A history of the pioneering years establishing a new genre in the field of arts: artistic research.

Artistic work connects multiple competencies, areas of knowledge, and ways of life. The Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR) has made this principle its guiding ethos through organizing research projects in correspondence with this transgressive gesture, manifesting as interdisciplinary, networked knowledge production.

Inventory and Hinge offers an overview of the research projects performed over the last two decades at IFCAR through project descriptions, plentiful illustrations, and, most importantly, links and QR codes that grant access to nearly all publications and websites that were created by the individual projects he discusses.

Although art as research has a long tradition outside of institutions, Inventory and Hinge chronicles IFCAR’s drive to introduce this new discipline and establish a new artistic genre.

Once considered a stepchild of social theory, legal criticism has recently received a great deal of attention, perpetuating what has always been an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand, law is praised for being a cultural achievement, on the other, it is criticized for being an instrument of state oppression. Legal criticism’s strategies to deal with this ambivalence differ greatly. While some seek to transcend the institution of law altogether, others advocate a transformation of the form of law or try to employ strategies to change the content of law, deconstruct its basis, or invent rights. By presenting a variety of approaches to legal criticism, What’s Legit? highlights transitions and exhibits irreconcilable differences of these approaches. Ultimately, What’s Legit? broadens debates that are all too often conducted only within the boundaries of separate theoretical currents.

Vénus, Flore, Hébé ou Diane – autant de divinités antiques qui ont prêté, à partir de la fin du XVIIe siècle en France, leurs attributs et leurs costumes vaporeux, souvent affriolants, à quantité de femmes de l’aristocratie de cour, de la bourgeoisie montante et de la noblesse de robe. L’élite sociale se fait alors peindre en costume mythologique ou historique par des artistes célèbres tels que Nicolas de Largillierre, Hyacinthe Rigaud, François de Troy, Jean-Marc Nattier ou Jean Raoux.
Ces portraits dits « historiés », dans lesquels l’effigie d’une personne vivante s’enrichit d’attributs mythologiques comme dans un tableau d’histoire, sont un genre pictural à part entière. D’abord prérogative masculine adoptée par les grands pour célébrer leurs vertus, il devient vers 1680 l’apanage des modèles féminins : le langage allégorique les pare de qualités à connotation spécifiquement féminine et galante, comme la beauté, la jeunesse, la grâce, qui, bien comprises, pouvaient aussi être un moyen de manier le pouvoir. Dès les années 1740, ces peintures font cependant l’objet de critiques répétées et le genre perd peu à peu sa légitimité à la fin de l’Ancien Régime, avant que ce procédé de distinction aristocratique suscite la méfiance des historiens de l’art, qui n’y verront que l’expression d’un amusement futile de milieux oisifs.

Le présent ouvrage remet à leur juste place ces travestissements : à la fois œuvre d’art, objet culturel et pratique sociale, le portrait historié est un phénomène de goût révélateur d’une culture de cour en pleine transformation. Marlen Schneider met ici en lumière les fonctions, les propriétés formelles, la réception et la portée historique d’un type de représentation trop longtemps déconsidéré.

This book weaves together Reiner Schürmann’s work on art and politics, drawing on a range of the most important thinkers and poets of the twentieth century and beyond.

The Place of the Symbolic gathers Reiner Schürmann’s essays on the nexus of art and politics. In keeping with his translation of the destruction of metaphysics into an an-archic philosophy of practice, Schürmann develops a radical theory of the place of symbols, irreducible either to idealist theories of symbols or structuralist accounts of the symbolic. Symbols, Schürmann argues, may provide a bridge between ontological difference and politics. They resist being grasped metaphysically, in terms of representation. Instead, their understanding requires a specific way of existence: attending to the coming-to-presence of phenomena. As such, the understanding of symbols discloses a form of praxis that abandons ultimate grounds and opens onto the manifold.

