A theoretical exploration of possible ways out of concepts adopted by the Enlightenment.

Thierry de Duve outlines the main features of a critical theory of male, all-too-male sexuation and cross-gender emancipation, drawing on Marcel Gauchet’s theses on Christianity as an exit from religion, Jacques Lacan’s algebra of desire, and Geneviève Morel’s analysis of the “law of the mother.”

Wouldn’t it have required more than the translation of the three Christian maxims “faith, hope, love” into the revolutionary maxims “liberté, egalité, fraternité?”  Is there more to the knot of incarnation, fatherhood, and the cult of Mary than just Christian mysticism? Can the uncertainty of fatherhood become an act of faith that acknowledges a fundamental uncertainty?

Come On, Men, One More Effort… explores ways out of the dead end of political concepts adopted by the Enlightenment and their continued impact today, since the only possibility seems to be to embrace the religious and reject it at the same time.
 

Dans ce petit livre intempestif arc-bouté à la conviction selon laquelle « le christianisme est la religion de la sortie de la religion » (Marcel Gauchet), Thierry de Duve sort des disciplines qui sont les siennes, l’esthétique et histoire de l’art, pour aborder deux questions anthropologiques que la mutation de l’ordre symbolique en cours rend pressantes : la différence des sexes, qu’il envisage par le biais de l’incertitude de la paternité, et l’avenir de la politique d’émancipation, qu’il ancre à la naissance prématurée des enfants humains. Le ton de ce livre est une certaine effronterie respectueuse par laquelle de Duve engage un dialogue imaginaire avec quelques grandes figures intellectuelles, parmi lesquelles Françoise Héritier, Alain Badiou, Georges Duby, Marcel Gauchet et, last but not least, Jacques Lacan.

Interdisciplinary studies that combine the current of materialist thinking with discussions of ecologies and environmentalization.

Placed at the intersection of art, media, and cultural studies as well as economic theory, Liquidity, Flows, Circulation investigates the cultural logic of environmentalization. As flows, circulations, and liquidity resurface in all aspects of recent culture and contemporary art, this volume investigates the hypothesis of a genuine cultural logic of environmentalization through these three concepts.

It thus brings together two areas of research that have been largely separate. On the one hand, this volume takes up discussions about ecologies with and without nature and environmentalization as a contemporary form of power and capital. On the other hand, it takes its cue from Fredric Jameson’s notion that each stage of capitalism is accompanied by a genuine cultural logic. The volume introduces this current of materialist thinking into the ongoing discussions of ecologies and environmentalization. By analyzing contemporary art, architecture, theater, films, and literature, the fifteen contributions by scholars and artists explore different fields where liquid forms, semantics flow, or processes of circulation emerge as a contemporary cultural logic.
 

Two important essays on Étienne-Jules Marey published for the first time in English alongside his breathtaking images of moving air and smoke.

Featuring more than one hundred and fifty photographs and images, Movements of Air reprints the breathtaking pictures of Étienne-Jules Marey—images captured between 1899 and 1901 during his scientific experiments with moving air and smoke—and complements them with essays by Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannoni.
 
Mannoni begins by reflecting on Marey’s experimental approach. As the founder of the “graphic method,” Marey was also the developer of an aerodynamic wind tunnel. His experiments’ photographs of fluid motion introduced a whole world of movements and turbulences, and fluids, and influenced generations of scientists and artists alike. Didi-Huberman expands on the philosophical debates surrounding these aesthetically and technically instructive images. Even though Marey’s main interest was graphic information, Didi-Huberman shows us how the flow of all things drew this ingenious experimenter to a photographic practice that creates drags, streaks, expansions, and visual dances. Marey’s wind tunnel photographs were also themselves causes of turbulence in the history of images. The artists Dombois and Oeschger explore these “graphical” vortices of the last 120 years, providing at the end of the book a collage from historical and contemporary material interlaced with their own image-making in Dombois’s wind tunnel at the Zurich University of the Arts.
 

Il est difficile de concevoir un art qui soit aussi étroitement lié à son présent que ne l’est l’art contemporain. En effet, l’art contemporain est issu d’une rupture inouïe avec les pratiques artistiques du passé. Il semble prendre son point de départ dans une profonde amnésie par rapport à ce qui le précède. Les distinctions esthétiques traditionnelles, entre forme et contenu, autonomie et hétéronomie, ou oeuvre et critique, ne sont plus pertinentes quand il s’agit de cet art. Mais qu’est-ce qu’alors que l’art contemporain? Cette question a pu être posée par l’historien, le théoricien, voire le sociologue de l’art. Mais elle n’a pas encore été soulevée comme question philosophique – comme question qui cherche à établir l’essence de l’art contemporain. La réponse donnée, dans ce livre, à ladite question est double. D’une part, elle est positive: dans son essence, l’art contemporain est la fiction d’un pur faire. D’autre part, elle est négative: l’art contemporain est le site où se révèle comme nulle part ailleurs l’idéologie politique du capitalisme néolibéral.