Boris Groys Libri

Dallo scoppio della crisi economica globale, il linguaggio finanziario ha monopolizzato i media e il dibattito politico internazionale. Un nuovo linguaggio monetario ha scalzato le categorie dell'analisi sociale e dell'azione politica attraverso una profonda trasformazione sistemica ancora in corso. Un gruppo di filosofi tedeschi, tra cui Boris Groys e Peter Sloterdijk, (con in appendice uno scritto di Walter Benjamin La religione del capitalismo) propone come risposta ai repentini mutamenti culturali e sociali del XXI secolo il concetto di "capitalismo divino". L'interpretazione del capitalismo come religione sui generis, che coglie le recenti trasformazioni strutturali ed epocali meglio di altre categorie dell'economia politica ufficiale. Quest'ultima, infatti, risulta ampiamente coinvolta nella crisi e apparentemente incapace di gestirla, se non procrastinandone gli effetti più nefasti e lasciandoli in eredità alle prossime generazioni. Oltre la religione sincretista sviluppata dal capitalismo divino, emerge l'idea di una riflessione più serrata sulla realtà in cui tutti viviamo

Against the Anthropocene scrutinizes the proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch regarding climate change. In this slender but dense volume, cultural theorist T.J. Demos analyzes the biases within contemporary visual culturepopular science websites, remote sensing and SatNav imagery, eco-activist mobilizations, and experimental artistic projectsdemonstrating that it does not merely describe a geologic period, but actively supports the neoliberal financialization of nature, anthropocentric political economy, and endorsement of geo-engineering as a preferred method of approaching climate change. To develop creative alternatives, Demos argues we need to carefully consider the underlying motives the Anthropocene thesis. T.J. Demos is Professor of Art and Visual Culture and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at UC Santa Cruz. Past publications with Sternberg Press include Decolonizing Nature and Return To The Postcolony.

Beyond the view that multiple, globally dispersed conceptual art practices provide a heterogeneity of cultural references, Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions propose much more: other dimensions altogether, other spatiotemporal politics, other timescales, other understandings of matter, other forms of life—not only as works, but as a basic condition for being able to perceive artworks in the first place. Could it be that the Moscow Conceptualists were so elusive or saturated with the particularities of life in a specific economic and intellectual culture that they precluded integration into a broader art historical narrative? If so, then their simultaneously modest and radical approach to form may present a key to understanding the resilience and flexibility of a more general sphere of global conceptualisms that anticipate, surpass, or even bend around their purported origins in canonical European and American regimes of representation, as well as what we currently understand to be the horizon of artistic practice.Design by Jeff Ramsey, cover design by Liam Gillick

For the philosopher and media theoretician Boris Groys, Google performs the function of philosophy and religion as a ubiquitous means of negotiating the world. Philosophical precursors for Google's dissemination of discourses and the emancipation of words from grammar include Plato, Saussure and Derrida; another analogy is the twentieth-century avant-garde's production of 'word clouds' severed from their context, as found in the Conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s. Groys identifies this tradition as "the struggle for a utopian ideal of the free flow of information-the free migration of liberated words through the totality of social space."

Philosophy is traditionally understood as the search for universal truths, and philosophers are supposed to transmit those truths beyond the limits of their own culture. But, today, we have become sceptical about the ability of an individual philosopher to engage in ‘universal thinking’, so philosophy seems to capitulate in the face of cultural relativism. In Introduction to Antiphilosophy, Boris Groys argues that modern ‘antiphilosophy’ does not pursue the universality of thought as its goal but proposes in its place the universality of life, material forces, social practices, passions, and experiences – angst, vitality, ecstasy, the gift, revolution, laughter or ‘profane illumination’ – and he analyses this shift from thought to life and action in the work of thinkers from Kierkegaard to Derrida, from Nietzsche to Benjamin. Ranging across the history of modern thought, Introduction to Antiphilosophy endeavours to liberate philosophy from the stereotypes that hinder its development.

An illustrated study of one of Ilya Kabakov's most fantastic installations.