A multifaceted engagement with the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy.
 
This book continues passionate conversation that Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was engaged in throughout his life with philosophers and artists from all over the world. The contributors take up Nancy’s philosophical question of truth as a praxis of a “with”—understanding truth without any given measure or comparison as an articulation of a with. It is a thinking responsible for the world from within the world, a language that seeks to respond to the ongoing mutation of our civilization. Contributors include Jean-Christophe Bailly, Rodolphe Burger, Marcia Sá Calvacante Schuback, Marcus Coelen, Alexander García Düttmann, Juan-Manuel Garrido, Martta Heikkilä, Erich Hörl, Valentin Husson, Sandrine Israel-Jost, Ian James, Apostolos Lampropoulos, Nidesh Lawtoo, Jérôme Lèbre, Susanna Lindberg, Michael Marder, Artemy Magun, Boyan Manchev, Dieter Mersch, Hélène Nancy, Jean-Luc Nancy, Aïcha Liviana Messina, Ginette Michaud, Helen Petrovsky, Jacob Rogozinski, Philipp Stoellger, Peter Szendy, Georgios Tsagdis, Marita Tatari, Gert-Jan van der Heiden, and Aukje van Rooden.

A theory of passive vitalism.

Contemporary theory has pushed the boundaries of the concept of the living, urging us to consider a vitality that manifests beyond the human, animal, or even the organic altogether. Recognizing the vast variety of modes of existence and vibrancy entails—such is the claim—a new ethics and politics. In Inorganic Life, the philosopher Eckardt Lindner intervenes in this discussion. He claims that we have not yet properly understood how and to what effect we can break the organo-centrism of philosophy and have neglected to consider the inner contradictions of such novel amalgams of vitalism and materialism.

As an unlikely ally in his critical project, he investigates the inner tension in Deleuze’s works between an overtly vitalist stance and critiques of classical forms of vitalism, bordering on a novel anti-vitalism. Against active forms of vitalism, interested in more immersion in the world, interconnectedness, and ever more efficacious praxis, one can find in Deleuze a passive vitalism. This subterranean thought in the philosophy of immanence highlights the capacity of life to disorient itself, to be out of line with itself, to detach itself from purposeful action and its own inner goals.

Lindner explores this passive vitalism by drawing together thinkers such as Deleuze, Cioran, Laruelle, Kant, and Derrida. Suspicious of the moralistic and enthusiastic tendency of new materialisms, this vitalism would be inherently critical—even of its own commitments to liveliness—and thus gestures to a new politics and ethics of life.
 

An edited collection of contributions to conversations about the climate crisis and its role in critical discourse.

The climate change crisis has become part of aesthetic discourse and critical research in culture and the arts. Future-oriented, ecologically conceived possibilities for action are being explored by artists, curators, and scholars alike. eco-operations addresses these emerging aesthetic ecologies and new technologies of cooperation that both challenge and shape a sustainable future, foregrounding interruptions, ruptures, disconnections, dissonances, exclusions, and allochronism. Moving beyond the concepts of “flow” and “network” as a single, coherent (ecological or technological) system, eco-operations instead emphasizes the frictions within asynchronously running systems. The infrastructures and formats of artistic production and exhibition play a central role here, as they themselves constitute ecosystems that invite and regulate processes of sharing and exchange. Artists and activists are embedded in these ecosystems, in which they simultaneously intervene when searching for alternative ways of creating collaborative practice. Bringing together scholars, artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, eco-operations explores this field of tension between global and local ecologies and aims to speculate on where dissonances imply both creative potential and political challenges.

eco-operations features contributions by Dalida María Benfield, Ursula Biemann, Lisa Blackmore, Mateo Chacón Pino, Lucrezia Cippitelli, T. J. Demos, Sandra Frimmel, Laura Flórez, Lorena Cely, Alexandra Gelis, Liliana Gómez, Fabienne Liptay, Uriel Orlow, and Dorota Sajewska.
 

Au milieu des années 1970, Sylvère Lotringer a créé Semiotext(e), un groupe philosophique devenu magazine puis maison d'édition. Depuis sa création, Semiotext(e) est le lieu de rencontres libres: John Cage lisant Nietzsche, à travers Deleuze; punk et philosophie; la possibilité de sexualités et de politiques alternatives; le dialogue immédiat entre artistes et philosophes. La vie artistique et intellectuelle américaine des cinquante dernières années en est largement tributaire. Le modèle de la revue et de la maison d'édition tourne essentiellement autour de la notion de collectif, et leur créateur Sylvère Lotringer s'est rarement livré à la continuité de son parcours personnel: son existence d'enfant caché pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale; l'expérience libératrice puis traumatisante du collectif dans le kibboutz; son activisme parisien dans les années 1960; son temps d'errance, qui le mena, par Istanbul, aux États-Unis; et puis, bien sûr, ses années américaines, la façon dont il mêlait sa vie nocturne à l'expérimentation formelle qu'il a inventée avec Semiotext(e) et avec ses cours. Depuis le début des années 2010, Donatien Grau a pris l'habitude de rendre visite à Sylvère Lotringer lors de ses voyages à Los Angeles; certains de leurs dialogues ont été publiés ou tenus en public. Ceux-ci nous donnent accès à la vie de Sylvère Lotringer, ses amitiés, ses choix, son admiration pour certains des plus grands penseurs de notre temps. Les conversations montrent des éclats de vie, des traces d'un voyage, à travers les textes et l'existence elle-même, avec une intensité rare.

A personal take on French Theory by one of the people who invented it.

In the mid-1970s, Sylvère Lotringer created Semiotext(e), a philosophical group that became a magazine and then a publishing house. Since its creation, Semio-text(e) has been a place of stimulating dialogue between artists and philosophers, and for the past fifty years, much of American artistic and intellectual life has depended on it. The model of the journal and the publishing house revolves around the notion of the collective, and Lotringer has rarely shared his personal journey: his existence as a hidden child during World War II; the liberating and then traumatic experience of the collective in the kibbutz; his Parisian activism in the 1960s; his time of wandering, that took him, by way of Istanbul, to the United States; and then, of course, his American years, the way he mingled his nightlife with the formal experimentation he invented with Semiotext(e) and with his classes. Since the early 2010s, Donatien Grau has developed the habit of visiting Lotringer during his trips to Los Angeles; some of their dialogs were published or held in public. This book is an entry into Lotringer's life, his friendships, his choices, and his admiration for some of the leading thinkers of our times. The conversations between Lotringer and Grau show bursts of life, traces of a journey, through texts and existence itself, with an unusual intensity.