Working in the early 1990s on the book As a Weasel Sucks Eggs: An Essay on Melancholy and Cannibalism (published in English in 2008 by Sternberg Press), we exchanged a few letters with the late Jacques Derrida, who was then working on what he referred to as the “cannibalistic tropes” in hermeneutics and German Idealism. He was grateful for a little fragment by Novalis that we had sent him:
All enjoyment, all taking in and assimilation, is eating, or rather: eating is nothing...
Issue #02
January 2009
With:
Daniel Birnbaum, Anders Olsson, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Marina Gržinić, Hassan Khan, Silvia Kolbowski
The nature of artistic speculation is, in part, to create new spaces and defer their use to others. While the pioneer gets first dibs in deciding the ideologies and governing principles of the spaces he creates, he is seldom present to see his planning in practice—he is off to new adventures while the subject must find ways of translating this vision into something inhabitable. Beyond the issue of governance, these circumstances beg the deeper question of the potential for simply inhabiting...
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7 Essays
January 2009
Some people are the motor of the event. Like an animator bringing characters to life. A character is drawn and through this process is free to behave in whatever way the animator wants it to. At our event you don’t know exactly who animates who, but it is definitely taking place. Everyone is part of the same story, but with separate lives. They are in the style of recent Manga comics from Japan, where each character has a complex formulation that frequently changes from episode to...
The field of art is today frequently equated with the art market, and the artwork is primarily identified as a commodity. That art functions in the context of the art market, and every work of art is a commodity, is beyond doubt; yet art is also made and exhibited for those who do not want to be art collectors, and it is in fact these people who constitute the majority of the art public. The typical exhibition visitor rarely views the work on display as a commodity. At the same time, the...
This question concerning the disappearance of borders is closely connected to processes through which capital is accumulated. One process is what David Harvey has called “accumulation by dispossession,” in which wealth is accumulated through redistribution and appropriation of assets (through the channels of credit systems, predatory speculation, privatization of land assets, etc.). 1 The second process is what we are facing today, what Michael Hudson has termed “the imperialism of...
1A. This white space is a stage—a platform that highlights and draws out a set of material conditions and coldly inspects them. This virtual space is inhabited by an androgynous protagonist with a specific sense of fashion. The figure is the subject, is the engine that powers this investigation—our focal point, the site through which a concept can be allowed to appear. The ground is the context—the white space, the white table, the stage of phantasms. The subject is enframed, is charged...
From the start of the credit crisis, panic has been caused by what we didn’t know. What happens if a Lehman Brothers is allowed to fail? What happens if toxic mortgage-backed securities are bought through a government bailout? Then, what happens if the U.S. treasury decides not to bail the banks out of these bad debts?
So it should have been reassuring that one of the most nerve-racking of the unknowns turned out to be benign.
We now know that we should not have feared...