past.forward

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri: Empire [2003 // 410 p. // translation: Zivan Filippi]

Rare are the philosophical works whose significance transcends the narrow confines of the academic community, and “Empire” is exactly such a book. Since the book was published in the English original, many terms from it have become commonplace slogans and vocabulary in the analysis of our globalized world. Regardless of whether they accept the conclusions from the “Empire” or reject them: the general conclusion is that this is an absolutely unavoidable text for understanding modernity.

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri: Multitude [2009 // 404 p. // translation: Tomislav Medak]

“Multitude” by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt is a sequel to probably the most influential philosophical book of the last decade – “Empire”. Just as the emergence of “Empire” was historically shaped by the Paris demonstrations of the mid-1990s and NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, so the writing of the “Multitude” was determined by two events from the beginning of the new millennium – September 11 and the Iraq campaign. “Multitude” reshapes the Hardt and Negri’s fundamental empire-multitude dichotomy into a distinction between war and absolute democracy. This transformation takes place on the basis of a normative analysis of the concept of multitude, which simultaneously explicates a genuinely biopolitical notion of social creativity and the notion of a democratic-legitimate force.

Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life [2006 // 174 p. // translation: Mario Kopic]

Since its publication in Italian in 1995, Homo sacer has been translated into a multiple languages, and Agamben’s provocative and far-reaching theses have become the subject of frequent debate, greatly exceeding the domain of mere academic discussion. Continuing the works of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, in his book Agamben sets out a completely independent and radical diagnosis of modern democratic societies.

Jean-Luc Nancy: 2 Essays [2004 // 148 p. // translation: Tomislav Medak]

Jean-Luc Nancy is a professor of philosophy at Marc Bloch University of Strasbourg. He is the author of a large number of extremely influential studies, and certainly the most important thinker of the generation that inherited Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, or Lyotard. Given the importance of Nancy’s opinion, it can be said that it was with him that French philosophy stepped into the 21st century. “The Disavowed Community” (1986) is a text that caused the so-called political turn in philosophical deconstruction, and it presents a careful analysis of the concept of community in an age when all certainties are disappearing, most notably the certainty of sovereign political action. In Being Singular Plural (1996), Nancy brilliantly developed the thought of a community without substance. These trials struck the foundations of a new possible political opinion in a period of utter exhaustion of the meaning of community in the shadow of the fall of communism.

Eyal Weizman: The Least of All Possible Evils [2013 // 240 p. // translation: Domagoj Orlić]

At the heart of the book is the question of the transformation of space at a time when political, military and humanitarian action are being mixed to beyond recognition. The author detects the essence of such a fusion in advocating “lesser evil”, and in order to deconstruct the basic coordinates of this ideology, Weizman proposes a critical practice of a “forensic architecture”.

Franco Moretti: The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature [2015 // 189 p. // translation: Iva Gjurkin // edition in collaboration with Booksa]

Franco Moretti’s study traces the rise and fall of bourgeois culture through the period of early capitalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie to the position of the ruling class. By analyzing European art of the 18th and 19th centuries, above all the prose as the dominant literary forms, Moretti extracts key words and stylistic mechanisms that got sedimented in the new characteristics and contradictions of the habitus of the bourgeois-citizen. From the industrious master embodied in Robinson Crusoe, through the serious prose of the nineteenth century, conservative hegemony in Victorian England, national malformations on the periphery of the nascent capitalist system, to the radical self-criticism of the bourgeoisie in Ibsen’s dramatic cycle, the study symptomatically shows the reasons for the historical downfall of bourgeoisie culture.

Quentin Meillassoux: After Finitude: An Essay On The Necessity Of Contingency [2016 // 200 p. // translation: Vladimir Šeput]

What Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was for the 20th century After Finitude is for the beginning of the 21st century: a work of extraordinary boldness and elegance, which sees the power of philosophy in a new contemplation of infinity.

Little MaMa’s Editions

Alexander García-Düttmann: Friends and Foes. Absolutely [2003 // 64 p. // translation: Petar Milat]

Alexander García Düttmann is a Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Goldsmiths University in London. García Düttmann is without a doubt one of the more intriguing theorists of the middle generation, always mediating between different backgrounds and languages, philosophical disciplines and traditions. Between the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and deconstruction, between aesthetics and political theory, García Düttmann develops equally subtle and radical thinking, comparable in relevance to Giorgio Agamben or Jean-Luc Nancy.

