4 documents
# 57
Democrisis: Notes on the Capitalist Imaginary of Europe
Sotirios Bahtsetzis
With his statement that “Eurozone voters have been blackmailed and betrayed,” journalist and economist Philippe Legrain provided us with a concise account of the political situation in Europe a week before the May 2014 European elections. 1 Legrain’s article suggests a direct link between the mismanagement of the sovereign debt crisis on the level of political discourse, and the rise of both xenophobia and Euroscepticism across the continent. 2 On a political and economic level, certainly…
e-flux Journal
Posted: September 1, 2014
Category
Democracy
Subjects
Crisis, Europe, Money & Finance, Ultranationalism
# 35
Eikonomia: Notes on Economy and the Labor of Art
Sotirios Bahtsetzis
Much has been said about the dangerous impact of a superficial, lifestyle-based, money-oriented culture: it has often been invoked as the explanation for why people become passive, docile, and easy to manipulate irrespective of how disadvantageous their economic conditions are. Following the illustrative critique of two eminent proponents of this criticism, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the culture of our times is endangered by the uncontrollable expansion of the culture industry into…
e-flux Journal
Posted: May 1, 2012
Category
Economy, Labor & Work
Subjects
Autonomy, Commodification, Post-capitalism
# 30
The Time That Remains, Part II: How to Repeat the Avant-Garde
Sotirios Bahtsetzis
Continued from “The Time That Remains, Part I: On Contemporary Nihilism” in issue 28.
To live is therefore also, always, to experience in the past the eternal amplitude of a present.
—Alain Badiou 1
Is there a way out from the compulsive repetition that is symptomatic of our times? Boris Groys has defined the specific artistic gesture of the universalistic, messianic avant-garde through what he calls “the weak gesture of avant-garde” in opposition to the strong…
e-flux Journal
Posted: December 1, 2011
Category
Avant-Garde, Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Philosophy
Subjects
Temporality
# 28
The Time That Remains, Part I: On Contemporary Nihilism
Sotirios Bahtsetzis
Art is the distinctive countermovement to nihilism.
—Martin Heidegger 1
In the late 1970s Aldo Rossi wrote: “Now it seems to me that everything has already been seen; when I design I repeat, and in the observation of things there is also the observation of memory . ” 2 If, for Rossi, architecture that comes from the typological reorganization of forms can only produce memories, then these memories are associated with the condition of a continuous awareness of the…
e-flux Journal
Posted: October 1, 2011
Category
Aesthetics, Modernism, Contemporary Art
Subjects
Temporality, Subjectivity, Nihilism