Essay

The Photograph Looked Back at Me is a series of prose miniatures, each born from an image the author cannot turn away from: a ghostly plant printed in a book about Chernobyl; a miner's face obscured by smoke, hanging in a Kyiv gallery; a picture of Katja Petrowskaja's parents, from an old family album.

Charles Esche traces twenty-five years spent inside European art institutions to ask what lies beyond their limits, and where the search begins again.

In this essai, architect Jean-Patrice Calori offers us a remarkable display of curiosity and the ability to draw connections. He approaches the history of his discipline, not as an endless sea, but rather as material that can be manipulated, appropriated, reshaped and interpreted: he transforms history into the raw material of a project, into a living substance.

An insect theory of media to understand our media devices and our technological modernity.

A comprehensive study of the impact of the life sciences—primarily botany—and their expansion in the 19th century on the thought and work of Gustave Moreau.

A groundbreaking study of the broader impact of the various theories of colour psychology on visual cultures at the turn of the 20th century.

An exploration of the encounter, in the early 1960s, between the controversial—yet now world-renowned—writer Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) and Tatsumi Hijikata's (1928–1986) Dance of Darkness (Ankoku butō). This paradoxical connection remains little known and is rarely mentioned in the chronologies and biographies of this turbulent man of letters.

D. N. Rodowick examines the complex relationships between contemporary art and cinema, around questions of movement, image, time, and history.

A counter-history of contemporary art, where experience becomes form, and aesthetics is redefined as a radical relationship with the living.

A fascinating journey through the long history of media before the age of mass media.

Through an analysis of the social and cultural history of the imperative of "creativity" that now shapes our lives, Andreas Reckwitz examines the paradoxical promises of aesthetic capitalism.

Prospective et futurologie, published in 1978 and republished here for the first time, is the first—and still unrivaled—overview of the experimental architectural movements of the 1960s and 1970s: through a reflection on alternative ways of living, Michel Ragon raises the question—more relevant than ever—of how architecture can adapt to the transformations of industrial society in the face of technological advances.

An analysis of the processes by which certain seemingly innocuous popular forms of modernity are used to serve fascism, through the example of synchronized dancing, which was imbued with the symbolism of Nazi domination.

Bill Evans / Scott LaFaro / Paul Motian (1959-1961): the story of one of the most original, dazzling and influential trios in jazz history, and of the recording of three legendary albums (new edition).

Karenna Gore posits a future for the design practices that works within the living and intelligent design of Earth.

How the transition to fossil fuels entailed an intensification of ongoing processes of racialization.

Sylvia Sasse explores and analyzes subversive affirmation as a critical practice in different political systems.

A new, collaborative, and educational translation of Plato's Symposium, designed to both encourage a fresh approach to the text and to explore new issues through it.

Two sharp accounts by Ana Teixeira Pinto and Abeera Khan on the current ideological shifts and the subsequent forms of violence they produce.

An essay on the figure of the writer-

A visual history of the Folly Cove Designers (1941-1969)—one of America's longest-running block printing collectives.

How does artificial intelligence affect the way we represent reality? Is it still photography? By contextualising contemporary uses of photography generated or analysed with the help of artificial intelligence, this book offers a critical reflection on the aesthetic, political and theoretical stakes of these technologies.

A series of reflections on research and fieldwork that situate the conditions of contemporary exile, refugeehood, migration, and community building at the margins of society.

Departing from a series of concrete projects and international exhibitions, this book considers the conditions of artistic research and related discourse via twenty significant concepts.

Reissue of a primordial work in the history of the art of the countries of North Africa and West Asia, a major reflection on the artistic currents of the Arab world in the 20th century which responds more than ever, thirty years after its first publication, to the need to decolonize the knowledge.

Reissue of a primordial work in the history of the art of the countries of North Africa and West Asia, a major reflection on the artistic currents of the Arab world in the 20th century which responds more than ever, thirty years after its first publication, to the need to decolonize the knowledge.

A painter-poet reflects on Laozi and Zhuangzi "from the heart" in an illustrated volume featuring his ink drawings.

A great Chinese painter, calligrapher, and poet, Fan Zeng conveys the spirit of literati painting in these studies, which draw on classical texts and his own experience with the painting.

Mathilde Roman explores contemporary video installation practices through the lens of theater and the performing arts.

A heterodox and uniquely incisive model of ideology critique, Furio Jesi's work offers us a powerful insight into some of the deeper determinants of Western political rationality and its stigmatizing, inferiorizing, and racializing dynamics.

Research-based art has become one of the defining genres of the century. Taking the collective Forensic Architecture as a case study, Emily Watlington, senior editor at Art in America, argues against what she sees as the dangerous slippage between artistic research and alternative facts.

Anne-Marie Morice traces the "urban drift" carried out in the northern suburbs of Paris in the 1950s by members of the Lettrist International, and later by those of the nascent Situationist International, led by Guy Debord, and analyzes how this way of experiencing urban space influenced both their artistic practice and their theoretical work.

The first French translation of one of the seminal texts on the decolonization of art.

A powerful and highly original psychoanalytical, philosophical, and political exploration of the dimensions of sensitivity, the unconscious, and psychedelia in the context of an experience based on medicinal plants (peyote, mushrooms, and ayahuasca) and psychotropic drugs, in the wake of Félix Guattari's thinking.

A philosophical perspective on photographic images.

The edition offers a new approach to what Ines Weizman names "documentary architecture," meaning that to write about the history of a building is also to map the world in which it is located.

The origins, scope, and legacy of Duchamp's revolution in the visual arts.

An illustrated sociological essay on women's emancipation through sexuality.

Poetry and Revolution brings together three previously untranslated essays by the Czechoslovak avant-garde theorist Karel Teige (1900-1951), accompanied by a polemical introduction by Peter Zusi placing Teige's thinking in the context of debates on "Western" and "Eastern" Marxism.

An aesthetic and political reflection on contemporary monumental and commemorative art, at a time of critical revision of history.

Jonathan Crary decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography.

The French translation of a seminal work considered to have sparked the "affective turn" in philosophy and cultural theory.

A deeply heartfelt and courageous reflection on the challenges and urgencies of listening to oneself.

J. Logan Smilges's essay "Bad Listeners" argues that traditional ideas about "good listening" in feminist and rhetorical theory can exclude neurodivergent and disabled people. Smilges challenges the assumption that ethical, caring, or politically responsible people should always be able and willing to listen. This leads to an important reframing of "bad listening" as an issue of access.

A personal reflection on fragmentation, language, and place.

A reflection on the autonomy and eternity of art by Canadian writer Madeleine Thien, based on a mural in the Thousand Buddha Grottoes of Bezeklik, China.

The Tenant is a monographic critical essay by Marie Canet. It is the first text to directly address the connections between McKenzie's work, pornography, and special effects.

The Tenant is a monographic critical essay by Marie Canet. It is the first text to directly address the connections between McKenzie's work, pornography, and special effects.