Coronavirus and Philosophers (2020) [IT, EN, ES]
Filed under dossier | Tags: · biology, biopolitics, community, contagion, democracy, pandemic, philosophy, politics, quarantine, state of exception, virus
Debate on the current Coronavirus (COVID-19) events and the state of exception sparkled by Giorgio Agamben’s article with contributions from Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, Sergio Benvenuto, Divya Dwivedi, Shaj Mohan, Rocco Ronchi, Massimo de Carolis, and others, in the Italian journal Antinomie. Included is an excerpt from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish on the measures taken in the wake of a plague in the 17th century.
English translations of selected texts have been published by the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.
An expanded edition in Spanish was edited by Pablo Amadeo and published by ASPO (Aislamiento Social Preventivo y Obligatorio).
Paradoxia epidemica (Italian, HTML)
Coronavirus and Philosophers (English, Mar 2020, HTML, subsequent texts)
Sopa de Wuhan (Spanish, 29 Mar 2020, PDF, added on 2020-4-18)
Siegfried Ebeling: Der Raum als Membran (1926–) [German]
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, bauhaus, biology, body
“Time and again Der Raum als Membran [Space as Membrane], published by Siegfried Ebeling as a kind of pamphlet in 1926 in Dessau — the artistic and technological laboratory of modernism—, caught the attention of his contemporaries. We find a copy on the desk of Walter Gropius at the Dessau Bauhaus, another one with notes from the hand of the architect at the library of Mies van der Rohe. And again and again whenever the utopian Bauhaus is mentioned, the title page of Der Raum als Membran reappears. The author, however, along with his other attempts to develop a theory of biological architecture, has disappeared from common memory. Siegfried Ebeling died 1963 in Hamburg, impoverished and isolated from post-war architecture.”
Full title: Der Raum als Membran: ist ein analytisch-kritischer Beitrag zu Fragen zukünftiger Architektur, die über das nackte Bedürfnis hinausgeht und hiermit sich legen möchte in die gestaltende Hand aller Wissenschaft.
First published by C. Dünnhaupt, Dessau, 1926.
New edition
Afterword by Walter Scheiffele
Publisher Spector Books, Leipzig, 2016
Edition Bauhaus, 43
ISBN 9783944669465, 3944669460
47 pages
via Thebaus
Commentary: Walter Scheiffele (2010), Volker Frank (n.d., DE), Luis Palcorbo & Ines Martin-Robles (RA, 2014, ES), James Lowder (2015), Matina Kousidi (Architectural Review, 2015), Matina Kousidi (MD Journal, 2016), Georg Vrachliotis (Arch+, 2016, DE).
PDF (Afterword missing, 5 MB)
Comment (0)Matthew Fuller: How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, biology, brain, dreams, homeostasis, insomnia, sleep, unconscious
“Sleep is quite a popular activity, indeed most humans spend around a third of their lives asleep. However, cultural, political, or aesthetic thought tends to remain concerned with the interpretation and actions of those who are awake. How to Sleep argues instead that sleep is a complex vital phenomena with a dynamic aesthetic and biological consistency.
Arguing through examples drawn from contemporary, modern and renaissance art; from literature; film and computational media, and bringing these into relation with the history and findings of sleep science, this book argues for a new interplay between biology and culture. Meditations on sex, exhaustion, drugs, hormones and scientific instruments all play their part in this wide-ranging exposition of sleep as an ecology of interacting processes.
How to Sleep builds on the interlocking of theory, experience and experiment so that the text itself is a lively articulation of bodies, organs and the aesthetic systems that interact with them. This book won’t enhance your sleeping skills, but will give you something surprising to think about whilst being ostensibly awake.”
Publisher Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018
Lines series
ISBN 1474288707, 9781474288705
192 pages