Bøger i Univocal serien

Forrenowned art historian Georges DidiHuberman, artist James Turrell is aninventor of impossible spaces and unthinkable sites, of aporias, of fables. Creator of some of the most fascinating works of the late twentieth and earlytwentyfirst century, Turrell uses as his medium the most elemental material ofsight and art: light.

"A double agent working for the police and living in the last habitable city on the planet, Mevlido clings to life and hope in the city's vast slums, dreaming of a mysterious mission he is told he must accomplish. A key work in Antoine Volodine's post-exotic fictional universe, Mevlido's Dreams envisions a world changed beyond recognition and ruled under irrational authoritarianism in which dreams nest within dreams and the boundaries between life and death are fluid and uncertain"--

A groundbreaking reflection on the process by which one arrives at an ethological theory How do humans study the complex worlds of animals without imposing their own societal and scientific gaze upon them? The biologist Amotz Zahavi stakes the controversial claim that Arabian babblers are said to raise themselves up each day to dance and tend to one another in the early morning sun. Such a claim will provoke the interest and intellectual curiosity of a young philosopher and psychologist recognizing that the best way for her to observe the practices of scientists at work is to join them on their terrain. Embedding herself in the field alongside ethologists in the Negev desert, Vinciane Despret deftly depicts and reflects on the process by which scientists construct their theories within the milieu of the animals they study. Along the way, and not without humor, Despret analyzes a variety of theories posited by many well-known thinkers, including Zahavi, who devoted his life to the interpretation, companionship, and conservation of the Arabian babbler bird, and naturalists such as Charles Darwin and Pierre Kropotkin.

On the complex aesthetics and ontology at work in Étienne Souriau’s unique oeuvre In this concise but expansive exegesis of the philosophical aesthetics of Étienne Souriau, philosopher David Lapoujade provides a lucid introduction to many of the key concepts underpinning Souriau’s existential pluralism. Among the various modes of existence that populate a world, Souriau grants particular importance to virtual beings—the lesserexistences. Always taking the form of a sketch or an outline, the perfection of such existences lies precisely in the incompletion with which they imbue all reality. They exist with a problematizing force, posing questions and inviting the establishment of an “art” that would make them more real. And yet, for this to happen, another existence must first see them—must be capable of hearing their appeals—and must be willing to defend their right to exist.Through discussions of modern art ranging from the dispossessed characters of Kafka and Beckett to the grids of Agnes Martin and the protographies of Oscar Muñoz, Lapoujade leads the reader into a complex philosophical world, brimming with modal existences and animated by a unique conception of creative processes, where the philosopher as artist or artist as philosopher becomes an advocate, defending the right of certain realities to gain in existence. For Souriau, nothing is given in advance, everything is a work in the making: such is the instaurative practice that grounds his entire oeuvre.

A harrowing early novel by one of France’s most unusual contemporary writers  At once humorous and horrifying, Solo Viola is one of Antoine Volodine’s first forays into post-exoticism. He takes the reader into a fictional world where a variety of characters collide: three prisoners just released from jail, a band of circus performers, a string quartet, a writer, and a bird. All are trying to survive in an absurd and hostile environment of authoritarian spectacle, at the mercy of a tyrannical buffoon, and seeking the strange counterbalance of hope in a viola player, whose stunning music just might save them all, if only for a moment.

Elisabeth von Samsonow is an artist, writer, curator, and professor of philosophical and historical anthropology at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Two of her books have been translated into English: Transplants and Epidemic Subjects—Radical Ontology.¿Anita Fricek is an Australian artist based in Vienna.¿Stephen Zepke is an independent researcher and author of Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the Future.¿

"Originally published in French as Survivances des lucioles, copyright 2009 by Les aEditions de Minuit . . . Paris"-- Verso title page.

As historical processes increasingly become steeped in technology, it becomes more necessary for a discipline to emerge that is capable of comprehending these materialities to better understand the fields they inundate such as science, art, and warfare. This effort is further compromised by the inherent complexity and complete arbitrariness of technical languages—especially when they are algorithmic—along with the rapid pace in which they become obsolete, unintelligible, or simply forgotten. The Turing Machine plays a central role in the Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts, wherein the gradual developments of the individual components encompassed by this complex technology are placed within the context of engineering sciences and the history of inventions. This genealogy also traces the origin of the computer in mathematics, meta-mathematics, combinatorics, cryptology, philosophy, and physics. The investigations reveal that the history of apparatuses that process signs is in no way limited to the second half of the twentieth century; rather, it is possible they existed at all times and in all cultures.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is a Brazilian anthropologist and professor at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Peter Skafish is Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Anthropology Department at McGill University.¿