Alongside Schürmann’s theory of symbols, the collection includes essays on the relation between metaphysics, tragedy, and technology; on the “there is” in poetry; as well as on judgment. Throughout these characteristically lucid interventions, Schürmann’s most urgent concern remains a consideration of singular and finite practices that enact a release from universal principles. Art and politics appear here as the unworking of ultimate grounds; that is, as practices attuned to a truly groundless form of life.
 

Le présent livre constitue le recueil de trois articles-charnières de Rainer Schürmann. Deux d’entre eux, Que faire à la fin de la métaphysique ? et Des doubles contraintes normatives sont des échos, respectivement récapitulatif et prospectif, des deux opus magnum de Schürmann, Le principe d’anarchie et Les hégémonies brisées. L’autre texte, Se constituer soi-même comme sujet anarchique, jette un éclairage tout à fait inédit sur ce qu’on pouvait déjà savoir à partir des deux autres textes, abondamment repris dans les deux ouvrages-phares de leurs auteurs. Ils les font lire différemment. C’est cet éclairage entièrement neuf, quant à la portée praxique que revêt la vaste méditation post-métaphysique de Schürmann, qui fait du présent recueil un inédit, au sens le plus plein du terme.

Through the lenses of Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, this edited volume traces the development of the relation between the will and the law as self-given. Modern Philosophies of the Will explores a variety of topics including: the ontological turn in philosophy of the will; the will’s playful character and the problem of teleology; the will as principle of morality as discussed by Kant, of life­forms as discussed by Nietzsche, and of technology as discussed by Heidegger; the formal identity of legislation; and transgression of the law. This volume traces three strategies in the development of the philosophy of will from Kant to Heidegger, through rationality and irrationality of the will, the ontological turn, and law.

In Being and Time, Heidegger announced the “Task of Destroying the History of Ontology” in order to free what had remained “unthought” in Western metaphysics. The unpublished part of that work was to be titled “Basic Features of a Phenomenological Destruction of the History of Ontology. According to the Guiding Thread of the Problem of Temporality.” This latest work in the Reiner Schürmann Selected Writings and Lecture Notes series aims to carry out Heidegger’s plan. The destruction, or, as it is later called, the deconstruction of metaphysics, has a negative side—the peeling off, or the archeology, of metaphysical history by means of the guiding thread of the question of Being—and a positive side—“retrieval” of the original experience of Being in ancient Greek philosophy.
 
“The destruction has no other intent than to win back the original experience of metaphysics through a deconstruction of those conceptions which have become current and empty.” The purpose of taking to pieces the fabric of Western metaphysics is to show how at each important stage “the question of the meaning of Being has not only remained unattended to or inadequately raised, but that it has become quite forgotten in spite of all our interest in 'metaphysics'.”

Never-before-published writing from a key twentieth-century philosopher.
 
In 1962, Reiner Schürmann began studying at the Dominican school of theology Le Saulchoir, outside Paris. That experience radically shaped his life and work, enabling him to begin to develop many of the ideas for which he would later be known: letting be, life without why, ontological anarchy, and the tragic double bind.
 
Ways of Releasement contains never-before-published material from Schürmann’s early period as well as a report Schürmann wrote about his encounter with Heidegger; a précis of his autobiographical novel, Origins; and translations and new editions of later groundbreaking essays. Ways of Releasement concludes with an extensive afterword setting Schürmann’s writings in the context of his thinking and life.