Saskia Sassen: Counter-geographies of Globalization [2003 // 119 p. // translation: Danijela Sestrić, Jakov Vilović, Tomislav Medak]

Saskia Sassen is the most influential sociological analyst of urban transformation today and a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. Through her research on structural changes in urban space and the development of transnational networks in the global digital space that occurs with the processes of economic globalization, Sassen has offered a new model for perceiving global social geography.

Critical art ensemble: Molecular Invasion [2005 // 144 p. // translation: Tomislav Medak]

The Critical Art Ensemble is the most important and enduring artistic-theoretical phenomenon that emerged from the early days of new media activism. The progenitors of digital resistance, digital civil disobedience, in recent years have focused on resistance to the capitalization and privatization of wetware of the biological structure of the world through biotechnology, transgenic, and genetic engineering.

Ante Jerić: Along Malabo – Faces of Contemporary Thought [2016 // 196 p.]

The focus of this book is Malabou’s notion of indifference, defined as the simultaneous separation of “subject from world and world from subject”. While considering this important motif in Malabou’s work, Jerić’s book brings the readings of several authors, Malabou’s occasional companions, who in their work try to think of the indifference of either the world to man or man to the world.

Bruno Latour : Thought Exhibitions [2017 // 270 p. // translation: Iva Gjurkin]

A special segment that unites the many interests of Bruno Latour is represented by 3 large exhibitions that he set up together with the team around the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) from Karlsruhe, Germany: Iconoclash [2002], Making Things Public [2005] and Reset Modernity! [2016]. He calls them ‘thought exhibitions’ which represent an experimental format of contemporary theory and art, and this edition of ours brings Latour’s introductions/prefaces to the catalogs of these exhibitions.

Lina Gonan (editor): Irreconcilable – Radical Queer Against Gender, State and Capital [2018 // 112 p.]

A small textbook whose original intention was to become a collection of texts about the queer. We did not reflect too much on how this selection “intervenes in the academic field”, but we were guided by an ideological line when choosing, and the result is that the texts do not belong to what is mostly taken as a queer or gender theory. The authors of the selected texts are anarcho-terrorists, communist party activists, YouTubers, artists, and academics, and the fact that there are, among other things, proclamations for protests, manifestos from fanzines, etc. speaks something about the status of such positions.

Lee Edelman: Learning Nothing: Bad Education [2018 // 100 p. // translation: Hana and Srdjan Dvornik]

Taking queerness as one of the figures of ontological exclusion, this essay focuses on the question of how queerness affects an impossible pedagogy that would not teach us anything. Considering this topic, the author analyzes Pedro Almodovar’s “Poor Education” as a work that explores the consequences of Schiller’s conception of aesthetic education.

Nancy Fraser, Tithi Bhattacharya, Cinzia Arruzza: Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto [2019 // 92 p. // translation: Karolina Hrga and Martin Beroš / in collaboration with the Subversive Festival, the Institute of Political Ecology and the Center for Women’s Studies]

Looking back at the increasingly frequent mass protests and strikes of women over the past few years around the world, the authors of the Manifesto try to articulate demands for a 3rd feminist wave that would be straightforward, as a class formation, directed against the capitalist economic order.

Espi Tomičić: Your Love Is King [2020 // 64 pages]

Entering the space of the unspoken, the author tries to make up for years of emotional and physical distance from the mother whose death awaits, while facing the question of how to step out of the circle of helplessness that our parents drew for us or around us. This raises an extremely relevant ethical and political question: can we create a new matrix for our physical and social body, if the matrix with which we came into the world acts destructively on us, if it pushes us into addiction, depression, anxiety, self-hatred for years? What does it take for the new matrix of our physical and emotional selves to be different, to feel safe and accepted by ourselves? Is our only remaining freedom to be born again?

Basic

Lawrence Lessig: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace [2004 // 399 p. // translation: Zivan Filippi]

In 2000, Lawrence Lessig published the book “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” in which he demonstrated that the seemingly unregulated and open cyberspace is still a regulated space, since the possibility of regulation is introduced by the technological architecture itself – especially that architecture of identification, authentication and discrimination that builds beside the open and neutral data transmission protocols, and the one that the need for trade development and state control of behavior on the Network, will make it the dominant model of the Network. Potentially, the technology of freedom will be transformed into the technology of control. Therefore, we need to wake up from the delusion that the freedom of cyberspace is ensured by its architecture and to make political decisions about what freedoms we want to keep in cyberspace and how we can legally, normatively, technologically and economically secure them.

