Peter Osborne - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Peter Osborne

ARTMargins, 2021

What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism con... more What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarship are necessary to address the great challenges of our uncertain future?

The electronic version of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercia... more The electronic version of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BYNC-ND). For more information, please visit creativecommons.org.

Drawn from a conference held to mark the 150th anniversary of the first volume of Karl Marx's... more Drawn from a conference held to mark the 150th anniversary of the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, these essays from a range of internationally established contributors offer readers a snapshot of debates about the book's current relevance across a variety of fields and contexts. The volume approaches Marx's Capital as an exemplary text in the continuation of the tradition of post-Kantian European Philosophy through transdisciplinary practices of critique and concept construction. The essays are grouped into four sections: Value-Form, Ontology & Politics; Capitalism, Feminism and Social Reproduction; Freedom, Democracy and War; The Poetics of Capital/Capital. Each section is accompanied by an image from the 2008 film by Alexander Kluge, News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx - Eisenstein - Capital.

As in the history of philosophy there are nodal points which raise philosophy in itself to concre... more As in the history of philosophy there are nodal points which raise philosophy in itself to concretion, apprehend abstract principle in a totality, and thus break off the rectilinear process, so also there are moments when philosophy turns its eyes to the external world, and no longer apprehends it, but, as a practical person, weaves, as it were, intrigues with the world ... and throws itself on the breast of the worldly Siren. That is the carnival of philosophy, whether it disguises itself as a dog like the Cynic, in priestly vestments like the Alexandrian, or in fragrant spring array like the Epicurean. It is essential that philosophy should then wear character masks. ... philosophy casts its regard behind it ... when its heart is set on creating a world. But as Prometheus, having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and to settle upon the earth, so philosophy, expanded to be the whole world, turns against the world of appearance. The same now with the philosophy of Hegel.1

MODOS, 2018

Este artigo considera os efeitos sobre os museus de arte da condição histórica de uma contemporan... more Este artigo considera os efeitos sobre os museus de arte da condição histórica de uma contemporaneidade global, à qual estão hoje sujeitos. A principal diferença, argumenta-se, diz respeito às formas de universalidade que os museus de arte articulam e às quais aspiram. O artigo parte de uma breve revisão da cada vez mais comum "crítica do museu" empreendida nas últimas décadas, que é uma crítica da concepção de um "museu universal" do século XIX. Ele procede refletindo sobre o caráter duplo e homólogo do projeto de totalidade desta concepção – a obra de arte como uma totalidade e a história como uma totalidade – em contraste com a heterogeneidade teórica das formas de unidade das categorias de periodização que são desenvolvidas pela história da arte hoje. As formas de totalidade herdadas revelaram-se projeções ilusórias ou fictícias. Entretanto, argumenta-se, em vez de representar uma dissolução da aspiração à universalidade do museu, como tal, essas formas heter...

POIÉSIS, 2018

Este ensaio expõe o sentido da proposição especulativa “arte contemporânea é arte pós-conceitual”... more Este ensaio expõe o sentido da proposição especulativa “arte contemporânea é arte pós-conceitual”. Partindo de uma elaboração conceitual do contemporâneo como uma forma disjuntiva do tempo histórico (como ideia, problema, ficção, e realidade globalmente transnacional), ele passa a dar um relato das convergências e mudanças que se reforçam mutualmente no caráter da obra de arte e nas relações sociais dos espaços artísticos. Trata-se da tradução da conferência realizada na Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota, Roma, Itália, em 9 de Julho de 2010.

