Adilkno, Cracking the Movement: Squatting Beyond the Media, trans. Laura Martz (Autonomedia, 1994), 230.
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977), 122, 123.
Williams, Marxism and Literature, 126.
On a related note, see Bini Adamczak, “The Promises of the Present,” in Deserting from the Culture Wars, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Sven Lütticken (BAK/MIT Press, 2020), 95–105.
On differential inclusion, see Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), 34–37, 132–33.
Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, trans. David Fernbach (Verso, 2016), 101.
Naomi Klein, “We Were Told Joe Biden Was the ‘Safe Choice.’ But It Was Risky to Offer So Little,” The Guardian, November 8, 2020 →.
See →.
“Der Historiker ist ein rückwärts gekehrter Prophet.” Friedrich Schlegel, “Fragmente,” in Athenäum, vol. I.1 (1798), 20.
Leopold von Ranke, Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1535, vol. I (Reimer, 1824), vi. “Potential history” is of course also the title of Ariella Azoulay’s magisterial recent study. While Azoulay drives home the importance of “unlearning imperialism” with great force, I have some issues with her notion of historical reversibility, as well as her unwillingness to consider that within the culture of Western imperialism, there may be forms of difference and dissensus worth taking seriously. This is not, however, the place for the kind of extensive discussion that Azoulay’s work deserves.
It should be noted, however, that Aristotle’s terms have proven ambiguous, with dunamis having been interpreted variously as logical possibility and as capacity. Both Schelling and Agamben fall into the latter camp. See Kevin Attell, “Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power,” in Diacritics 39, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 39.
F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, ed. Manfred Frank (Suhrkamp, 1977), 127–35. The majority of this volume consists of the so-called Paulus-Nachschrift, a transcript of the lectures published (against Schelling’s will) in 1843. An official version of Schelling’s “positive philosophy,” as manifested in the Philosophie der Mythologie and Philosophie der Offenbarung, would only be published posthumously by his sons.
Manfred Frank, “Einleitung des Herausgebers,” in Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, 22.
Gérard Lebovici’s Champ Libre published Cieszkowski’s Prolegomena zur Historiosophie (1838) in a French translation in 1973, the book having been recommended by Debord. See Debord’s letter to Lebovici, April 16, 1976 →.
Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, 156–64.
Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, 165–83, 194–96.
In this respect, the posthumous 1858 version of the Philosophie der Offenbarung is arguably worse than the pirated Paulus-Nachschrift, which I’m following here.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Raezen (Stanford University Press, 1998), 48; Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby,” chap. 9 in The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (University of Minneapolis Press, 1993), 35–36.
Georges Didi-Huberman, Survival of the Fireflies, trans. Lia Swope Mitchell (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 33–45.
Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, 162.
“Der Inhalt des Prozesses ist die Hervorbringung von einer Welt, wo alle Möglichkeiten Wirklichkeiten seien. Der wirkliche Gott ist der, der Schöpfer ist.” Kierkegaard’s transcript of Schelling’s lecture of January 17, 1842, in Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, 440, my translation.
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I (1843), in Kierkegaard’s Writings, III, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1987), 41.
See Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin (1844), in Kierkegaard’s Writings, VIII, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson (Princeton University Press, 1980).
Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (Verso, 2013), 175–76.
Our Literal Speed, “Notes from Selma: On Non-Visibility” →; text used by Tony Cokes in his work Evil.27: Selma (2011).
Isabelle Stengers, “The Care of the Possible,” interviewed by Erik Bordeleau, Scapegoat, no. 1 (2011): 12–17, 27. In 2019, this interview provided the point of departure and title for the exhibition “Le Soin des Possibles/The Care of the Possible” at 1.1 in Basel.
Patricia de Vries, Algorithmic Anxiety in Contemporary Art: A Kierkegaardian Inquiry into the Imaginary of Possibility (Institute of Network Cultures, 2019), 33, 92.
Ronald Reagan, “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with the Students and Faculty at Moscow State University” (May 31, 1988), in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 24, no. 22 (June 6, 1988), 704.
Bill Clinton, “Remarks at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies” (March 8, 2000), in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 36, no. 10 (March 13, 2000), 492.
Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 51.
Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (Basic Books, 1994). Quoted from the updated 2009 edition, 11, 14.
Donna Jean Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (Yale University Press, 1976), 34.
Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, 39.
Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (Verso, 2018), 69.
Parikka, Insect Media, 56.