Marina Gržinić: Aesthetics of the Cyberworld and the Effects of Derealization [2005 // 228 p. // translation: Nebojsa Jovanovic]

“The Aesthetics of the Cyberworld and the Effects of Derealization” is a book that connects the contexts of aesthetics, politics, culture, and philosophy with theories of the virtual, new technologies, and media realities. The book actualizes the ways in which societies in transition objectify the penetration of liberal capital, issues concerning the post-socialist Eastern European paradigm, the time-space paradigm inherent in virtual realities, and new media technologies, and the dynamics of constituting a postmodern subject in a globalized world.

McKenzie Wark: A Hacker Manifesto [2006 // 154 p. // translation: Tomislav Medak]

McKenzie Wark, a renowned Australian digital culture theorist, is a professor of cultural and media studies at New School University in New York. The Hacker Manifesto is a book that reformulates Marx’s political-economic thought for the information age, a manifesto of exceptional poetic nerve, in the footsteps of Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, with which the new information age production class — the hacker class — articulates its own class consciousness.

Ian Bogost: How to Do Things With Videogames [2014 // 163 p. // translation: Tihana Bertek // edition in collaboration with Libra Libera magazine]

Video games are not what they used to be. As they moved from the periphery to the center of popular culture, they changed in countless ways; they have long since ceased to be limited to leisure, but are used in different contexts for different purposes. Nevertheless, the debate over video games has not changed much – the use of this medium is usually seen as either superficial entertainment, sometimes a reprehensible phenomenon as they allegedly encourage violence/isolation from society, or serious activity because in some versions they show features of “real” works of art. Ian Bogost starts from the assumption that video games should not be tried to fit into one of two categories, serious or superficial, high or popular, useful or useless, because that will not reveal their potentials to us. His study, beyond these categories, testifies for how games have “leaked” from our computers and become an integral part of our lives. As such, it is an ideal starting point for thinking about how to do things with video games.

Robert W. McChesney: Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy [Multimedia Institute & Faculty of Media and Communications // 2014 // 354 p. // translation: Domagoj Orlić]

“Digital Disconnect” is a fundamental reading for anyone who wants to understand where the Internet stands today and what its role in social change is. The digital revolution has entered the stage of world history promising radical democratization of the public sphere, true media pluralism, decentralization of social power, the disappearance of censorship, decommercialization of culture, and efficient markets without monopolies. Two decades later, the Internet’s communications space is concentrated in the “clouds’ ‘ of several monopolistic corporations, customer-based advertising has become the dominant business model, electronic communications are under constant surveillance by intelligence services, and news media are in an unprecedented crisis. The festival of democracy has turned into a festival of economic and political domination. Leading world expert on the political economy of communication Robert W. McChesney detects the reasons for the betrayed promises in the commercialization of the Internet due to changes in public policies during the 1990s and the consequent action of capitalist forces on its further development. The starting point for the analysis is a concise overview of the basic determinants of modern monopoly capitalism, the application of political economy insights into the field of media systems and an exhaustive history of commercialization, concentration, and monopolization of the Internet. The book concludes by considering the future of journalism as a key element for democracy and advocating the transformation of journalism and Internet communication into public goods. Without the transformation of media and communication, even wider social change will not be possible.

Kazimir Majorinc: As Powerful as One Can Be [2015 // 208 pages // Croatian edition]

Most programmers first encounter Lisp through one of the many quotes and aphorisms in which, sometimes beyond measure, the beauty, elegance, and power of language are emphasized. Thus, for example, the understanding of Lisp is called enlightenment; it is claimed that the programming experience in Lisp makes a programmer better, even if he has never used Lisp in his life. Mystical properties are attributed to the language, albeit jokingly; the god (or gods) programmed the world in Lisp, and the Lisp community is described as a cult. In the face of community fragmentation and the existence of numerous interpretations of basic ideas, one who wants to understand Lisp can hardly avoid the historical approach; getting acquainted with the ideas in the form they had when they arose. The most interesting period is, as a rule, the earliest. This book attempts to expose the emergence and development of Lisp’s main ideas during the first few years in which John McCarthy led the language development.

Mario Hibert: Digital Degrowth and Postdigital Goods [2018 // 152 p. // edition in cooperation with the Institute of Political Ecology] // PDF download

The book thematizes the ideas of critical librarianship, a specific form of professional culture based on the concept of social responsibility. Examining the credibility of the public mission of librarianship in a networked society underlined the importance of critical media literacy, especially critical Internet studies. Special emphasis is placed on aspects of information and communication commodification, articulation of epistemological and political controversies of the data society as well as management of the digital common good which in the light of degrowth theory offers librarianship a constructive imagary for the social reorganization of technology.

