Hal Foster: Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (2015)

“Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.

Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it.

Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.””

Publisher Verso, London and New York, 2015
ISBN 1784781460, 9781784781460
208 pages

Presentation and discussion (video, The Kitchen, NYC, Sep 2015)
Interview (John Douglas Millar, Mute, Nov 2015)

Reviews: Mark Steven (Affirmations 2015), Brian Dillon (Guardian 2015), Rachel Wetzler (ArtNews 2015).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML

Paget Henry: Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (2000)

“Caliban’s Reason introduces the general reader to Afro-Caribbean philosophy.

In this ground-breaking work, Paget Henry traces the roots of this discourse in traditional African thought and in the Christian and Enlightenment traditions of Western Europe. Since Afro-Caribbean thought is inherently hybrid in nature and marked by strong competition between its European and African orientations, Henry highlights its four main influences–traditional African philosophy, the Afro-Christian school, Poeticism and Historicism–as his organizing principle for discussion.

Offering a critical assessment of such writers as Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Edward Blyden, C.L.R. James and George Padmore, Caliban’s Reason renders a much-needed portrait of Afro-Caribbean philosophy and fills a significant gap in the field.”

Publisher Routledge, 2000
Africana Thought series
ISBN 0415926459, 9780415926454
xiii+304 pages

Reviews: H. Adlai Murdoch (SubStance, 2002), Claudette Anderson (Small Axe, 2002), Charles Mills (Phil Review, 2003), Clevis Headley (Int’l J of African Hist Studies, 2003), Leslie R. James (North Star, 2004).

Interview with author (Linda Martín Alcoff, 2003)

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF

Theory, Culture & Society 32(5-6): Transdisciplinary Problematics (2015)

This special issue of the journal contributes to current debates about disciplinarity and academic disciplines.

With texts by Peter Osborne, Michel Serres (introduced by Lucie Mercier), Étienne Balibar, David Cunningham, Nina Power, Félix Guattari (introduced by Andrew Goffey), Éric Alliez, Stella Sandford, Tuija Pulkkinen, and Lisa Baraitser.

Edited by Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford and Éric Alliez
Publisher Sage, September-November 2015
ISSN 0263-2764
231 pages

Publisher

PDF (2 MB)