examines the long noirish shadows the Cold War still casts over our current moment.
In making sense of the present moment, where systemic thought should prevail, monocausal explanations instead seem everywhere to abound. One language or narrative is enforced where many are required. Against this monoglottism, we can look for guidance to the radical ethos of Officer Ingravallo—the Roman detective with a philosophical bent who is the protagonist of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s classic modernist crime novel That Awful Mess on Via Merulena (1957). Early on in Gadda’s masterpiece, Ingravallo delivers his declaration of procedural intent: “He sustained, among other things, that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed. … The opinion that we must “reform within ourselves the meaning of the category of the cause,” as handed down by the philosophers from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant, and replace cause with causes was for him a central, persistent opinion, almost a fixation … This was how exactly how he defined ‘his’ crimes. ‘When they call me.. sure. If they call me, you be sure that there’s trouble: some mess, some gliuommero to untangle.’”
e-flux Index is a bimonthly publishing project that likewise sets itself the task of helping untangle the mess of the contemporary—which wades itself all the way out into Ingravello’s multicausal whirlpool.
explores the domain of the many specters and ghosts (both friendly and malevolent) with whom we are forced to cohabit.
gathers pieces that yogically stretch and expand the limits of the human body, of embodiment, and of “the human” itself.
addresses the myriad contemporary forms of psychic and physical violence, from wars fought in the name of “civilization” to the impossibility of actually depicting peace.
shuttles between the radical forms of go-slow, quiet quitting, and social refusal that comprise the decision to down tools.
purloins its title from silviculture forestry terminology to examine the manifold paradoxes of sustainability, ecology, wastage, and re-usage.
groups together pieces which engage questions of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and neocolonial territorialization.
turns to examine the little nations of the museum, opening up onto larger questions of exhibition-making and curatorial strategy.
collects texts that ask: How to overcome institutional inertia and sclerosis? In different ways, each of these contributions sets out to address the problems of the commons, of living together, and what remains of the public sphere.