New Critical Theory [in collaboration with the Belgrade Circle]

Christoph Menke: Tragic Play [2008 // 280 p. // translation: Dalibor Davidovic]

The study of the contemporary German philosopher Christoph Menke “Tragic Play – Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett ” is a polemic with Hegel’s famous insight that tragedy is a thing of the past. Menke, on the contrary, wants to show that we misunderstand ourselves, our position and conditioning, as well as tragedy, its form and experience, when we believe that we are deprived of the experience of tragedy, that we have overcome the form of tragedy. Menke presents a critique of the “modern” belief that tragedy disappears in the modern age with an awareness of theatricality, and a thesis on the normative significance of tragedy for contemporary practice through analyzes of great works of classical and contemporary world literature: King Oedipus, Hamlet, Beckett’s The End of the Game, Müller’s Philoctetes and Strauss’s Ithaca. He presents a study that revises the importance of aesthetic experience for contemporary political thought, offering original philosophical, political-theoretical, and literary-theoretical insights to the reader. Christoph Menke is a professor of aesthetics at the University of Potsdam, where he also serves as director of the Center for Human Rights.

Hauke Brunkhorst: Solidarity [2004 // 280 p. // translation: Tomislav Medak]

In Solidarity, Brunkhorst provides a genealogy of the notion of “democratic solidarity” as a link between civil liberty and equality. Referring to history, political philosophy and political sociology, Brunkhorst discusses the historical development of the idea of universal, egalitarian citizenship and analyzes perspectives and critical potentials of democratic solidarity in the context of a global legal order dominated by economic globalization with no social integration. Hauke Brunkhorst is one of the prominent representatives of the normative political philosophy derived from the Frankfurt School. Brunkhorst is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Flensburg in Germany. He is the author of monographs on Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse and numerous studies on political philosophy.

Helmut Dubiel & Gabriel Motzkin [eds.]: The Lesser Evil Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices [2005 // 332 p. // translation: Aleksandra Kostić, Dušan Đorđević Mileusnić et al.]

Helmut Dubiel [Justus Liebig University, Giessen / Germany] and Gabriel Motzkin [Hebrew University, Jerusalem] gathered in this volume the work of an international group of prominent intellectuals. The book uses a comparative approach to analyze the practices of twenty centuries of genocide, in the name of future-oriented memory, but not through the production of a new national myth or global symbol, but in a transnational process of determining and accepting the past.

Visual course

Jacques Rancière: Bela Tarr, the Time After [2015 // 104 p. // translation: Sana Peric]

Jacques Rancière, as a thinker of emancipation, has in recent years turned to the study of the relationship between time and art – whether it is the life of art in historical time or time as the material of artistic creation. But Rancière’s analyzes do not stand on this issue as something that is important only for artistic practice, but the philosopher connects it with his previous thoughts on democracy and equality, thus opening an intellectual horizon that can be imagined in the time of freedom. The starting point is the essay “Béla Tarr, the Time After”, about the famous Hungarian director.

Jacques Rancière: Modern Times – Essays on Temporality in Art and Politics [2017 // 168 p. // premiere edition, in cooperation with the Yugoslavia Edition]

Modern times is a book in which Rancière presents his general view of time in a systematic and synthetic way, but also a book in which he points to a common time or moments of emancipation. They are perfectly exemplified by the figure of the wave: between inactivity and activity, between someone before and someone after, there is a common sea full of movements and moments ready to break the horizon of a predictable, cemented present. Modern Times is jointly published by the Multimedia Institute and the Yugoslavia Edition, and the texts in the book are based on lectures given by Rancière in the cities of former Yugoslavia in recent years.

Georges Didi-Huberman: Bark [2012 // 56 p. // translation: Ksenija Stevanovic]

“Bark” is a photo story by Georges Didi-Huberman about the author’s visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in the summer of 2011. It is as painful as it is an inspiring meditation on the nature of painting in the age of industrial genocide – from the pen of one of the most internationally respected contemporary thinkers of painting.

Thomas Keenan & Eyal Weizman: Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics [2012 // 80 p. // translation: Tihana Bertek]

In Jerusalem in 1960, the trial of Adolf Eichmann was held, and the “age of witnesses” began. A group of forensic scientists discovered Josef Mengele’s body in Brazil in 1985, thus changing the understanding of evidence in human rights discourse, shifting the focus from personal testimony to forensic evidence. The book explores the origin of the object in the processing of war crimes, the conditions of its presentation, as well as the aesthetic operations involved in deciphering the “speech of things”.

