John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros, Sergio Tischler (eds.): Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism (2009)

How can activists combat the political paralysis that characterizes the anti-dialectical theories of Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, without reverting to a dogmatic orthodoxy? This book explores solutions in the “negative dialectics” of Theodor Adorno.

The poststructuralist shift from dialectics to “difference” has been so popular that it becomes difficult to create meaningful revolutionary responses to neoliberalism. The contributors to this volume come from within the anti-capitalist movement, and close to the concerns expressed in Negri and Hardt’s Empire and Multitude. However, they argue forcefully and persuasively for a return to dialectics so a real-world, radical challenge to the current order can be constructed. This is a passionate call to arms for the anti-capitalist movement. It should be read by all engaged activists and students of political and critical theory.

Publisher Pluto Press, 2009
ISBN 0745328369, 9780745328362
Length 252 pages

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John Holloway: Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (2002)

“The series of demonstrations since Seattle have crystallised a new trend in left-wing politics. Popular support across the world for the Zapatista uprising and the enthusiasm which it has inspired has led to new types of protest movement that ground their actions on both Marxism and Anarchism. These movements are fighting for radical social change in terms that have nothing to do with the taking of state power. This is in clear opposition to the traditional Marxist theory of revolution which centres on taking state power. In this book, John Holloway asks how we can reformulate our understanding of revolution as the struggle against power, not for power.

After a century of failed attempts by revolutionary and reformist movements to bring about radical social change, the concept of revolution itself is in crisis. John Holloway opens up the theoretical debate, reposing some of the basic concepts of Marxism in a critical development of the subversive Marxist tradition represented by Adorno, Bloch and Lukacs, amongst others, and grounded in a rethinking of Marx’s concept of ‘fetishisation’– how doing is transformed into being.

The struggle for radical change, Holloway argues, far from being marginalised, is becoming more and more embedded in our everyday lives. Revolution today must be understood as a question, not as an answer.”

First published 2002
New edition
Publisher Pluto Press, 2005
ISBN 0745324665
237 pages

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Change the World without Taking Power (English, 2nd ed., 2002/2005, updated on 2017-1-2)
Cambiar el mundo sin tomar el poder (Spanish, 2005, added on 2017-1-2)

Domenico Quaranta (ed.): Ubermorgen.com (2009)

UBERMORGEN.COM is an artist duo created in Vienna, Austria, in 1999 by lizvlx and Hans Bernhard, a founder of etoy. Behind UBERMORGEN.COM we can find one of the most unmatchable identities – controversial and iconoclast – of what they call “the contemporary European techno-fine-art avant-garde”. Their open circuit of conceptual art, drawing, software art, pixelpainting, computer installations, net.art, sculpture and digital activism (media hacking) transforms their brand into a hybrid Gesamtkunstwerk.

This monograph is a first attempt to provide an overview of their hybrid body of work, that moves constantly between art and entertainment, mass communication and one-to-one experience, digital and physical; and to introduce their corporate identity, that is itself a work of art. Through projects such as [V]ote Auction, Psych|OS, Art Fid, Superenhanced and the recent monument to the e-commerce age known as The EKMRZ Trilogy, and trough contributions by the art critics Inke Arns and Domenico Quaranta and the legendary net.art duo Jodi.org, this book is also a veritable portrait of a future that is already here.

Edited by Domenico Quaranta
Texts by Domenico Quaranta, Inke Arns, Jodi.org
Published by FPEditions, Brescia, February 2009
160 x 225 mm / 6.3 x 8.9 in
ISBN: 978-88-903308-5-8
96 pages

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