Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art

Introduction by Joseph Backstein, Daniel Birnbaum, Sven-Olov Wallenstein

Contributions by Giorgio Agamben, Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Boris Groys, Mikhail Iampolski, Boris Kagarlitzky, Chantal Mouffe, Molly Nesbit, Valery Podoroga, Jacques Rancière, Mikhail Ryklin, Saskia Sassen, Bernard Stiegler

Thinking Worlds brings together contributions from a two-stage symposium organized in connection with the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. These essays address questions of the sense and purpose of the “event” in contemporary artistic culture, of the current status of philosophy and aesthetic theory, and of the political significance of artistic interventions. How should we situate the status of art and its critical discourses with respect to global political changes, to the market, and to the suspicion that art is now a part of the society of the spectacle, whose scope and power by far extends earlier forms of commodity culture?

Co-published by Interros Publishing Program, Moscow