Nor, indeed, is it a matter of arguing that “performance is in the wrong place when it’s in the museum, it would seem, because there are lots of people there”—which is the bizarre position that Catherine Wood ascribes to me in “From the Institution of Performance to the Performance of Institutions,” in The Methuen Companion to Performance Art, ed. Bertie Feldman and Jovana Stokic (Methuen, 2020), 223. It is never about performance as such, or the mass, the crowd, or the museum, but about specific crowds and performances and museums. Tate Modern is not the museum, nor do its practices always manage to be both “responsively heteronomous and responsibly autonomous.”
Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (Verso, 2016), 11.
Antoine Augustin Cournot, Traité de l’enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l’histoire, vol. 2 (Hachette, 1861), 342. Quoted and discussed in Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (Verso, 1992), 300–301.
Elena Esposito, “Blindness and the Power of Algorithmic Prediction,” lecture at Maerzmusik in Berlin, 2016 →.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Profile Books, 2019), 277.
Louise Amoore, The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability (Duke University Press, 2013), 40.
Amoore, The Politics of Possibility, 8–10.
Hillary Hoffower, “Bill Gates Has Been Warning of a Global Health Threat for Years. Here Are 12 People Who Seemingly Predicted the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Business Insider, December 15, 2020 →.
Naomi Klein, “The Great Reset Conspiracy Smoothie,” in The Intercept, December 8, 2020 →.
Williams, Marxism and Literature, 126.
Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone Books, 2010/2017), 60.
Mikael Spång, Constituent Power and Constitutional Order: Above, Within and Beside the Constitution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 128.
See my essays “Abdicating Sovereignty,” in Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas (BAK/MIT Press, 2019), 81–94, and “Performing Culture Otherwise,” in Deserting from the Culture Wars, 21–52.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991), 154.
See also my essay “Posthuman Prehistory,” in Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (Sternberg Press, 2017), 115–46.
Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 36.
Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 13. See also Krystian Woznicki, Undeclared Movements (b_books, 2020).
Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 42.
Territories, ed. Klaus Biesenbach, Anselm Franke, Rafi Segal, and Eyal Weizman (KW/Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2003), 38–41.
Summarized in Attell, “Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power,” 45.
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 41, 44.
Attell, “Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power,” 45–46.
Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 59–64, 98.
Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 76. On capital as sovereign, see also Joshua Clover, “The Rise and Fall of Biopolitics: A Response to Bruno Latour,” Critical Inquiry blog, March 29, 2020 →.
Tellingly, Brown likens Schmitt to the “quintessential owl of Minerva flying at dusk.” Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 95.
See (in German) →.
See Milo Rau/IIPM, General Assembly (Merve Verlag, 2017). On the “Storming of the Winter Palace,” see Nikolai Evreinov & andere: “Sturm auf den Winterpalast,” ed. Inke Arns, Igor Chubarov, and Sylvia Sasse (Diaphanes, 2017). This publication accompanied an exhibition in the Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund that included documentation of Rau’s Storming.
The weekly in question is Demokratischer Widerstand →, which to this day lists “Prof. Giorgio Agamben” as the copublisher on its front page, although Agamben has denied any direct involvement. The editors stage themselves as an antifascist resistance movement that is the equivalent of Star Wars’ Rebel Alliance, systematically turning a blind eye to the far-right elements in Querdenker and Querfront milieus, and collaborating with the conspiracist publicist Ken Jebsen and his KenFM platform. Demokratischer Widerstand published one of Agamben’s Corona screeds in issue no. 15 (August 8, 2020), and an interview in which the Covid state of exception is characterized as the most dreadful totalitarian apparatus ever created in no. 23 (October 17). Issues no. 32 (January 9, 2021), 32 (January 16), and 34 (January 32) contain obscurantist justifications for the attack on the Capitol—with Agamben’s name still on the masthead.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT Press, 2016), 27.
Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Methods, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013), 158–59.
Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 40. Brown references Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Eyal Weizman, “The Wall and the Eye,” in Cabinet, no. 9 (Winter 2002–03): 31, though I see no direct source for her remark in the online version at →.
China Miéville, The City & The City (Pan Macmillan, 2009).
Murray Bookchin, “Thoughts on Libertarian Municipalism,” 1999 →.
Giorgio Agamben, “What Is a Destituent Power?” trans. Stephanie Wakefield, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, no. 32 (2014): 69.
Agamben, “What Is a Destituent Power?” 69–70.
Verónica Gago, “Intellectuals, Experiences, and Militant Investigation: Avatars of a Tense Relation,” Viewpoint Magazine, June 6, 2017 →. For the early articulation of this notion by Colectivo Situaciones (of which Gago was a member), see 19 & 20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism, trans. Nate Holdren and Sebastián Touza (Minor Compositions, 2011), 51–53.
Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford University Press, 2013), 142.
David Graeber, Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (Minor Compositions, 2011), 43–44.
The final section of this text is related to an editorial project for BAK’s online platform Prospections, to be released later this year.