And if you think of Brick, for instance, and you say to Brick, “What do you want Brick?” And Brick says to you, “I like an Arch.” – Louis Kahn [1] A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. [...]
Gabriel Tarde's Monadology and Sociology
Monadology and Sociology, Tarde’s 1893 book, is now available from re.press, as an open access pdf.
Gabriel Tarde’s Monadology and Sociology, originally published in 1893, is a remarkable and unclassifiable book. It sets out a theory of ‘universal sociology’, which aims to explicate the essentially social nature of all phenomena, including the behaviour of atoms, stars, chemical substances and living beings. He argues that all of nature consists of elements animated by belief and desire, which form social aggregates analogous to those of human societies and institutions. In developing this central insight, Tarde outlines a metaphysical system which builds on both classical rationalist philosophy and the latest scientific theories of the time, in a speculative synthesis of extraordinary range and power.
From Semiotext(e):
Gilles Deleuze from A to Z
Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet and Pierre-Andre Boutang
Translated by Charles J. Stivale
Although Gilles Deleuze never wanted a film to be made about him, he agreed to Claire Parnet’s proposal to film a series of conversations in which each letter of the alphabet would evoke a word: From A (as in Animal) to Z (as in Zigzag). These DVDs, elegantly transtlated and subtitled in English, make these conversations available for English-speaking audiences for the first time.
In dialogue with Parnet (a journalist and former student of Deleuze), the philosopher exhibited the modest and thrilling transparency that his seminal works (such as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus) reveal. The sessions were taped when Deleuze was already terminally ill; he and Parnet agreed that the film would not be shown publicly until after his death. The awareness of mortalityfloats through the dialogues, making them not just intellectually stimulating but also emotionally engaging. Because Parnet knew Deleuze so well, she was able to draw him out—as no one else had—to what might be the 1001st plateau: a place of brilliance, rigor, and charm.
In “A as in Animal,” for example, Deleuze vents his hatred of pets: “A bark,” he declares, “really seems to me the stupidest cry.” Instead, he praises the tick: “… in a nature teeming with life, [the tick] extracts three things”: light, smell, and touch. This, he claims, in a sense is philosophy. “And that is your life’s dream?” Parnet wryly asks. “That’s what constitutes a world,” he replies.
CFP: Log 25, “Reclaim Resi[lience]stance, edited by Francois Roche.
Issue 12 of Parrhesia, which includes essays by Meillassoux, Lyotard and others, is available for download.
STUDIO Magazine Issue#01 "[from] CRISIS [to]"
RRC studio architects is proud to announce you that STUDIO Magazine Issue#01 is OUT now!
The theme of this issue -[from] CRISIS [to]- is the Crisis as a turning point, as a decision moment that involves also the urban contexts.
Contributions have been written by several international architects, critics, photographers and artists: Bernd Upmeyer (MONU magazine), Domenico di Siena (Ecosistema Urbano), Marco Introini and others.You can download the Magazine at STUDIO.
Horizonte – Journal for Architecture, No. 4, “Building Matters” is now available in Germany and from Motto.
Read more (in deutscher Sprache) at Arch+.
The Artists Documentation Program (ADP) interviews artists and their close associates in order to gain a better understanding of their materials, working techniques, and intent for conservation of their works. All interviews are conducted by conservators in a museum or studio setting.
NOTE: access to the interviews requires registration.
Peter Sloterdijk's Bubbles, the First Volume of Spheres: Microspherology
From Semiotext(e):
Bubbles
Spheres Volume I: Microspherology
Peter Sloterdijk
Translated by Wieland Hoban
If I had to place a sign of my own at the entrance to this trilogy, it would be this: let no one enter who is unwilling to praise transference and to refute loneliness.
—from Bubbles
An epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk’s three-volume, 2,500-page Spheres is the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Rejecting the century’s predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, a self-described “student of the air,” reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial and immunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment, Sloterdijk is able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, René Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille into a morphology of shared, or multipolar, dwelling—identifying the question of being as one bound up with the aerial technology of architectonics and anthropogenesis.
Sloterdijk describes Bubbles, the first volume of Spheres, as a general theory of the structures that allow couplings—or as the book’s original intended subtitle put it, an “archeology of the intimate.” Bubbles includes a wide array of images, not to illustrate Sloterdijk’s discourse, but to offer a spatial and visual “parallel narrative” to his exploration of bubbles.
Written over the course of a decade, the Spheres trilogy has waited another decade for its much-anticipated English translation from Semiotext(e). Volumes II, Globes, and III, Foam, will be published in the coming seasons.
About the Author
Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947) is one of the best known and widely read German intellectuals writing today. His 1983 publication of Critique of Cynical Reason (published in English in 1988) became the best-selling German book of philosophy since World War II. He became president of the State Academy of Design at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in 2001. He has been cohost of a discussion program, Der Philosophische Quartett (Philosophical Quartet) on German television since 2002.
Quiz: Which Metaphor Best Captures Your Personal Brand of Post-Modern Ennui?
Answer: A bathroom in a hipster bar from which the mirror has been removed because it caused excessive self-consciousness in its patrons
I just discovered that Herzog & De Meuron finally have an official website. However, after a few minutes frustratingly clicking around, I have to say I preferred the obstinacy mystery of the firm sans site.