Pasi Väliaho: Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema Circa 1900 (2010)

“In Mapping the Moving Image, Pasi Väliaho offers a compelling study of how the medium of film came to shape our experience and thinking of the world and ourselves. By locating the moving image in new ways of seeing and saying as manifest in the arts, science and philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century, the book redefines the cinema as one of the most important anthropological processes of modernity. Moving beyond the typical understanding of cinema based on optical and linguistic models, Mapping the Moving Image takes the notion of rhythm as its cue in conceptualizing the medium’s morphogenetic potentialities to generate affectivity, behaviour, and logics of sense. It provides a clear picture of how the forms of early film, while mobilizing bodily gestures and demanding intimate, affective engagement from the viewer, emerged in relation to bio-political investments in the body. The book also charts from a fresh perspective how the new gestural dynamics and visuality of the moving image fed into our thinking of time, memory and the unconscious.”

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2010
Film Culture in Transition series
ISBN 9089641408, 9789089641403
256 pages

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Tiqqun: Premiers matériaux pour une Théorie de la Jeune-Fille (1999/2001) [French]

Ceux qui ont réussi à s’aveugler sur le fait pourtant massif de la Jeune-Fille n’en sont pas à une cécité près : ouvrez n’importe quel magazine féminin, vous le verrez bien, la Jeune-Fille n’est pas toujours jeune, n’est pas toujours fille. Elle n’est que la figure de l’intégration totale à une totalité en désintégration. Elle « n’est bonne qu’à consommer ; du loisir ou du travail, qu’importe ».On ne la côtoie pas que sur papier glacé ; elle est le vecteur le plus abouti de la nouvelle organisation sociale et la forme la plus sophistiquée de la mutation anthropotechnique, car elle est la nouvelle physionomie du Capital. Le formatage jeune-filliste se généralise. Ainsi, quand d’aucuns protestent contre l’évidence que le monde n’est pas une marchandise, et d’ailleurs, eux non plus, ils feignent une virginité qui ne justifie que leur impuissance. Tiqqun ne veut ni de cette virginité ni de cette impuissance. Il ouvre dans ces Premiers matériaux la voie à une autre éducation sentimentale.

Originally published in Tiqqun 1, 1999
Revised edition
Publisher Éditions Mille et une nuits, September 2001
La Petite Collection series
ISBN 9782842055905
144 pages

publisher

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English edition (2010)
German edition (2009)

Tiqqun: Introduction to Civil War (2009/2010)

“Society is not in crisis, society is at an end. The things we used to take for granted have all been vaporized. Politics was one of these things, a Greek invention that condenses around an equation: to hold a position means to take sides, and to take sides means to unleash civil war. Civil war, position, sides—these were all one word in the Greek: stasis. If the history of the modern state in all its forms—absolute, liberal, welfare—has been the continuous attempt to ward off this stasis, the great novelty of contemporary imperial power is its embrace of civil war as a technique of governance and disorder as a means of maintaining control. Where the modern state was founded on the institution of the law and its constellation of divisions, exclusions, and repressions, imperial power has replaced them with a network of norms and apparatuses that conspire in the production of the biopolitical citizens of Empire.

In their first book available in English, Tiqqun explores the possibility of a new practice of communism, finding a foundation for an ontology of the common in the politics of friendship and the free play of forms-of-life. They see the ruins of society as the ideal setting for the construction of the community to come. In other words: the situation is excellent. Now is not the time to lose courage.”

Originally published in French by Éditions La Fabrique, 2009.

Translated by Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith
Publisher Semiotext(e), February 2010
Intervention series, 4
ISBN 1584350865, 9781584350866

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PDF (updated on 2017-6-26)