László Krasznahorkai: The Last Wolf [2012 // 40 p. // translation: Viktorija Santic]

The main protagonist of this one-sentence story describes himself as a former philosopher. He finds himself in Extremadura where he will be preoccupied with the fate of the last wolf, as the restlessness (of existence) falls into the void (of meaning).

László Krasznahorkai & Max Neumann: Animalinside [2014 // 47 p. // translation: Viktorija Santic]

Animalinside is a joint work of Krasznahorkai and the German painter Max Neumann. The text, divided into 14 short chapters, is a kind of sequel or answer to the story The Last Wolf.

Alexander García-Düttmann: Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood [2005 // 197 p. // translation: Dalibor Davidović], in collaboration with BLOK

García-Düttmann begins his study of Luchino Visconti with the hypothesis that the Italian director’s films seem to stage one of Adorno’s thoughts – namely, that it is having possibilities the thing that prevents utopia from happening, and not what is directly given and what surrounds us. In five chapters, Düttmann develops his initial hypothesis, seeking to show the extent to which Visconti’s works produce insights that are not screaming results of intellectual activity but are simply insights into blood and flesh. The study “Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood” had its world premiere in our edition.

Tanja Vrvilo & Petar Milat [ed.]: Reader [2007 // 216 p. // bilingual edition]

The reader is a selection of lectures from the Visual Course in the period from 2004 to 2007. The authors are Stephen Zepke, Cesare Casarino, Alexander Horwath and Akira Mizuta Lippit.

Eric Bullot: Film and its Double [2018 // 44 p. // translated by: Dorotea-Dora Held, Leonardo Kovačević]

French director and theorist Eric Bullot in his book Film and its Double, from which we translated 2 essays, following the proposed typology of ‘cinema by other means’ in the introductory text, discusses what for the film medium, as well as its ontology or politics, is the so-called performative turn.

Slobodan Šijan: Tomislav Gotovac – Life as a Film Experiment [2018 // 386 p. // translated into English by: Greg de Cuir & Žarko Cvejić // in collaboration with the Tomislav Gotovac Institute and the Croatian Film Association]

With this monograph (the original was published in 2012 as Kino Tom – Antonio G. Lauer or Tomislav Gotovac between Zagreb and Belgrade, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade & Croatian Film Association), Slobodan Šijan paid tribute to Gotovac and his unique understanding of cinema. On almost 400 pages, 48 chapters function as 48 “frames” of analysis, quotations, sketches and comments, but also as an attempt to understand some of the processes that influenced the creation of Gotovac’s films and the formation of his artistic procedures. Generously using and mixing personal memories, narration, testimonies, and archival material, Šijan presents a book about the artist from the artist in a specifically artistic way.

Ana Peraica: Photography as Evidence [2018 // 220 pages]

Through seven 256-page chapters (Provability in Photography, Photography, and Philosophy, Photography as Knowledge, Photography as Ontological Proof, Photography as Evidence, “Philosophy of Photography”, Photography as a Political Tool), the book connects the technical-technological characteristics of the media with the social-humanistic superstructure – an endeavor extremely rare in domestic and translated literature. Photography as evidence outgrows such an approach and shows, among other things, that for a quality understanding of each medium it is necessary to start from and know its intrinsic qualities, limitations, and application possibilities, thus representing an exceptional and unique contribution to domestic literature in the field of photography aesthetics, photographic ontology, visual culture, and art history, as well as the sociology of photography.

Lars Henrik Gass: Film and Art After Cinema [2019 // 210 p. // translated into English by: Laura Walde]

The director of the famous festival in Oberhausen and a filmologist writes about the aesthetic, media, and social consequences of withdrawing the film from the cinema, advocating the thesis that only now, when the cinema has disappeared, is it possible to realize its true significance.

Marguerite Duras & Jean-Luc Godard: Dialogues [2019 // 132 p. // translation: Zlatko Wurzberg / in collaboration with Subversive Festival]

The three dialogues between Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Godard collected in this book represent a conversation begun in 1979 [the first dialogue, on the occasion of Godard’s film Every Man for Himself], continued in 1980 (second dialogue, regarding the incest film project ) and which ends in 1987 (the third dialogue for the television show “Océaniques”). Between the writer and the director, it is both an essential relationship and a time-bound encounter. Godard, in a 1997 interview, says he knew Duras for “two or three years,” in an expression reminiscent of the title of his film, Two or Three Things I Know About the Ostrich. They meet for a few years and talk about “two or three things” that help them think: their second encounter happens after they both published anthologies of their thoughts on film, Duras Green Eyes, Godard Introduction to the True History of Film.

