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The Case for Reduction Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger

Critical discourse hardly knows a more devastating charge against theories, technologies, or structures than that of being reductive. Yet, expansion and growth cannot fare any better today. This volume suspends anti-reductionist reflexes to focus on the experiences and practices of different kinds of reduction, their generative potentials, ethics, and politics. Can their violences be contained and their benefits transported to other contexts?
2022 | Cultural Inquiry, 25 | 30 € (hc) | 16 € (pb)

Errans: Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer

Today’s critical discourses and theorizing vanguards agree on the importance of getting lost, of failure, of erring — as do life coaches and business gurus. The taste for a departure from progress and other teleologies, the fascination with disorder, unfocused modes of attention, or improvisational performances cut across wide swaths of scholarly and activist discourses, practices in the arts, but also in business, warfare, and politics. Yet often the laudible failures are only those that are redeemed by subsequent successes. What could it mean to think errancy beyond such restrictions? And what would a radical critique of productivity, success, and fixed determination look like that doesn’t collapse into the infamous ‘I would prefer not to’? This volume looks for an answer in the complicated word field branching and stretching from the Latin errāre. Its contributions explore the implications of embracing error, randomness, failure, non-teleological temporalities across different disciplines, discourses, and practices, with critical attention to the ambivalences such an impossible embrace generates.
2022 | Cultural Inquiry, 24 | 29 € (hc) | 14 € (pb)

Openness in Medieval Europe Ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum

This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.
2022 | Cultural Inquiry, 23 | 32 € (hc) | 17 € (pb)

Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory Ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini

Over the last twenty years, reenactment has been appropriated by both contemporary artistic production and art-theoretical discourse, becoming a distinctive strategy to engage with history and memory. As a critical act of repetition, which is never neutral in reactualizing the past, it has established unconventional modes of historicization and narration. Collecting work by artists, scholars, curators, and museum administrators, the volume investigates reenactment's potential for a (re)activation of layered temporal experiences, and its value as an ongoing interpretative and political gesture performed in the present with an eye to the future. Its contributions discuss the mobilization of archives in the struggle for inclusiveness and cultural revisionism; the role of the body in the presentification and rehabilitation of past events and (impermanent) objects; the question of authenticity and originality in artistic practice, art history, as well as in museum collections and conservation practices.
2022 | Cultural Inquiry, 21 | 35 € (hc) | 22 € (pb)

Queeres Kino / Queere Ästhetiken als Dokumentationen des Prekären Ed. by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Philipp Hanke

Wenn queeres Kino und queere Ästhetiken das Prekäre dokumentieren, dann intendiert dies auch eine Revolution im Symbolischen. Oder anders formuliert: ihr ästhetisches Unterfangen, Rahmungen zum Vorschein zu bringen, ohne sie zu wiederholen, erweist sich, wie die hier versammelten Beiträge namhafter Film-, Medien- und Queertheoretiker*innen zeigen, als prekäre Form der Dokumentation. Die Beiträge bieten dabei zugleich einen Einblick in den gegenwärtigen Stand des queeren Kinos – seiner Filme, Videos und visuellen Installationen.
2021 | Cultural Inquiry, 22 | 25 € (pb) | 39 € (hc)

The Work of World Literature Ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson

The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.
2021 | Cultural Inquiry, 19 | 12.50 € (pb) | 25.00 € (hc)

Materialism and Politics Ed. by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva

Is materialism still relevant to critically think politics? Throughout modernity, the concept of materialism was associated with fatalism and naturalism, when it was not simply dismissed as heresy and atheism. In the nineteenth century, materialism evolved into a central concept of progressive politics, reappearing again in the past decades through renewed Marxist and Spinoza-based approaches, New Materialism, and feminist discourses. This volume inquires these contrasting uses from theoretical and historical perspectives.
2021 | Cultural Inquiry, 20 | 18 € (pb) | 29 € (hc)

Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue

Opening to passion as an unsettling, transformative force; extending desire to the text, expanding the self, and dissolving its boundaries; imagining pleasures outside the norm and intensifying them; overcoming loss and reaching beyond death; being loyal to oneself and defying productivity, resolution, and cohesion while embracing paradox, non-linearity, incompletion. These are some of the possibilities of lyric that this book explores by reading Petrarch’s vernacular poetry in dialogue with that of other poets, including Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Shakespeare. In the Epilogue, the poet Antonella Anedda Angioy engages with Ossip Mandel’štam and Paul Celan’s dialogue with Petrarch and extends it into the present.
2020 | Cultural Inquiry, 18 | 12 € (pb) | 24 € (hc)

Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer

Weathering is atmospheric, geological, temporal, transformative. It implies exposure to the elements and processes of wearing down, disintegration, or accrued patina. Weathering can also denote the ways in which subjects and objects resist and pass through storms and adversity. This volume contemplates weathering across many fields and disciplines; its contributions examine various surfaces, environments, scales, temporalities, and vulnerabilities. What does it mean to weather or withstand? Who or what is able to pass through safely? What is lost or gained in the process?
2020 | Cultural Inquiry, 17 | 24 € (pb)

Claude Lefort Dante’s Modernity: An Introduction to the Monarchia Ed. by Christiane Frey, Manuele Gragnolati, Christoph F. E. Holzhey, and Arnd Wedemeyer

One of the most prominent political philosophers of the twentieth century reads Dante’s Monarchia, showing the surprising relevance of this radical fourteenth-century treatise that defends the necessity of universal monarchy and its independence from the Church for modern political theory. Judith Revel’s accompanying essay submits Lefort’s encounter with Dante to a transformative mis/reading and ties it to current debates on the question of the common.
2020 | Cultural Inquiry, 16 | 9.50 € (pb)