer works of philosopher Simone Debout, including early and recent works, and an unpublished correspondence with André Breton. The issue also features an introduction by Florent Perrier & Gérard Roche, and texts and essays by Charles Fourier, Philippe Audoin, André Breton, Michel Butor, Roger Garaudy, Annie Le Brun, Robert Pagès, Octavio Paz, Raymond Queneau and Alejandra Riera.

An original reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini's work and “impulses”, between aesthetic and psychoanalytic reflection.

Cutting across diverse thematic interests and modes of investigation, the thirty-five essays in Realism Materialism Art (RMA) offer a snapshot of the emerging and rapidly changing set of ideas and practices proposed by contemporary realisms and materialisms, and examine their ramifications on the arts.

A pioneering study in which professor of media theory Dieter Mersch paves the way for a methodology of aesthetics that would move beyond the “linguistic turn” to create a new scientific discourse that would create a better conceptual understanding of art-based research.

Performing the Sentence brings into dialogue the ways that “performative thinking” has developed in different national and institutional contexts, within different disciplines in the arts, and the conditions under which it has developed in experimental art schools.

Speculative Drawing presents fifteen books—from monographs and translations to collections of essays—that emerged from the research platform Speculative Poetics, conceived by Armen Avanessian in 2011.

A series of 365 cartoon drawings, made daily in 2012, exploring philosophical thoughts concerning art, being, knowledge, logic and skateboarding.

Issue devoted to the phalanstery and its (few) representations: a rigorous as well as singular contribution on the traditional ambiguities passing through the relationship between utopia and its image.

Theory, Spectacle and Film in the thought of Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem.

A selection of conversations between Markus Miessen and political philosopher Chantal Mouffe.

A previously unpublished text by Gilles Deleuze on Francis Bacon, with a set of contemporary readings of his Deleuze's writings on art, by philosophers and theoreticians of the various disciplines addressed (literature, cinema, music, art history...).

The previously unpublished transcript of a lecture by Jacques Derrida around the figure of the blind and blindness in art.

A study of the philosophical, ethical and political underpinnings of installation art.

The story of objectivity, by two of the greatest historians of science today.

A collection of influential essays by Boris Groys.

Walter Benjamin reader of Charles Fourier.

The artist book by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber is based on an unpublished text by French philosopher and urbanist Henri Lefebvre which is printed as a facsimile and accompanied by essays from Ljiljana Blagojevic, Zoran Eric, Klaus Ronnberger, and Neil Smith.

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

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).

A minimalist interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus (artist's book).

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

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.

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

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.

An exploration of the "swampy" zone between the human and the other forms of life that make up his ecosystem and his environment, at the intersection of art, architecture and philosophy, in the perspective of a posthumanist ecology.

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 cross-disciplinary and critical reflection on the philosophical stakes of so-called "artificial intelligence", from an epistemological, political and cultural point of view.