Arne De Boever

Reconsiders exceptionalism between aesthetics and politics Here, Arne De Boever proposes the notion of aesthetic exceptionalism to describe the widespread belief that art and artists are exceptional. Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism challenges that belief by focusing on the sovereign artist as genius, as well as the original artwork as the foundation of the art market. Engaging with sculpture, conceptual artwork, and painting by emerging and established artists, De Boever proposes a worldly, democratic notion of unexceptional art as an antidote to the problems of aesthetic exceptionalism. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism

Warren Neidich

The psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism

The first sustained exploration of Simondon's work to be published in English. This collection of essays, including one by Simondon himself, outlines the central tenets of Simondon's thought, the implication of his thought for numerous disciplines and his relationship to other thinkers such as Heidegger, Deleuze and Canguilhem.Complete with a contextualising introduction and a glossary of technical terms, it offers an entry point to this important thinker and will appeal to people working in philosophy, philosophy of science, media studies, social theory and political philosophy.Gilbert Simondon's work has recently come to prominence in America and around the Anglophone world, having been of great importance in France for many years.

Being and Technology

Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology

If the September 11 terror attacks opened up an era of crises and exceptions of which we are yet to see the end, it is perhaps not surprising that care has emerged in the early twenty-first century as a key political issue. This book approaches contemporary narratives of care through the lens of a growing body of theoretical writings on biopolitics. Through close-readings of J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions, and Tom McCarthy's Remainder, it seeks to reframe debates about realism in the novel ranging from Ian Watt to Zadie Smith as engagements with the novel's biopolitical origins: its relation to pastoral care, the camps, and the welfare state. Within such an understanding of the novel, what possibilities for a critical aesthetics of existence does the contemporary novel include?

Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel

Published on the occasion of the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) conference in 2013, this volume collects papers presented at the first Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism conference in Los Angeles (2012). Philosophers, critical theorists, media theorists, art historians, architects and artists including Jonathan Beller, Franco Bifo Berardi, Arne de Boever, Jodi Dean, Warren Neidich, Patricia Pisters, Jason Smith, Tiziana Terranova, and Bruce Wexler discuss cognitive capitalism as it relates to the conditions of mind and brain in the world of advanced telecommunication, data mining and social relations.

Part One

This issue brings together three lectures on aesthetics delivered by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler in Los Angeles in 2011 with articles by scholars of Stiegler's work. Aesthetics, understood as the theoretical investigation of sensibility, has been central to Stiegler's work since the mid-1990s. The lectures featured here explicitly link Stiegler's interest in sensibility to aesthetic theory proper as well as to art history. In "The Proletarianization of Sensibility," "Kant, Art, and Time," and "The Quarrel of the Amateurs," Stiegler expounds his philosophy of technics and its effects on human sensibility, centering on how the figure of the amateur--who loves what he or she does--must be recovered from beneath the ruins of technical history. The other contributors engage the topics covered in the lectures, including the figure of the amateur, cinema, the digital, and extinction. Contributors. Stephen Barker, Ed Cohen, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Arne De Boever, Beno�t Dillet, Alexander R. Galloway, Mark B. N. Hansen, Jason R. LaRivi�re, Gerald Moore, Daniel Ross, Bernard Stiegler

Arne De Boever

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