Capitalist Modernity

Joseph Beuys’ installation Plight (1985) forcefully avows the Nazi genocide by means of negative presentation. The work culminates a collective artistic investigation of negative sculptural strategies for representing traumatic history, opened by the Nouveaux Realistes under the impact of Alain Resnais’ documentary film Nuit et Brouillard. This article for Nordic Journal of Aesthetics outlines this history and analyzes Plight in the context of the ‘after Auschwitz’ crisis of representation and traditional culture theorized by Theodor W. Adorno. For Adorno, Auschwitz demonstrated threats to autonomous subjectivity posed by tendencies unfolding within the global social process of modernity itself. Reflecting on the fate of music, poetry and literature under these conditions, Adorno advocated a hermetic art of silence and dissonance, as exemplified by Paul Celan and above all Samuel Beckett. This article shows that in the visual arts, too, the genocidal violence of World War II was confronted with analogous strategies of indirection. In Plight, Beuys would successfully synthesize John Cage’s symbolic demolitions of traditional music and the investigations of negative presentation carried out in sculpture by Arman and Daniel Spoerri.
keywords Beuys,Negativepresentation,Adorno

These twelve interconnected essays probe the dense historical knots binding terror, power, and the aesthetic sublime, and trace transformations in art and critical theory in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2nd edition)

This paper is based on three fundamental axes. The first axis is Öcalan’s analysis of capitalism and his critique of capitalist modernity. In this context, I will touch on points where Öcalan on the one side and Karl Marx, Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, who influenced Öcalan’s theoretical world, on the other side con- and diverge. The second axis consists of Öcalan’s analysis of economy, definition of economic society and mechanisms within his theses of democratic modernity. Finally, this paper discusses fundamental questions and problem areas that have risen in discussions on communal economy, which is based on the free life paradigm that rests on communality, ecology and women’s freedom.

Resumen. Desde hace décadas hasta la actualidad, Centroamérica ha atravesado una violencia en contra de su autodeterminación, resultando en la muerte, desaparición y desplazamiento de un sinnúmero de personas. En el caso de Guatemala, se llegó a efectuar lo que se califica de un genocidio en contra de la población maya. A través de un análisis de la novela Insensatez (2004), del escritor salvadoreño nacido en Honduras, Horacio Castellanos Moya, se intentará dilucidar tanto el origen ontológico de dicha violencia y lo que esta revela con respecto a la naturaleza humana como los efectos, entre los que se destaca el desplazamiento geográfico y existencial, que puede tener en sus víctimas. Para lograr este cometido, se emplearán las ideas de Bolívar Echeverría, Sigmund Freud y Georges Bataille, entre otros.

Abstract. For decades up to the present, Central America has undergone violence in opposition to its self-determination, resulting in the death, disappearance and displacement of countless people. In the case of Guatemala, what would be described as a genocide was carried out against its Mayan population. Through an analysis of the novel Insensatez (2004), by the Salvadoran writer born in Honduras, Horacio Castellanos Moya, I will try to elucidate both the ontological origin of this violence and what it reveals with respect to human nature and the effects, among which geographical and existential displacement stands out, it can have on its victims. To achieve this goal, I will use the ideas of Bolívar Echeverría, Sigmund Freud and Georges Bataille, among others.

Two different sociopolitical projects of nation formation seem to be in praxis in Kurdistan simultaneously: The Kurdistan Region of Iraq aspires to be an independent nation-state, while the movement led by the Kurdistan Workers' Party advocates a democratic confederal project. How did this bifurcation arise? By putting Abdullah Öcalan's interpretation of nationalism and capitalist modernity in dialogue with existing theories of nationalism, I argue that this bifurcation resulted from a difference in scaling the root causes of the Kurdish question: The former project imagines emancipation through state formation within capitalist modernity, while the latter problematises capitalist modernity itself. The modular and hegemonic expansion of nationalism and the nation-state along with capitalist modernity has been countered in Mesopotamia by politico-social multiplicity. This has given rise to the particular structural dynamics that underlie a “recurring failure” in state formation. The bifurcation in question here has emerged interactively against this background.

Co-author: Iain Boal. This contribution to Camera Atomica, John O'Brian, ed. (London: Black Dog Publishing and Art Gallery of Ontario, 2015) constellates quotations, descriptions of social facts, and photographic images of various nuclear calculators. The result is a critical perspective on the history of nuclearism and its social contexts.

This essay considers the US-led so-called war on terror through the lenses of capitalist modernity and the aesthetic category of the sublime. It began as a talk at the 2007 conference The Sublime Now at Tate Britain. It was published and developed in several versions over the following years in Left Curve and Static 7. This revised version was published in Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska (eds.), The Sublime Now (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp. 133-154.

This essay, added as chapter eleven of the second, softcover edition of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, ISBN 978-0-230-11048-9), develops the category of "enforcement" in the context of the capitalist modernity and its ruined myths of automatic progress, as well as the post-1945 transformation of the modernist state into a Weapons of Mass Destruction security regime grounded in terror.