From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.
From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.
If all things in the world can be considered as sources of aesthetic experience, then art no longer holds a privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject and the world, and any aesthetic discourse used to legitimize art must also necessarily serve to undermine it. Following his recent books Art Power and The Communist Postscript, in Going Public Boris Groys looks to escape entrenched aesthetic and sociological understandings of art--which always assume the position of the spectator, of the consumer. Let us instead consider art from the position of the producer, who does not ask what it looks like or where it comes from, but why it exists in the first place. Boris Groys is Professor at New York University and Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Design, Karlsruhe. He is the author of many books, including The Total Art of Stalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, Art Power, The Communist Postscript, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
Since Plato, philosophers have dreamed of establishing a rational state ruled through the power of language. In this radical and disturbing account of Soviet philosophy, Boris Groys argues that communism shares that dream and is best understood as an attempt to replace financial with linguistic bonds as the cement uniting society. The transformative power of language, the medium of equality, is the key to any new communist revolution.
In the early 20th century, art and its institutions came under critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. In an age of secularism and materialism, artworks would be understood as merely things among other things. This meant an attack on the techniques of realism, and the traditional mission of the museum, both designed shield a small class of objects from the entropic fate awaiting everything else-and the development of an approach that Boris Groys calls "direct realism": an art that would not produce objects, but practices that could enter the flow of time to live and die like the rest of us. But for more than a century now, every advance in this direction has been quickly followed by new means of preserving art's distinction. In this major new work, Groys, one of the world's leading art theorists, charts the paradoxes produced by this tension, which continues to structure the production and reception of new art. The internet, the latest medium through which artists have attempted to disavow this special status, inverts the most notorious consequence of early modernist developments. If the techniques of mechanical reproduction gave us objects without aura, digital production generates aura without objects, transforming all its materials into vanishing markers of the transitory present.
The public generally regards the media with suspicion and distrust. Therefore, the media's primary concern is to regain that trust through the production of sincerity. Advancing the field of media studies in a truly innovative way, Boris Groys focuses on the media's affect of sincerity and its manufacture of trust to appease skeptics. Groys identifies forms of media sincerity and its effect on politics, culture, society, and conceptions of the self. He relies on different philosophical writings thematizing the gaze of the other, from the theories of Heidegger, Sartre, Mauss, and Bataille to the poststructuralist formulations of Lacan and Derrida. He also considers media "states of exception" and their creation of effects of sincerity—a strategy that feeds the media's predilection for the extraordinary and the sensational, further fueling the public's suspicions. Emphasizing the media's production of emotion over the presentation (or lack thereof) of "facts," Groys launches a timely study boldly challenging the presumed authenticity of the media's worldview.
Philosophy is traditionally understood as the search for universal truths, and philosophers are supposed to transmit those truths beyond the limits of their own culture. But, today, we have become sceptical about the ability of an individual philosopher to engage in 'universal thinking', so philosophy seems to capitulate in the face of cultural relativism. In Introduction to Antiphilosophy, Boris Groys argues that modern 'antiphilosophy' does not pursue the universality of thought as its goal but proposes in its place the universality of life, material forces, social practices, passions, and experiences - angst, vitality, ecstasy, the gift, revolution, laughter or 'profane illumination' - and he analyses this shift from thought to life and action in the work of thinkers from Kierkegaard to Derrida, from Nietzsche to Benjamin. Ranging across the history of modern thought, Introduction to Antiphilosophy endeavours to liberate philosophy from the stereotypes that hinder its development.
A compelling intellectual biography of Stalin told through his personal library "[A] fascinating new study."--Michael O'Donnell, Wall Street Journal In this engaging life of the twentieth century's most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, this book explores all aspects of Stalin's tumultuous life and politics. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated, revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Based on his wide-ranging research in Russian archives, Roberts tells the story of the creation, fragmentation, and resurrection of Stalin's personal library. As a true believer in communist ideology, Stalin was a fanatical idealist who hated his enemies--the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors--but detested their ideas even more.