Nathaniel Dorsky: Dedication Cinema [2019 // 44 p. // translation: Milos Djurdjevic]

Over the past five decades, American filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky has been creating unique film poems. He began his film work as a member of the American film underground, working alongside Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas. His works directly address the film’s core, elements, and their interrelationships: light, rhythm, gaze, cut (…). The author’s commitment to celluloid and precise filmmaking stems from the belief that film can and should be a transcendental experience, one that “undermines our rootedness in temporality and reveals the depths of our reality, allowing us a fuller sense of self and the world around us.” All this makes Dedication Cinema one of the most important contemporary poetics of film.

Sequence [in collaboration with FMK, Belgrade]

Pavle Levi: Jolted Images: Unbound Analytic [2019 // 205 p. // translation: Djordje Tomic]

Taking over Maccabee’s ludicrous approach to art that should be “jolted”, Levi’s analysis of contemporary images seems to awaken the reader-viewer with a specific kind of textual and thought syntonics. If we agree to the pact that the author offers us, a reading of an academic lucid dream, we enter a space in which it is possible to perceive the known from hitherto unknown or unexpected angles; Through the theoretical and interpretive reading of comics, films, and photographs, the author reveals his passion for the analysis of visual consciousness and the barely noticeable seam that connects the world of sleepers with the world of the awake person, ie the world of film with the world of “reality”.

Friends [in collaboration with Booksa / Kultutreger]

Dubravka Ugrešić: Karaoke Culture [2015 // 164 pages]

“Karaoke is less supportive of the democratic idea that everyone can make it if they want to, and more in favor of the democratic practice that everyone can when they can. (…) We asked for freedom, we got the freedom to play, we even understood the game as freedom of movement. ” The picture of a culture that Ugrešić outlines in this essay concerns precisely our digital age, but it also has its ancestors in the earlier periods of the 20th century and in countries such as Yugoslavia or the USSR.

Alain Badiou: Metaphysics of Real Happiness [2016 // 120 p. // translation: Antonia Banovic & Dorotea-Dora Held]

The text of the Metaphysics of Real Happiness is divided into four chapters, the first three of which are devoted to the portrayal of philosophy as a revolution in thought and happiness as its affect. In the last chapter, Badiou, without losing sight of the connection between philosophy and happiness, recapitulates his path from Theory of the Subject through Battle and Events to the Logic of Worlds, and presents the structure of the Immanence of Truth, the book he plans to complete his philosophy with.

Catherine Malabou: The Ontology of the Accident [2016 // 128 p. // translation: Marko Gregoric]

Lives usually flow like rivers. Physical and mental transformations only strengthen the lasting identity. But due to severe trauma, and sometimes for no reason, the river jumps out of its bed, its course begins to fork and a new personality, without precedent, begins to coexist with the old, until it finally displaces it. A new being without its own history is emerging. Malabou in Ontology of Accident insists that such a change of identity is not just a consequence of an external event, which occurs purely by chance, and affects and changes the originally stable identity. A “normal” identity from the very beginning is a changeable and transformative entity, which can always betray itself or say goodbye. Malabou, with the help of Spinoza, Deleuze, and Damasius, as well as Proust, Duras, and Thomas Mann, points out that the change of identity by the destruction of man is an existential possibility, a biological and ontological destiny inscribed in it as an eventuality.

David Albahari: 21 stories of happiness [2017 // 64 pages]

David’s short writings can be read as reactions to Badiou’s philosophical theses, as variations on their themes, but also as independent stories about characters – students, writers, mothers and fathers, boys and girls, teachers – who with various ways try to discover what happiness is all about, so that they can throw themselves into the search for it. And in that, they sometimes succeed. The book is accompanied by a “map” containing Badiou’s theses on happiness and the talk Tell Me About Happiness by mathematician, writer, and friend Vladimir Tasić – also in the form of 21 comments.

Anne Carson: The Albertine Workout [2019 // 48 p. // translation: Miroslav Kirin]

The Albertine Workout contains fifty-nine poetic passages with contributions summarizing Anne Carson’s research on Albertina, Marcel’s main love interest in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

László Krasznahorkai: Chasing Homer[2019 // 112 p. // translation: Viktorija Santic]

After our invitation, László Krasznahorkai visited Dalmatia in the fall of 2016 (Dubrovnik, Korčula, Mljet and Split). Chasing Homer, the story Krasznahorkai wrote on the occasion, is a text inspired at the same time by the Mediterranean landscape and the works of art of the writer’s friends – drawings by Berlin painter Max Neumann and music by New York drummer Elijah Keszler. Both artists, on the other hand, responded to Krasznahorkai’s story by creating new works, making Chasing Homer a unique triptych or ensemble of literature, painting and music.

