Gilles Deleuze: What Is Grounding? (1956-57/2015) [FR, EN]

“What is Grounding? is Gilles Deleuze’s first seminar, and is distinguished in that, rather than “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his offspring, yet monstrous”, the work focuses instead on the question of grounding, defined both as “the sufficient reason for concrete entities”, and “the point of departure for philosophy”, in translator Arjen Kleinherenbrink’s terms. Rather than foregrounding method, in which human subjective experience remains primary, here Deleuze affirms the centrality of system, of things and the relations between things.”

Translated, introduced, and annotated by Arjen Kleinherenbrink
Edited by Tony Yanick, Jason Adams & Mohammad Salemy
Publisher &&& Publishing, Grand Rapids, MI, 2015
Mémoires involontaire series, 1
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License
ISBN 9780692454541
185 pages

Publisher

Qu’est-ce que fonder? (French, 1956-57, HTML)
What is Grounding? (English, 2015, PDF)

Major Waldemar Fydrych: Lives of the Orange Men: A Biographical History of the Polish Orange Alternative Movement (2014)

“In Communist Poland, Surrealism Paints You!!!

Between 1981 and 1989 in Wroclaw Poland, in an atmosphere in which dissent was forbidden and martial law a reality, the art-activist Orange Alternative movement developed and deployed their “socialist sur-realism” in absurd street-painting and large-scale performances comprising tens of thousands of people dressed as dwarves, in an effort to destabilize the Communist government. It worked. Beginning with the ‘dialectical painting’ of dwarves onto the patches of white paint all over the city’s walls, which uncannily marked the censorship of opposition slogans, the group moved on to both stage happenings and over-enthusiastically embrace official Soviet festivals in a way that transformed both of these into mass expressions of dissent. They illegally restaged the mass spectacle of the storming of the Winter Palace on the anniversary of the October Revolution using their own homemade tanks; organized patriotic gatherings in which anyone waving red flags or wearing red (or eating red borscht, or covering oneself in ketchup) was arrested; and inspired other Orange Alternative groups to appear across the country. Although the group existed to the left of the mainstream opposition of Solidarity, their art was a key, acknowledged factor in the overthrow of the Communist government.

Lives of the Orange Men tells the story of the movement’s main protagonists, and is the first stand-alone English-language account of the Orange Alternative, written autobiographically by is central figure, and featuring an appendix of newly translated key texts including Major’s “Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism,” a timeline of every Orange Alternative happening, and a new foreword from the Yes Men.”

Foreword by the Yes Men
Edited by Gavin Grindon
Translated by David French
Publisher Minor Compositions, 2014
Open Access
ISBN 9781570272691
328 pages

Review: Stewart Home (ArtReview, 2014).

Publisher

PDF, PDF (3 MB)

See also other publications about the Orange Alternative

Foucault / Blanchot: Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside / Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him (1966/1986–) [FR, ES, EN, GLG, CZ, SR, BR-PT, PT, HU, RU]

“In these two essays, novelist/essayist Maurice Blanchot and philosopher Michel Foucault reflect on each other’s work and develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth. The two texts present reflections on writing, language, and representation which question the status of the author/subject and explore the notion of a ‘neutral’ voice that arises from the realm of the ‘outside.'”

Foucault’s essay first published as “La pensée du dehors”, Critique 229 (June 1966), pp 523-546. Blanchot’s essay first published as Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine, Fata morgana, Paris, 1986.

English edition
Translated by Brian Massumi (F) and Jeffrey Mehlman (B)
Publisher Zone Books, New York, 1987
ISBN 0942299027, 9780942299021
109 pages

Foucault’s essay
La pensée du dehors (sur Maurice Blanchot) (French, 1966/1994)
El pensamiento del afuera (Spanish, trans. Graciela Ortiz, 1986)
Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside (English, trans. Brian Massumi, 1987)
El pensamiento del afuera (Galician, trans. Manuel Arranz Lázaro, 1988/1997)
Myšlení vnějšku (Czech, trans. Miroslav Petříček, 1996/2003)
Mišljenje spoljašnjosti (Serbian, trans. Vladimir Milisavljević, 2005)
O pensamento do exterior (Brazilian Portuguese, trans. Inês Autran Dourado Barbosa, 2009)

Blanchot’s essay
Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine (French, 1986)
Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him (English, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, 1987)
Foucault como o imagino (Portuguese, trans. Miguel Serras Perreira and Ana Luiza Faria, 1987)
Michel Foucault, tal y como lo imagino (Spanish, 1992, HTML)
Michel Foucault – ahogy én látom (Hungarian, trans. Mihancsik Zsófia, 1997, HTML)
Mishel Fuko, kakim ya ego sebe predstavlyayu (Russian, trans. V.E. Lapitsky, 2002, DJVU)

For more from Foucault see Monoskop wiki.