A Western Marxist analysis of the relationship between the historical present and
political action.
Hegel after Occupy is a Western Marxist analysis of different attempts to understand the present historical situation and the way theories of postmodernity, globalization, and contemporaneity implicitly or explicitly conceptualize the relationship between the historical present and political action. They all persuasively describe a breakdown of former historical categories but paradoxically end up understanding this breakdown as the end of politics tout court. Analysis and “position” thus merge, and the analytic diagnosis of a disavowal of the future (and the past) ends up as a disavowal of politics.
This book is the volume 9 of “
The Contemporary Condition” series, edited by Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund and published with Aarhus University, and ARoS Art Museum (Denmark). The aim of the series is to question the formation of subjectivity and concept of temporality in the world now. It begins from the assumption that art, with its ability to investigate the present and make meaning from it, can lead to an understanding of wider developments within culture and society. Addressing a perceived gap in existing literature on the subject, the series focuses on three broad strands: the issue of
temporality, the role of contemporary
media and
computational technologies, and how artistic practice makes epistemic claims.
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is a Danish art historian and writer. He teaches at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University.
