Art shares with philosophy that they are both: affirmation and resistance. Affirmation does not equal approval. Affirmation means saying yes to reality in its incommensurability-value. Being open to the world as it is. That is why such affirmation implies a certain resistiveness, a resistance against a schema of [more]

The “affirmative essence” (Thodor W. Adorno) of art must turn against its own distorted image, against the idealist temptation to locate art somewhere beyond the world of fact. Affirmation is not naïveté or approbation. Affirmation is invention and construction. The affirmative intensity of the work of art includes [more]

Because inequality exists there is something to be thought. Because the world — the spectrum of institutionalized realities — is a world of unequals (not only of unequal subjects), it is not only a living space but a space of thinking opening up the possibility of holding up [more]

Every genuine artwork comes from the future, never from the past. Poor art can be recognized by its sentimentality, nostalgia, admiration of the past, in short, by its inability to make the future precise. Instead of competing with documentation and historical work, it is always a matter of [more]

Everybody knows that to love demands the transgression of the narcissistic „narrative of the victim“ (Eva Illouz), which declares the subject to be an object of a structure of determinants. Because this transgression isn’t easy, Jean-Luc Nancy distinguishes between „good“ and „bad narcissism“. Good narcissism would be nearly [more]

If, in love, there is a moment of criticism of ideology, it lies in the necessity to open the rhetoric addressing the other, which is controlled by stereotypes towards a space of a language yet to be invented, which expects as little convention as possible of the singularities [more]

Rupture designates the rupture with established presences. It serves notice on co-operation with firm realities whether they be positive (plainly legitimating) or negative (plainly negating). The rupture is already rupture with this positive-negative model, rupture with plain affirmation as well as with plain negation in order finally to [more]

It is not always easy to make sense of love, as absurd as it seems, as resistant against every meaning. One is based on a rift, which Jacques Derrida describes as the difference between the who (qui) and what (quoi) of love: “Is love the love of someone [more]

Can there be an equality of subjects who can rely on nothing but the absence of substantial guarantees? What would this community of equals be? Would it not be at first the community of those who participate in the incommensurable? In the incommensurable which is another name of [more]

We can speak of a subject once the willingness appears to substitute for the esotericism of the quest of self-discovery a self-invention; that is to say, once a little of the courage to address oneself as something other than an object comes into play. With the death of [more]

Within the horizon of Michel Foucault’s analytic of finitude that supplants the “metaphysics of the infinity,” Gilles Deleuze writes, man is “traversed by an essential disparity, almost an alienation by rights, separated from itself by its words, by its works, and by its desires.”  It would be wrong [more]

Theodor W. Adorno never ceases to insist on the possibility of aesthetic autonomy in its opening toward its own impossibility. This renders him the advocate of a possible impossibility. Part and parcel of art is its “rejection of empirical reality.” Art departs the “empirical world” not by fleeing [more]

What I call a collective is the dream-figure of a lawless community of subjects who put their trust in nothing but their singularity and ontological loneliness, a trust which, like all trust, is without ground, blind. One could formulate the difference between the subject of we-subjectivity and the [more]

Marguerite Duras: La mer est  une force illimitée où le ‚moi’, le regard se noient, en se perdant pour retrouver leur propre identité.

1. Art is that which generates a concept of art. 2. The artwork implies a surpassing and transgressing of its factual conditions. 3. An artwork is something other than (merely) a document of its times. 4. Art articulates a difference from the texture of facts. 5. The artwork [more]

Theodor W. Adorno quotes the passage from Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics where the latter says of the artist that, “as a free subject,” he seeks to “strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness,” impressing on it “the seal of his interiority” in order to “enjoy in the [more]

To be a subject means to surpass and transgress the horizon of facts in order—in the assertion of a new form, the form of the subject—to give space to the experience of a primordial inner turmoil, which is the truth of the subject. I call this inner turmoil [more]

The subject is not a self which can be certain of itself as it could be certain of a fact. It is the  scene of self-experience which proves to be the experience of inconsistency insofar as it experiences the lack of a stable self as the condition of [more]

The aporia leads towards a threshold which the human subject cannot cross. Contrary to the idea that with it, loves comes to an end, aporia is a part of love. The aporias of love prove to be the conditions of its possibility, if love means to resist narcissistic [more]

