Unravelling the mystery of Alexandre KojèveIn this intellectual biography, critic and philosopher Boris Groys turns to the Arthur Rimbaud of modern bureaucracy, Alexandre Kojève, a philosopher of little-known writings and profound influence. Kojève was fascinated with Hegel’s dialectics and with communism and envisioned a universal empire as the end of history. Kojève drew on Buddhism and also proclaimed himself a Stalinist. At the same time, he was one of the crea...

To the philosopher Boris Groys, everything technology produces in the modern world ultimately falls into two categories – it's art, or it's garbage. Both are useless, defunctionalized objects that simply lie there. The difference between them comes when we immunize art from the destructive power of time to which we devoutly deliver our garbage.In this collection of essays and interviews, Groys expounds on these paradoxes, taking in art, the dialectic of work, the a...

Retracing the philosophical discussions around careOur current culture is dominated by the ideology of creativity. One is supposed to create the new and not to care about the things as they are. This ideology legitimises the domination of the “creative class” over the rest of the population that is predominantly occupied by forms of care – medical care, child care, agriculture, industrial maintenance and so on. We have a responsibility to care for our own bodies, b...

Zur menschlichen Existenz gehört elementar die Sorge. Sie besitzt vielerlei Formen: Fürsorge, Selbstsorge, Pflege oder medizinische Vorsorge. Spätestens mit der Pandemie wurde klar, dass der Körper nicht mehr Privatbesitz des Subjekts ist. Stattdessen wurde das leibliche Wohl beinahe vollständig sozialisiert, bürokratisiert und politisiert. Das Ich scheint die Selbstbestimmung an ein Gesundheits-System abgetreten zu haben. Der Philosoph Boris Groys lotet in seinem neuen Buch aus, ob und wi...

Modern history is a history of aesthetizations – and every aesthetization raises a claim of protection. We aestheticize and want to protect almost everything, including Earth, oceans, the atmosphere, rare animal species and exotic plants. Humans are no exception. They also present themselves as objects of contemplation that deserve admiration and care. For some time, artists and intellectuals struggled for the sovereign right to present themselves to society in their own way – to become se...

Since Plato, philosophers have dreamed of establishing a rational state ruled through the power of language. In this radical and disturbing account of Soviet philosophy, Boris Groys argues that communism shares that dream and is best understood as an attempt to replace financial with linguistic bonds as the cement uniting society. The transformative power of language, the medium of equality, is the key to any new communist revolution.

A new book by Boris Groys acknowledges the problem and potential of art's complex relationship to power.Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues the distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market's fiats of inclusion and exclusion. In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary a...

A TLS Book of the Year 2017In this, the first anthology of Russian contemporary art writing to be published outside Russia, many of the country's most prominent contemporary artists, writers, philosophers, curators and historians come together to examine the region's contemporary art, culture and and theory.With contributions from Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Boris Groys, Dmitri Prigov, Anton Vidokle, Keti Chukhrov, Ox...

The leading art theorist takes on art in the age of the InternetIn the early twentieth century, art and its institutions came under critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. The notion of works of art as sacred objects was decried and subsequently they would be understood merely as things. This meant an attack on realism, as well as on the traditional preservative mission of the museum. Acclaimed art theorist Boris Groys argues this led to the developm...

We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police brutality, and from graphic horror films to transgressive artworks, many of the images in our media culture might strike us as unsuitable for viewing. Yet what does it mean to proclaim something “unwatchable”: disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible?With over 50 original essays by leadin...

From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.

On the New looks at the economies of exchange and valuation that drive modern culture's key sites: the intellectual marketplace and the archive. As ideas move from one context to another, newness is created. This continuous shifting of the line that separates the valuable from the worthless, culture from profanity, is at the center of Boris Groys's investigation which aims to map the uncharted territory of what constitutes artistic innovation and what processes underpin its recogn...