Zum modernen Selbstverständnis der Kunst gehörte es, gegebene Wissensbestände und Traditionen in Frage zu stellen. Heute übt sich Kunst vielfach in konformistischer Bestätigung des neoliberalen Zeitgeistes, vor allem dort, wo sie ihre eigene Radikalität verkennt. Was ist Gegenwartskunst? ist der Versuch, das Verhältnis von Kunst und Politik für unsere Gegenwart auf den Begriff zu bringen. Alexander García Düttmann gelingt es in seinem neuen Essay nicht nur, die Gegenwartskunst in ihrer Radikalität theoretisch zu fassen, sondern auch zu zeigen, wie sie (...) dazu dient, die politische Ideologie unserer Zeit zu verstärken: eine Ideologie, die eine wirkliche gesellschaftliche Veränderung hintertreibt. Das Buch führt so ins Zentrum der politisch-ästhetischen Debatten unserer Gegenwart"--Publisher's website. (shrink)

This chapter interrogates the figure “without soil” in relation to pivotal concerns in Theodor W. Adorno's thought. Freedom, the element of philosophy, proves itself as much in the conscious dismissal as in the rescuing return. The return is not that of something repressed, a claim suppressed by another claim, by the blank refusal to have anything to do with something. The fact that Adorno's thinking draws on dialectical motifs means that the conscious dismissal turns against what exists, against what is (...) merely natural, isolated, abstract in life; the life of the spirit that has freed itself from abstraction no longer sets itself in opposition to death. It no longer takes control of death as negativity and, for that very reason, no longer succumbs to it. If one wanted to revert to Kantian terminology, one could say that philosophy is concerned with neither inclination nor respect, but with favor. (shrink)

An Kunst teilnehmen heisst immer, sich der Kunst als Kunst bewusst zu sein und sich zugleich von ihrem Schein einnehmen zu lassen. Alexander García Düttmanns Buch ist der erste systematische Versuch, die Teilnahme an Kunst zu erklären und dadurch ein neues licht auf die Teilnahme an Politik zu werfen.

Von welchen Annahmen muss eine Ästhetik ausgehen, die nicht hinter der Komplexität der Kunst zurückbleiben will? Einerseits davon, dass Künstler erst wird, wem es gelingt, die ungewöhnliche Kraft aufzubringen oder die eigentümliche Fähigkeit zu entwickeln, alles zu bejahen, was ihn trifft und berührt, was er erleidet, was ihn schmerzt, reizt und verwundet. Es gibt nichts, was der Künstler von seiner Liebe ausschliessen könnte, wenn sich in seiner uneingeschränkten Bejahung eines Aussen eine aktive Zuwendung, Teilnahme und Sorge ausdrückt, die man Liebe (...) nennen kann. Das gilt noch für das Unerträgliche und das Unannehmbare, das Unfassbare, von dem man denken könnte, dass das Subjekt es verwerfen muss oder dass es dieses sogar traumatisiert. Der Künstler ist in diesem Sinn ein radikal promiskuitives Subjekt, nicht ein gegebenes empirisches und psychologisches Individuum, das eine Voraussetzung für die Erzeugung von Kunst bildet. (shrink)

Images, whether filmic or not, cannot be replaced by words. Yet words can make images. This is the thesis underlying So What, a collection of essays on filmmakers and artists, including Luchino Visconti, Orson Welles, Marguerite Duras, Hollis Frampton, and Agnes Martin.

Splendour and misery of exaggeration : an introduction -- Thinking as gesture : exaggeration and philosophy -- Trust me : exaggeration and enlightenment -- Odd moves : exaggeration and irony -- The violence of destruction : exaggeration and infinity -- ? and ? end? : exaggeration and politics -- Being guilty : exaggeration and factuality -- Flight simulator : exaggeration and trauma -- The obvious : exaggeration and self-evidence -- Blow job : exaggeration and institution -- Old opera : exaggeration (...) and art -- Life lines : exaggeration and event -- Lexical note. (shrink)

Though La parole donnee memoire et promisse, published in 1989 by Editions Galilee, was the first book Garcia Duttmann's (German, Middlesex U., England) wrote, and he has developed many of its ideas more fully in subsequent works, he has chosen to make few changes for the translation. He muses on the path towards toward sacred names, translating the thing, over-naming and melancholy, and apparitions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

A lavishly decorated handbook of medicine was conceived for the lay public on topics such as human health, healing, medicine, and household management.

