Diversity of Aesthetics - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and associate editor of e-flux journal. His work has appeared in Historical Materialism, Social Text, New Inquiry, AJ+ Subtext, Frieze, Bookforum.com, Roar Magazine, the Verso blog, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic. He is a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU where he is researching anti-eviction, squatting, and tenants’ movements as they relate to the production of social space.

Jose Rosales is an independent researcher and journalist based in Lisbon, Portugal. His work has appeared in e-flux notes, Lumpen: A Journal of Poor and Working Class Writers, and has contributed a chapter called “Communism As the Riddle Posed to History” in Double Binds of Neoliberalism (2022).

Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004, currently living and working in Palermo, Sicily.

Iman Ganji is a writer and scholar in exile and holds a PhD in Performance and Theatre Studies from Freie Universität Berlin. From 2004 to 2012, he lived in Tehran, where he worked as a translator, writer, and activist, cotranslating books by Spinoza, Marx, Benjamin, and others.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997; Norton, 2022); Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Norton, 2019), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Judy Grahn Prize for Lesbian Nonfiction, and the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and a University Professor.

Vicky Osterweil is a writer, organizer, and brick-mason based in Philadelphia. Her first book, In Defense of Looting, was an account of historical struggles for liberation in the United States. She has written about the intersections of film, politics and culture for a variety of outlets, including The Paris Review, Art in America, Al Jazeera America, The Baffler, Dissent, Lux Magazine, and The New Inquiry, where she was also a culture editor for many years. Her series on the political economy and cultural role of videogames, “Well Played,” which ran in Real Life Magazine from 2019–2020, won her the Blogger of the Year award from prestigious video game criticism outlet Critical Distance.

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The idea that our complicity robs us of the ability to say anything is bullshit. You can bite the hand that feeds you. In fact, you must bite the hand that feeds you. Are we all okay with normalizing McCarthyism? Is our complicity an extension of white liberal guilt? No! You’re supposed to say something anyway. You have to show up to the employee cafeteria and look at your boss like, “Yeah, that was me outside, how’s your day today?”
—Shellyne Rodriguez
 
There are many ways of seeing what communism could mean, some of which have become clearer today than in the past. At least over the past fifteen years, the idea of communism is no longer that of appropriating the means of production, because the means of production, along with what is being produced, are themselves destroying the planet. So this is already a revolution in the very foundations of the philosophical framework of materialism, which historical communism and the workers movement sought to realize as praxis. But this isn’t a riddle, it was a mistake from the very beginning and remains the structuring blind spot of Marxism and workerist ideologies.
— Claire Fontaine
 
Looting is direct action par excellence. But it is also a nearly irrecuperable aesthetic gesture against the police, whiteness, and the regime of property that gives those forces power and purpose. In revealing the innately ideological and social content of property ownership, in demonstrating that all that stands between us and plenty is a thin sheet of plate glass, looting destabilizes the ideological hold of whiteness, property, and capital, and it has done so since the enslaved looted themselves singly and en masse from the plantation.
—Vicky Osterweil