Originally published in 1995, Advances was first written by Jacques Derrida as a long foreword to a book by one of his most promising former students, the philosopher Serge Margel\u2019s Le Tombeau du Dieu Artisan (The Tomb of the Craftsman). What Derrida uncovers for us is Margel\u2019s own unique theory of the promise in relation to an an-archic, pre-chronological temporality, in conjunction with Margel\u2019s radical rereading of Plato\u2019s Timaeus. As Derrida states right away, Margel\u2019s reading is a new one, a new reading of the Demiurge. A new promise. A new advance. In this magisterial late essay by Derrida, what the reader soon discovers is in part a conversation with his former student, as well as an opening for a new reflection on our current ecological and political crises that are all the more urgent today where the possibility of giving ourselves death as a human race and the end of the world is now, within an era of climate change, more real than ever.As part of Univocal\u2019s Pharmakon series, this essay, itself published in advance, becomes a brief but powerful light pointing toward Univocal\u2019s forthcoming publication of the translation of Serge Margel\u2019s Le Tombeau du Dieu Artisan. \u201cOnce again the Timaeus, of course, but a different Timaeus, a new Demiurge, I promise.\u201d

Georges Didi-Huberman is a lecturer at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris. He has published over 20 books on art history and philosophy including Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (1995) and Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of A Certain History of Art (2009). He is also the recipient of the 2015 Adorno PrizeDrew S. Burk has translated works by thinkers such as François Laruelle, Gilbert Simondon, and Fernand Deligny. He lives in Minneapolis, MN.¿

Michael Marder is ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His most recent works include¿Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015),¿Dust (2016), The Chernobyl Herbarium (2016), and, with Luce Irigaray, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives¿(2016).

In the heart of Australia, on the cracked red earth, among wild vegetation, weathered bush, and dried-up creeks, hundreds of invisible pathways exist that become entangled on the earth''s surface, underground, and in the sky, clouds, and wind. The Aboriginal people call them Jukurrpa: "the Dreamings."This web is the Warlpiri land. Practicing the Dreaming, by ritual art, is for the Warlpiri a way to reactivate their ancestral traditions to connect with the cosmos and respond to current social and political issues.In 1979, anthropologist Barbara Glowczewski embarked on a journey to study the Warlpiri in the Australian outback. Struggling at once to maintain their traditions and cultural heritage as well as adapting to the continuing secularization and techno-progress of their European Australian counterparts, she takes us into the landscape, artistic rituals, and turmoil of the Warlpiri over three decades. Becoming accepted among Aboriginal families as a translator, and at the same time a negotiator of two vastly different visions of the earth, contemporary Western culture and the ancient indigenous dreaming culture, Glowczewski created a singular document of ethnological fieldwork and of self-transformation and discovery.

Throughout a large part of the 1980s, F\u00e9lix Guattari, known for his collaborations with Gilles Deleuze and his experimental and groundbreaking practices in psychotherapy, decides to shift his experimental work into a different medium of artistic and creative thought practice: the world of science fiction. Part self-analysis, part cinematic expression of his theoretical work, Guattari\u2019s screenplay merges his theoretical concepts with his passion for comic books, free radio movements, and film. So begins Guattari\u2019s journey to write a screenplay wherein a group of squatters makes contact with a superior intelligence coming from the infinitely small Universe of the Infra-quark (UIQ). Guattari worked feverishly on his film, attempting to secure a budget, traveling to Hollywood, and enlisting the help of American screenwriter Robert Kramer. But the film would never see the light of day. Through the important archival work of artists, Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, Guattari\u2019s script is now published here, for the first time in English.

In Language and Reality, originally published in S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil, in 1964, Vil\u00e9m Flusser continues his philosophical and theoretical exploration into language. He begins to postulate that language is not simply a map of the world but also the driving force for projecting worlds and enters then into a feedback with what is projected.Flusser\u2019s thesis leads him to claim, in a seemingly missed encounter of a dialogue with Wittgenstein, that language is not limited to its ontological and epistemological aspects but rather is at the service of its aesthetic. Traversing a diverse area of research and ruminations on cybernetics to poetry, music, the visual arts, religion, and mysticism, Language and Reality can be viewed as a vital transitional work in Flusser\u2019s emerging thought that will eventually lead to his works in the 1970s and 1980s concerning what we would later consider media theory, design, and digital culture.

How is it that when we think of time, we hardly think of the role affect plays in granting us access to time: the sense of waiting, regret, mourning, melancholy? In Powers of Time, David Lapoujade returns to two central themes that continuously converge throughout the writings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson: durée (duration) and intuition. If duration is synonymous with memory, how are we then capable of thinking an authentic sense of the future? Does this mean that freedom is nothing more than a reprisal of our past?Lapoujade uncovers multiple versions of Bergson: a philosopher of sympathy, a melancholic philosopher, a perspectivist Bergson, a spiritualist Bergson. Leading us beyond simplistic anthropomorphic conceptions of temporality and intuition, Lapoujade''s multiple Bergsons guide us to encounter a rapport with time, memory, and duration that places us in direct contact with the nonhuman flows and movements of the universe.

An insightful philosophical investigation and reading of the concept of utopia