Armen Avanessian

Suhail Malik

Genealogies of Speculation looks to break the impasse between the innovations of speculative thought and the dominant strands of 20th century anti-foundationalist philosophy. Challenging emerging paradigms of philosophical history, this text re-evaluates different theoretical and political traditions such as feminism, literary theory, social geography and political theory after the speculative turn in philosophy. With contributions from leading writers in contemporary thought this book is a crucial resource for studying cultural and art-theory and continental philosophy.

Materialism and Subjectivity since Structuralism

Genealogies of Speculation

Thomas Keenan

Tirdad Zolghadr

It is difficult to imagine making claims for human rights without using images. For better or worse, images of protest, evidence, and assertion are the lingua franca of struggles for justice today. And they seem to come in a flood, more and more, day and night. But through which channels does the torrent pass? The Flood of Rights examines the pathways through which these images and ideas circulate—routes that do not merely enable, but actually shape human-rights claims and their conceptual background. What are the technologies and languages that structure the global distribution of humanism and universalism, and how do they leave their mark on these ideas themselves? Which narratives and imageries have proven easier to export and import, and whose interests are at stake in the configurations in question? The Flood of Rights draws on a conference of the same name, organized by the LUMA Foundation and Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, which took place in Arles, France, in 2013. Copublished with the LUMA Foundation and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York Contributors Amanda Beech, Rony Brauman, David Campbell, Olivia Custer, Rosalyn Deutsche, Thomas Keenan, Eric Kluitenberg, David Levine, Suhail Malik, Sohrab Mohebbi, Sharon Sliwinski, Hito Steyerl, Bernard Stiegler, Tirdad Zolghadr

The Flood of Rights

An incisive analysis of neoliberalism's intensely futural composition of time—the pretermodern, a condition of overwhelmed modernity. The modern vision was characterized by a future that had the potential to transform the present through human foresight and planning. With the depletion of modernity, however, the institutions and operations of the “contemporary” offer new configurations of time-sequencing and history. Theses such as “posthistory,” “presentism,” or the “cancellation of the future” diagnose our postmodern condition as that of a progressless contemporaneity haunted by the ghosts of futures past. In this incisive intervention, Suhail Malik contends that such claims fatally misidentify the rigorously postmodern time-innovations of neoliberalism, which instead enable a torrent of futures, a condition of superfluous and multitudinous newness in which futures are continually enacted upon and factored into a “speculative present”. In ContraContemporary, Malik seeks to describe this intensely futural composition of time, which is at once true to the premises of modernity yet far outstrips its anthropometric limitations—a condition of overwhelmed modernity that Malik calls the pretermodern. Malik demonstrates how the fate of the avant-garde and its successors in contemporary art indicates the shifting registers of futurity and the new, confronts the violent colonial origins of global modernity and their transmutation into postmodern racisms, and radicalizes the analysis of “risk societies.” He contests the widespread image of a postmodernity deserted by the future, presenting instead a trenchant vision of the task of constructing an art and a politics adequate to the speculative present. When the future is happening now. Everywhere. All the time.

Modernity's Unknown Future

ContraContemporary

It is very hard for me to explain that dark period of my life. After I came out of the party, I ran. I ran a lot; I don’t know how many kilometers I had covered, or who was crying, me or my heart. Then I found myself on a bridge on that terrible night, and as I looked around, it was dark, calm, and silent. Hence I started crying again. I couldn’t control the tears which were rolling down my cheeks. Even my heart was drenched in the storm. Why am I crying? I asked myself. I was unable to understand what I should go back for. As I looked around, it was barren, all barren like my life, and finally, I moved towards my residence. As I closed my door a sudden thought struck my mind. If he does come, how do I welcome him? Look at the madness I am still in! As I entered my flat I found that everything was wrecked. My bedroom was open, and I rushed towards it. The mattress was torn open, the bedsheet was in tatters. The mirror was shattered. Everything was ruined, and I thought to call the police. Then suddenly I saw a diary on the corner of the bed and a red “Pierre Cardin” pen. Then I realized that all this wreckage was done by him. Each thing that we had shared was either broken or torn by him. And he had left that diary for me to understand what had happened to him and his journey till then. But was he interested in my journey and how I lived it without him?

Suhail Malik

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