On contemporaneity, after Agamben : ǂthe ǂconcept and its times

If the philosopher Alain Badiou asks of what present are we the living witnesses in philosophy today, the writing in this second volume of essays addresses a related question to works of art today: what art can (still) be at the time of a global existential crisis, in a world living at the edge of, if not inexorably moving toward, a final ecological catastrophe? In four essays the author turns to works of art she considers critical with regard to this question of art situating itself at the limit: the last film of Jean-Luc Godard, Adieu au langage; Pasolini's faux documentary, La Rabbia (Rage), a fragment of a Paul Celan poem, as questioned by Jacques Derrida, the plastic art of Abdel Abdemassad and Anselm Kiefer. She interrogates these chronologically disparate works neither as representations or diagnoses of a present in a change of epoch, a word in crisis or at the edge of a catastrophe, nor as works that are symptomatic of such times and worlds. Instead, the writing metaphorically 'listens to' voices that arrive from inside a world without an exit as exemplary responses to the question: what art can (still) be at such times, in such worlds? What creation - new gesture or performative or language - can be commensurate with the intensity of forces pressing against such presents? These are some of the questions that this second volume, under a borrowed sub-title from Giorgio Agamben, addresses to Art. In four essays - punctuated by shorter texts on Derrida's letters and Cixous' recent auto-fictional works - the writing patiently observes how each work in the small corpus gives a new sense to the term and is a singular creation of a unique instance of "contemporaneity." Who are our contemporaries today ? Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, or Giorgio Agamben, or the already neglected Althusser or Lacoue-Labarthe ? From among the thinkers of the last "great generation" of the past century, who are the precursors whose voice is strong enough to speak to our present today ? when the nature of time itself is uncertain: a time of "mutation" (Nancy), a "change of epoch" (Blanchot), an "epoch without an epoch" (Stiegler), or more catastrophically, the time of the geocide (Deguy) ? Is it Bataille (Inner Experience) or Blanchot (The Writing of the Disaster) who anticipates the future that is already our present ? Or Derrida who announced the unsurpassable dilemma of the law of hospitality ? Announced a future to be presented only as a “monstrosity” ? Or is it rather Deleuze, whose geo-philosophy already dispenses with the subject, privileges matter over spirit, and subordinates the great movements of peoples and animals, of history and revolution, the political and the social as relative, to the de- re-territorializing powers of the forces of the Earth ? Or again, is it not philosophy but rather art that measures up to the intensity of the forces pressing against us in the present ? The exhausted prose of Beckett, the broken verse of Celan ? The stammer of Artaud ? These are some of the questions that animate the writing in the aftermath of Agamben's influential essay What is the Contemporary ? Critical reflections in this the first of two volumes work toward re-opening the question of contemporaneity today, the concept and its time, its exigence and critical task, its actuality and actualizable possibility "Who are our contemporaries today? From among the thinkers of the last "great generation" of the past century, who are the precursors whose voice is strong enough to speak to our present today? Or again, is it not philosophy but rather art that measures up to the intensity of the forces pressing against us in the present? These are some of the questions that animate two volumes of critical essays written in the aftermath of Agamben's influential essay "What is the contemporary?" ... re-opening the question of contemporaneity today"--Page 4 of cover. Cover Title Page Copyright Contents If . . . Preface PART I Questions PART II My Contemporaries 1 Blanchot / Bataille Excursus: The Impossible 2 Artaud / Deleuze 2 Celan / Hölderlin / Kurtág 3 Die Welt ist fort: József Attila, Jacques Derrida, Paul Celan PART III Geophilosophy 1 World Earth Planet 2 Geophilosophy PART IV Appendix Of the Mother Tongue – With / After Hélène Cixous Letters of Jacques Derrida: Postscript to “The (False) Gifts of Writing” Bibliography Back Cover