Skhole [the edition is part of the Dopolavoro project as part of Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture]

Sylvain Lazarus: May ’68, Politics, History – Conversations [2018 // 60 p. // translation: Ozren Pupovac]

In his booklet originally published in 2008, the French anthropologist, sociologist, and political activist looks back at the events of 1968 and what they mean for a different political opinion and action, no longer from the position of the state but of the people.

Goran Sergej Pristaš: Exploded Gaze [2018 // 326 p. // English translation: Žarko Cvejić]

Diverse in form and rich in styles, from personal art records to scientific insights, this book by Goran Sergej Pristaš “recapitulating two decades of work in theater and art, dazzles the reader as a rare treat of poetics and political and philosophical thought at the same time. In a virtuoso style, this volume brings fresh insights into viewing, time, and production through which the imaginative and critical forces of theater are reinvented beyond the confines of theater. Like Jean-Luc Godard, Mladen Stilinović or Anne Boyer, Pristaš breathes new life into compact thinking from art itself that can change our view of the world if we follow its wise implications. ”

Didier Eribon: Returning to Reims [2019 // 248 p. // translation: Milena Ostojic / in collaboration with Sandorf]

Returning to Reims has been an unavoidable subject of debate in recent years. Eribon expands Bourdieu’s notion of autoanalysis, transforming it into a new genre that connects personal confession of origin and growing up with sociological study and political manifesto. In the book, the presentation and analysis of the ideological transformation of the working class alternates with the presentation of conflicts between authors and social norms in the process of becoming a subject, and with the political articulation of conflicts or overlaps of different social identities.

Explicit music [in collaboration with the Zagreb Music Biennale]

Ksenija Stevanović & Dalibor Davidović [ed.]: Archipelagos of Sound [2005 // 80 p. // englesko izdanje]

The booklet was published as part of the 23rd Zagreb Music Biennale and the 2005 ISCM World Music Days. The authors of the article are Peter Szendy, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, and Ksenija Stevanović & Dalibor Davidović.

It all comes down to aesthetics and political economy [in collaboration with kuda.org]

Susan Buck-Morss: Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display [2014. // 69 p. // translation: Olja Petronić]

With the emergence of political economy as a science in the 18th century, its subject – the national economy – was created as a subject of analysis. But as the economic system cannot be the subject of direct observation, the basis for its understanding were the visual instruments of representational mapping. Going through the historical forms of representational mapping of economic processes, Buck-Morss gives a brief overview of the development of economic science from political economy to neoclassical economics and their essential connection with the regime of visual representation.

Pierre Macherey: The Productive Subject [2014 // 80 p. // translation: Slavica Miletic]

Starting from Foucault’s interest in segments of Marx’s Capital about increasing the productive power of labor through its subordination to the organization of the production process, Macherey in The Productive Subject points out that the notion of biopower that simultaneously forms and conforms the social subject relationships. From the meeting of these two analyzes, the question of power, authority, and subject is irreversibly shifted “from the political plan to the economical plan”, and thus the question of resistance and political strategy takes on a new form.

other editions

Étienne Balibar: Violence and Civilization. Wellek lectures [2011 // 196 p. // translation: Tomislav Medak / in collaboration with FMK Belgrade]

The book contains lectures given by Étienne Balibar in 1996 as part of the Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. Encouraged by contemporary phenomena of cruelty – as exploded in ultrasubjective forms of identity delirium of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav wars or as reproduced in ultraobjective forms of surplus production through the processes of economic globalization – Balibar opens the theoretical problem of political violence. While modern political thought from Hobbes to Hegel assumed the transformativeness of violence into political institutions, the phenomenology of extreme violence indicates that politics can never finally end violence or completely renounce the use of force. From this cycle of violence and counter-violence, emancipatory or revolutionary practice can find a way out in the strategies of civility, and the basic features of such a policy Balibar will offer through readings of different currents of contemporary philosophy.

