Marina Vishmidt Read Bio Collapse
Marina Vishmidt (1976–2024) was a critical theorist and public intellectual who built transversal connections between political groups, theoretical approaches, and institutional domains. Her work encompassed the fields of contemporary art, partisan Marxist theory, and academia, while in recent years she was increasingly vocal as an activist and labor organizer. Her books include Reproducing Autonomy (Mute, 2016, with Kerstin Stakemeier), Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value-Subjectivityin Art and Capital (Brill, 2018 / Haymarket, 2019), Speculation (MIT Press, 2023), and the forthcoming Infrastructural Critique (2025).
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In the current political climate, neither your average plutocrat nor cultural administrator is ready to tolerate the “autonomy” of cultural and educational institutions, whether in the vein of pluralism or partisanship, even when a genocide is unfolding before our eyes. (And forget about enjoining historical and geopolitical context.) This makes it ever more clear that autonomy’s philosophical aesthetics should be approached in a spirit of genealogical-critical inquiry but also contested—not just discursively, as it has been for years, but also practically.