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

We argue that C. Darwin and more recently W. Hennig worked at times under the simplifying assumption of an eternal biosphere. So motivated, we explicitly consider the consequences which follow mathematically from this assumption, and the infinite graphs it leads to. This assumption admits certain clusters of organisms which have some ideal theoretical properties of species, shining some light onto the species problem. We prove a dualization of a law of T.A. Knight and C. Darwin, and sketch a decomposition result (...) involving the internodons of D. Kornet, J. Metz and H. Schellinx. A further goal of this paper is to respond to B. Sturmfels’ question, “Can biology lead to new theorems?”. (shrink)

Data taken by the Mark II detector at the PEP storage ring was used to measure the rate of dilepton production in multihadronic events produced by e+e- annihilation at √s=29 GeV. We determine the probability that a hadron initially containing a b quark decays to a positive lepton to be 0.17-0.08+0.15, with 90% confidence level limits of 0.06 and 0.38. © 1990.

This paper discusses two passages from Alexander of Aphrodisias’s commentary on Aristotle’s _ Topics _ that are transmitted in Ps-Jābir’s _ Kitāb al-Nukhab _. It argues that the Arabic translation of Alexander’s commentary may have been made from a fuller version than what came down to us in Greek. Especially since the author(s) of the Jābir-corpus form a tradition different from the school of Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq (d. 873) and authors associated to the ‘Baghdad school’, whose earliest figure (...) is Abū Bishr Mattā b. Yūnus (d. 940), the Arabic fragments of Alexander’s commentary preserved in the _ Kitāb al-Nukhab _ promise to shed more light on the early reception of the _ Topics _ and the different contexts in which Aristotelian dialectic was studied in the Islamic world. (shrink)

Group selection is increasingly being viewed as an important force in human evolution. This paper examines the views of R.D. Alexander, one of the most influential thinkers about human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, on the subject of group selection. Alexander's general conception of evolution is based on the gene-centered approach of G.C. Williams, but he has also emphasized a potential role for group selection in the evolution of individual genomes and in human evolution. Alexander's views are (...) internally inconsistent and underestimate the importance of group selection. Specific themes that Alexander has developed in his account of human evolution are important but are best understood within the framework of multilevel selection theory. From this perspective, Alexander's views on moral systems are not the radical departure from conventional views that he claims, but remain radical in another way more compatible with conventional views. (shrink)

Among the characteristic features of Russian philosophy, there is its openness and connections with other realms of public consciousness. In the Middle Ages Orthodox religion was trying to take over the main functions of Russian philosophy. Philosophy was not just under the aegis of religion, as it was in Western Europe and Byzantium, but in its depths. Active philosophical life manifested itself under non-philosophical covers. Russian literature also is involved in philosophy. A plenty of a philosophical writers could doubtlessly be (...) called great. They are: Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, etc. The things that each of them has brought into philosophy are very different in size and direction. As a result of the openness of Russian philosophy appears a unique ideological element which borders on natural science. This element was philosophical on its nature, but it had a strong and sound ties with natural science. No less important for Russian philosophy its connection with historical science. Philosophical ideas and categories are involved in the study of historical events and processes. Historical science, enriched with philosophy, does not remain extraneous to it. Philosophical historians also influenced different sections of philosophy: philosophy of history, social and political philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophical anthropology… Russian philosophy penetrated into other spheres – music, painting, etc., where it was represented by quite significant figures, in particular – Alexander Scriabin, Nikolay Roerich. The philosophical views of Scriabin and Roerich were not limited to the framework of their theoretical, philosophical constructions. Artistic intuition embodied these constructions in the creation of art. Nowadays contacts of Russian philosophy in its various manifestations with other areas of intelligence also do not lose their attractiveness. (shrink)