Tomislav Medak & Petar Milat (editors): Idea of radical media [2013 // 256 p. // bilingual Croatian-English edition]

The idea of radical media is the proceedings of the conference held on 07.-08.06. 2013 in MaMi. The conference took place in the context of the Arkzin Outlook exhibition and the associated media actions by which we wanted to revalue the Arkzin phenomenon two decades later. Arkzin’s publishing and activist work anticipated and reflected tactical media practices that crystallized in the early 1990s in the face of a political moment — marked by postsocialist transition, Yugoslav wars, and alterglobalist resistance — with the technological advent of the Internet.

Tomislav Medak and Marcell Mars (editors): Public Library [2015 // 144 p. // bilingual Croatian-English edition]

“Everything that is solid and steady turns to smoke” – since its beginnings in the 18th century, the institution of the public library has developed in the border area of this process. It did not allow the class division and the steel logic of the market to dictate who has access to knowledge and education as means of changing the world. It is not surprising, therefore, that the intensive commercialization of education in recent decades and current austerity measures aim to erase the space of coexistence, cognition, and action, and the intellectual property regime to eradicate the very idea of universal access to knowledge for every member of society. The gap between opportunity and social reality has only deepened with the availability of knowledge brought about by the Internet age. The Public Library takes care of and carries the collective memory of all the challenges and struggles with artificially created scarcity, forbidden knowledge, and exclusive territories. In activating the memory of the public library lies the key to the survival of the public library itself, but also much more important: the struggle for the joint management of shared resources. The publication “Public Library” was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name held in Nova Gallery 27.05 – 13.06.2015.

Nathan Brown and Petar Milat (editors): Poiesis [2017 // 270 p. // english edition]

angela rawlings: si tu [2017 // 88 str.]

The essays in the collection Poiesis were, with some additions, presented at the three-day symposium of the same name in Zagreb in 2015. As part of the program, a choreography of Variations on the Sensible by Marjana Krajač was performed, to which Angela Rawlings reacted poetically with her text Si tu – which we are publishing together with the collection.

The authors included are Thomas Schestag, Branka Arsić, David Wills, Jed Rasula, Marie Gil, Alexi Kukuljevic, Amanda Holmes, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Julie Beth Napolin, Aaron Schuster, Dee Morris & Stephen Voyce, and Nathan Brown.

Catherine Malabou: Morphing Intelligence [2018 // 148 p. // translation: Suzana Bojović, Srđa Janković / in collaboration with FMK Belgrade]

In a new book, derived from Wellek 2015 lectures, Malabou revisits and revises some of the fundamental assumptions of her earlier work on brain plasticity. In that self-criticism, the new avatar of plasticity becomes intelligence. The author conceptualizes intelligence as a mediator between the realms of the transcendental and the empirical and uses it to outline a new topology of thought, freedom, and resistance.

Geoffroy de Lagasnerie: Thinking in a Bad World [2018 // 76 p. // translation: Zlatko Wurzberg / in collaboration with the association Bijeli val / Subversive Festival]

What does it mean to write in a society marked by violence, domination, exploitation? How to imagine a thought practice that would not contribute to the restoration of the existing situation, but would, on the contrary, be oppositional? What is the meaning of art, culture and knowledge – and in particular, under what conditions do they have meaning and value? Since we live in a bad world, every author must necessarily ask himself the question of how to resist and not agree with the systems of government.

Upcoming books:

Barbara Cassin: Nostalgia [in collaboration with Books / Kulturtreger]

China Miéville: London’s Overthrow [in collaboration with Booksa / Kulturtreger]

Franco Moretti et al: Forms and Interpretation – Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlets

Quentin Meillassoux: Metaphysics and Fiction about the Worlds Beyond Science [in collaboration with Ubiq]

Georges Didi-Huberman: Out of the Dark

Georges Didi-Huberman: Survival of the Fireflies [in collaboration with FMK Belgrade]

Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa: The Work of Love

Dubravka Ugrešić & Davor Konjikušić: There is nothing in here [premiere edition]

Anne Boyer: a collection of Garments against Women and A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

Friends

Bruno Latour : Thought Exhibitions [2017 // 270 p. // translation: Iva Gjurkin]

Preparation

Lee Edelman: Learning Nothing: Bad Education [2018 // 100 p. // translation: Hana and Srdjan Dvornik]

Lina Gonan (editor): Irreconcilable – Radical Queer Against Gender, State and Capital [2018 // 112 p.]

Ante Jerić: Along Malabo – Faces of Contemporary Thought [2016 // 196 p.]

The focus of this book is Malabou’s notion of indifference, defined as the simultaneous separation of “subject from world and world from subject”. While considering this important motif in Malabou’s work, Jerić’s book brings the readings of several authors, Malabou’s occasional companions, who in their work try to think of the indifference of either the […]