How is the place of the work within the social field to be determined? How do the production of art, art criticism, art studies, and philosophy relate to one another? Is there a political commission for an artwork? Is art necessarily critical—critical of institutions, the market, ideology? Or [more]

“The human being”, says Martin Heidegger, is “in its essence itself a katastrophé […] – a turning-about which turns it away from its own essence. Among beings, the human being is a complete, unique catastrophe”. The meaning of this statement, of course, resides in the circumstance that the [more]

The experience of art is the experience of the conditions of its possibility as much as of the affront to these conditions the work represents. The concept of art condenses the paradox of a performance that must turn against its own possibilities for the sake of the impossible [more]

Chaos has the status of a radical outside, but it shares the one territory with the subject which is the world of immanence, the world without an outside, i.e. without an exterior.

To philosophize means to take on the identity of a subject without subjectivity (and that means also without identity). It means to resist the comfortable indolence of securing one’s identity in cultural, social, political and other models. Philosophy is resistance through opening up. And what the philosophical subject [more]

An object that fascinates—what kind of object is that?  What does fascination mean?  Fascinationm marks  the split between  subject  and  object.  To be precise,  it  confronts the  subject with its objectness. It heterogenizes the subject, reconciles  it with basic heterogeny. Fascination objectifies the subject;  it hollows  it out, [more]

If the entire onto-theological tradition, at least in the orthodox reading, has privileged an onto-theology of two worlds over the alternative of immanence, if there is in it a turn in faith toward a beyond and toward a life after life, then its structure can be identified as [more]

In the history of philosophy, chaos has many names. It is the divine, the noumenal and the sublime, the untimely, the uncanny, nothingness or freedom, the infinite, becoming or the exterior, contingency and pure multiplicity, the dimension of the ethical, of the mystical, of the miracle and the [more]

The diagram stands between order and chaos – just like the subject. It is wrong to think that the object did not do anything but to oppose chaos. As long as we define chaos as universal incommensurability, which, instead of describing a mad world, indicates this one and [more]

From the outset philosophy has caused anxiety. What caused the anxiety was the lack of anxiety, philosophy’s courage, because philosophy is a movement full of risks. It is a movement of love (philía, philein) requiring courage and resolve. People have tried to subject it to ridicule. People were [more]

In a commentary on Deleuze’s last essay, “L’immanence: une vie” (1995), Giorgio Agamben arrives at the following diagrammatic conclusio, which schematizes a certain sequence in modern philosophy:   TRANSCENDENCE                                       [more]

Like any acceleration, the head over heels dynamics of love hold the risk of missing and drifting. Love is experience and experiment. It is a test of reality. In this way it suspends the established values and brings forth new categories. Contingency delimits the space of determined events [more]

Art “refuses definition,” writes Theodor W. Adorno, but it equally calls for one. Art hardly exists other than as the work on its concept, the work of determining what art is and ought to be. In opening up toward what it has long been embedded in, the dimension [more]

In his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno quotes the passage from Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics where the earlier philosopher says of the artist that, “as a free subject,” he attempts “to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness” in order to impress “the seal of his interiority” [more]

In his lectures on Philosophical Terminology, Theodor W. Adorno insists on the connection of identity and the thinking of identity with the principle of synthesis and the concepts of the whole and the one vis-à-vis the dangerous uncontrollability of the non-identical, the diffuse and the many which resists [more]

The artwork has the power to disturb through clarity, to suspend the subject’s certainties, “to suspend reality,” as Gilles Deleuze once said. There has never been art that entered into a coalition with reality. Art is resistance against that which is, not in the name of what ought [more]

The question concerning the subject (What is a subject?) — the question concerning art, the question concerning writing, the question concerning philosophy (What is art? What is writing? What is philosophy?) must open itself to the question of blindness. It is as if there were a subject — [more]

The definition of art has to open up to the question concerning the museum. If one reads the article which Georges Bataille contributed in 1930 in the Documents on the concept of the Museum, one can only be disappointed. From Bataille, the theorist of the heterogeneous, one would [more]

The demystification of the world has led to the mystification of the demystified reality. Enlightenment has engendered its own obscurantism; facts are now the new religion. They bring consistency and reliability. That is the meaning of the word and its function: to guarantee familiarity. The opening toward the [more]

Heiner Müller: “Experience can only be had blindly.”

