Diana Taylor: ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (2020)

“In ¡Presente! Diana Taylor asks what it means to be physically and politically present in situations where it seems that nothing can be done. As much an act, a word, an attitude, a theoretical intervention, and a performance pedagogy, Taylor maps ¡presente! at work in scenarios ranging from conquest, through colonial enactments and resistance movements, to present moments of capitalist extractivism and forced migration in the Americas. ¡Presente!—present among, with, and to; a walking and talking with others; an ontological and epistemic reflection on presence and subjectivity as participatory and relational, founded on mutual recognition—requires rethinking and unlearning in ways that challenge colonial epistemologies. Showing how knowledge is not something to be harvested but a process of being, knowing, and acting with others, Taylor models a way for scholarship to be present in political struggles.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2020
Dissident Acts series
ISBN 9781478009443, 1478009446
xii+329 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (31 MB, updated on 2021-4-13)

Jean Baudrillard: Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2007/2009)

“Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination,” writes French theorist Jean Baudrillard in Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? In this, one of the last texts written before his death in 2007, Baudrillard meditates poignantly on the question of disappearance. Throughout, he weaves an intricate set of variations on his theme, ranging from the potential disappearance of humanity as a result of the fulfillment of its goal of world mastery to the vanishing of reality due to the continual transmutation of the real into the virtual. Along the way, he takes in the more conventional question of the philosophical “subject,” whose disappearance has, in his view, been caused by a “pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality.”

Interspersed throughout the text are photographs by Alain Willaume that help illustrate Baudrillard’s argument. Baudrillard insists that with disappearance, strange things happen—some things that were eliminated or repressed may return in destructive viral forms— yet at the same time, he reminds us that disappearance has a positive aspect, as a “vital dimension” of the existence of things.

Originally published under the title Pourquoi tout n’a-t-il pas déjà disparu ?, Editions de L’Herne, 2007
Translated by Chris Turner
With images by Alain Willaume
Publisher Seagull, 2009
The French List series
ISBN 1906497400, 9781906497408
72 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-29)