Le titre est, bien entendu, inspiré par Althusser (“Lire Le Capital”) – mais de façon polémique. Par “lire Marx” j'entends lire Marx et non pas Engels, Mao, Gramsci, Lukács, Marcuse, Althusser et ainsi de suite. En d'autres termes : le but de ce cours est, avant tout, de délibérément désintriquer la pensée de Marx de la pensée marxiste. Une polémique avec certains marxistes sera ainsi menée en sous-main, par des allusions ponctuelles. Un tel programme véhicule trois implications majeures : Qu'il y a effectivement une différence de pensée entre Marx et le marxisme. Ce premier point sera établi à travers une lecture philosophique de Marx : l'hypothèse étant que ce qui se trouve de plus original dans Marx, ce n'est ni sa pensée politique, ni sa pensée sociologique ou économique, mais bien sa charpente philosophique. Cette charpente philosophique détermine et situe ses autres théories. La seconde implication, c'est qu'un clivage entre Marx et les marxistes existe comme tel, qu'il peut être défini par certaines caractéristiques générales, et que ces caractéristiques générales différent de la pensée originale de Marx ou la restreignent. Il s'agit là d'un sujet passablement complexe, voire compliqué ; mais on peut résumer ce clivage en disant que le marxisme

a surtout retenu de Marx les éléments utiles à l'action politique dans une situation donnée, urgente. Une théorie de la “praxis révolutionnaire” a donc pris la place de la philosophie. La troisième implication est la précompréhension qui préside à l'approche du texte. Un texte est quelque chose d'imprimé : il représente comme tel un objet clos, constitué, fini. Mais nous n'en obtiendrons de réponses décisives que si nous le soumettons à des questions décisives. Et la question décisive que soulèvent les marxistes, c'est l'urgence d'une situation révolutionnaire (qu'elle existe de fait ou doive être réalisée). Leur question est donc généralement homothétique à celle de Lénine : “Que faire ?” C'est la question de ceux qu'Althusser appelle les “intellectuels militants” (pour Marx 24), et qui participent directement aux luttes de la classe ouvrière. Une telle “ lecture” de Marx est stratégique. Or, je tiens que la lecture stratégique ne peut que rester aveugle, de par sa nature même, au questionnement philosophique. Notre précompréhension des textes de Marx n'a, par conséquent, rien de stratégique ; elle est bien plutôt qu'ils proposent une réponse à la plus ancienne question de la philosophie occidentale : ti to on, savoir : qu'est-ce que l'être ? ou : qu'est-ce que la réalité, ainsi que son corollaire : qu'est-ce que la vérité ? Donc : Marx versus marxisme ; le concept de “praxis” comme étant le concept différenciant Marx du marxisme ; une double théorie des textes. Développons plus avant ces trois points

In this lecture course, Reiner Schürmann develops the idea that, in between the spiritual Carolingian Renaissance and the secular humanist Renaissance, there was a distinctive medieval Renaissance connected with the rediscovery of Aristotle. Focusing on Thomas Aquinas’s ontology and epistemology, William of Ockham’s conceptualism, and Meister Eckhart’s speculative mysticism, Schürmann shows how thought began to break free from religion and the hierarchies of the feudal, neo-Platonic order and devote its attention to otherness and singularity. A crucial supplement to Schürmann’s magnum opus Broken Hegemonies, Neo-Aristotelianism and the Medieval Renaissance will be essential reading for anyone interested in the rise and fall of Western principles, and thus in how to think and act today.

In this book, Reiner Schürmann argues that what is most original about Marx is his philosophical axis. Extending his highly original engagement with the history of philosophy, Schürmann draws out this axis, which determines and localizes his theories of history, social relations, and economy. Whereas Marxist readings of Marx conceive history, classes, and social relations as primary realities, Schürmann brings out a radically immanent understanding of praxis that introduces multiplicity. This edition is complemented by a reprinting of Schürmann’s Anti-Humanism essay, in which he reads Marx alongside Nietzsche and Heidegger as spelling out the dissociation of being and action. Reading Marx showcases underappreciated facets of Schürmann’s work and offers an interpretation of Marx that resonates with the readings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, Antonio Negri, and François Laruelle.

What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a so-called pirate library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art plays an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic, and that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially.
 
Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a double character. They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are operational in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the commons. In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a thinking tool—in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.
 
 

Critique is a form of thinking and acting. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as concepts such as the break, marginalization, tearing, and opening indicate. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated that generate critical statements less through traditional argument and more through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects, and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.