Acknowledgments

No book is written in isolation: first and foremost, my thanks go both to my students and to my co-teachers, Henriette Gunkel and Philipp Hanke, of seminars held on ‘Queer Aesthetics and Affect Politics’ (2020/21) and on ‘Queer Aesthetics as Documentations of the Precarious’ (2021/22) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. The lively discussions we had in these seminars have shown me once again how important it is, in today’s rapidly changing techno-social conditions, to think together about queer cinema. Not only have the content and production of films and videos and the technology of images all changed, so too have their circulation and reception. Even film festivals, a key focus of queer cinema and so eminently important for the queer community right from the start, have changed as a result of digitalization, to say nothing of the Covid pandemic and its aftermath. We were shown this most vividly by a visit to the Hamburg International Queer Film Festival in autumn 2022, undertaken as part of a seminar on ‘Queer Aesthetics and the Polis/Politics of the Festival’. I would like to thank Henriette Gunkel and our guest professor Zethu Matebeni for their joint reflections.

Many thanks go to Penelope Deutscher for her words of motivation and generous support in revising each of the chapters, as well as for our many discussions on queer aesthetics and queer temporalities. In the same spirit, I am grateful to Katrin Pahl for her critical and productive reading of the Introduction. I am indebted, too, to Gertrud Koch, Christiane Voss, and Lorenz Engel for their inspiring, helpful and productive discussions. Monique David-Ménard’s friendship and her critical examination of the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis have been a major inspiration to me for many years. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to Flavia Barbier and Bettina Baltensweiler for their permission to use the photograph Wollgraffiti Zürich 2012, Besuch bei Max Bill as the cover image for this volume, and I should like to thank Bettina in particular for the many insightful and thought-provoking discussions that we have shared about art and politics.

My deepest thanks go to Christoph Holzhey, Manuele Gragnolati, and all the team at the ICI Berlin Press, notably Claudia Peppel and Louisa Elderton. Their generous interest in my work was key to my decision to write this book. The discussions I had with Christoph Holzhey about each part of the book have guided my revisions and helped me to achieve so much more clarity in the overall argumentation.

Special thanks go to Steven Corcoran for his careful and insightful copyediting. I would like further to thank each of the translators of earlier versions of select chapters: William Wheeler (Chapter 1), Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Chapter 2), and Michael Lipkin (Chapter 3).

Part of the Introduction and earlier versions of Chapters 1, 2, and 3 were first published in German under the title Queeres Post-Cinema: Yael Bartana, Su Friedrich, Sharon Hayes (Berlin: August Verlag, 2017). Many thanks to the publisher for permission to include the relevant material in the present volume, but above all to Maria Muhle, who provided the decisive impetus for the completion of the first German version.

The aforementioned translation of Chapter 1 by William Wheeler has appeared in Poison and Poisoning in Science, Fiction and Cinema, edited by Heike Kippel, Bettina Wahrig, and Anke Zechner (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

A German version of Chapter 4 has been published in Queeres Kino/Queere Ästhetiken als Dokumentationen des Prekären, edited by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Philipp Hanke (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.37050/​ci-22>.

Finally, a version of Chapter 5 has been published in Anthropologies of Entanglements: Media and Modes of Existence, edited by Christiane Voss, Lorenz Engell, and Tim Othold (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).