In On Certainty from 1949-1951, Ludwig Wittgenstein showed that there is no reasonable ground not to put one’s trust in what is groundless. The language game and the form of life on which our social and scientific evidence is based are without ground. They themselves cannot be grounded [more]

The work of art stands its ground amid a world to which it cannot assimilate. The act of creatio is not so much a heroic act as one of embarrassment. “Go with art into your very own narrowness. And set yourself free”: the sentence from Paul Celan’s Meridian speech [more]

To affirm the other as being constitutive for me means to touch his or her truth, which seems to be inseparable from mine. Coincidence of two aporiae, because this is a bonding of two incommensurabilities: the incommensurability of the other as the other and the incommensurability of a [more]

The definition of art that I attempt to give culminates in the assertion that art asserts a consistency owed to its opening to inconsistency.

Theodor W. Adorno never ceases to insist on the possibility of aesthetic autonomy in its opening toward its own impossibility. This renders him the advocate of a possible impossibility. Part and parcel of art is its “rejection of empirical reality.” Art departs the “empirical world” not by fleeing [more]

There is art only in the here and now of the one world without exit: the world of fact. Art is not an escape from it; it frames its aspiration to autonomy amid the world of determiners in order to escape in an opening toward heteronomy its phantasmatic [more]

Flying implies all the risks of lifting off, of speed and crashing. Flying demands the courage to an unknown movement into the unknown. Flying is the form of movement of philosophy, of another philosophy withdrawn from evidence, from light and enlightenment, from the imperatives of facts, from the [more]

Established reality is supposed to be familiar but it is uncanny.

Part and parcel of the infinity of love—which names its punctual intensity, not its temporal extension—is that the loving subject is not immortal = finite. The finitude of its life gives meaning to the infinity of love. I love, I die: this certainty can give rise to love, [more]

The work of art draws its power from its resistance against forces that reduce it to an effect of what already exists.

Neither the romantic narrative, nor its disenchantment in the postromantic sequence of a love identifying as a phantasm hit its aporetic core, which identifies them as lived difference. With Alain Badiou, love can be thought as „encounter and thinking“, as „asymmetric egalitarian becoming“ or „procedure for a truth [more]

Michel Foucault consigns thinking to its indeterminate future as much as its complex arché, “an unthought which [thinking] contains entirely.” Let us quote the following important passage in full: “The unthought (whatever name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shrivelled-up nature or a stratified [more]

Transcendence is the essence of a subject without essence. The subject is the ecstatic subject of a primordial self-transgression and self-surpassing. It is the subject of this ontological nakedness and poverty, to be nothing but a subject of emptiness, indeterminacy and lack of essence. This subject appears in [more]

That the world is indefinite means that it remains open towards its inconsistency which describes its state of immanence that Maurice Blanchot has associated with the topoi of an empty past. Only in the opening towards non-determinacy can there be freedom, in the acceptance of the contingent character [more]

Do art and philosophy share a concept of experience of this sort, one aiming at an event that is excluded, by definition, from the apparatus of established realities but emerges, as what is excluded, in the space of fact? How can we assert such an emergence without hypostatizing [more]

In 1971 Marguerite Duras met Francis Bacon in Paris. They spoke about painting and writing. It was a matter of the experience of accident shared by writing and painting. Bacon said, “I do not draw. I begin by placing a lot of spots (taches). I wait for what [more]

The hyperborean subject inhabits the universe of facts without assimilating itself, like the hypochondriac subject, to the order of facts. The world of facts is the world of objective unfreedom, the world of determinants, laws, definitions. It is the world that has already been decided, the universe of [more]

Chaos is the lack of ground or the abyss. It is the dimension which forever precedes the Logos, reason, language and communication. The Logos refers to this abyss. It points to it. The abyss of the Logos cannot be thought as ground. The Logos glides over its own [more]

To think the childhood of philosophy, Greece, means not much more than pointing to the Mediterranean and to the peoples which triumphed over it. Of the philosopher it can be said what Hegel said of the Hellenic people: that they are at home on the water of the [more]

Art exists only as an assertion of form which accelerates beyond what is well-known, while refusing to allow itself to be assimilated to any kind of nature. The alliance with the natural is necessarily regressive. It enters a coalition with a metaphysics of the origin which is at [more]

There is an irreconcilable difference between art and culture, and so art must needs defend itself against culture and its imperatives. He is an artist who engenders a conception of art that has never yet existed in this precise form. The only works of art that count are [more]