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and …, 2006

If anyone was in doubt about the continuing grip of French philosophy on the theoretical imaginat... more If anyone was in doubt about the continuing grip of French philosophy on the theoretical imagination of the anglophone humanities, the reception of the writings of Alain Badiou must surely have put paid to such reservations. The translation of his magnum opus, Being and Event, in spring 2006, brought to eleven the number of his books published in English in

Historical Materialism, 2015

This piece reconstructs and reflects upon the terms of the theoretical projection underlying Max ... more This piece reconstructs and reflects upon the terms of the theoretical projection underlying Max Tomba’s book,Marx’s Temporalities, with particular reference to his use of the concepts of multiple temporalities (Ernst Bloch) and temporal layers (Bloch and Reinhart Koselleck). Tomba’s use of these concepts, it is argued, productively relocates Marx’s writings within the framework of the twentieth-century philosophy of time. However, Tomba’s dependence upon received versions of these concepts, untransformed, reproduces theoretical problems implicit within them, which have been intensified by recent developments within global capital. The application of these concepts to an understanding of the historical present, understood as a situation of globally disjunctive contemporaneity, is seen to be, in part, vitiated by their embeddedness within an increasingly exhausted past.

The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise is something in which there is depress... more The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise is something in which there is depressingly little belief at present. * For all the enthusiasm for change manifest in the debates about postmodernism, there is probably currently less of a sense that 'things might proceed otherwise' in Western capitalist societies than at any time since the early 1950s. At a theoretical level, this situation has been depicted in a number of ways: from the 'realisation of nihilism' of Fukuyama' send of hi story , via the 'realisation of positivism' of J ameson' s postmodernism, to a series of more diffuse analyses of the end of politics and the crisis of the future. 1 One thing which is distinctive about all these scenarios is their fulsome embrace of that hitherto discredited nineteenth century genre, the philosophy of history; albeit, more often than not, in negative or inverted forms.2 Indeed, the mere fact that Fukuyama crafts his argument at this level has...

Reflections on the relationship of aesthetics to politics tend to circle, almost compulsively, ar... more Reflections on the relationship of aesthetics to politics tend to circle, almost compulsively, around a relatively stable set of conceptual oppositions, inherited from German philosophies of the late 18th century. This essay proposes an expansion of the theoretical terms of the debate by extending the field of transcendental aesthetics into the domain of historical temporalization. Fundamental art-historical categories may thereby be incorporated, philosophically transformed, into 'aesthetics' as forms of historical temporalization: avant-garde, modern, contemporary. The essay expounds two theses, in particular: 1. The historical subsumption of the temporality of the avant-garde by the temporality of the modern: the modern stands to the avant-garde as the negation of its politics by the repetition of the new-'the new as the ever-same'; 2. the historical subsumption of the temporality of the modern by 'the contemporary': the contemporary stands to the modern as the negation of the dialectical logic-and hence specifically developmentalist futurity-of the new by a spatially determined, but imaginary co-presencing. One effect of this latter subsumption, it is argued, is a particular, regressive 'repetition of the national', at the level of cultural representation, on the terrain of the global.

Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

… starting in the late 1960s … [the Moscow conceptual] circle of artists became an engine in the ... more … starting in the late 1960s … [the Moscow conceptual] circle of artists became an engine in the development of aesthetic and conceptual models that, while reflecting on local issues, also fit successfully into the discourses that were being developed by their contemporaries in the West. Indeed, it can be claimed that the 1970s and 1980s were the last era when a channelling of local contexts into an international language was effectively realised, just as in the period of the historical avant-garde.-Margarita Tupitsyn 1 The term 'Moscow' is heavy enough to outweigh any Western term like 'futurism' or 'conceptualism'.-Boris Groys 2 These two statements raise a series of interesting historical and methodological issues about the emergent discourses of a global art history and of histories of contemporary art in particular. Taken together, they highlight the tension internal to the phrase 'Moscow Conceptualism', in which a Western category ('conceptualism') is conjugated with a purportedly Eastern name ('Moscow') in order that the latter may This is a revised version of a talk presented on 6 November 2015 at the V-A-C Foundation in Moscow.

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2016

What happens to the form of the biennial when biennials become part of a world system of art inst... more What happens to the form of the biennial when biennials become part of a world system of art institutions, subject to the historical temporality of a global contemporaneity? In particular, what happens when the periodic rhythms of national narratives of biennial exhibitions are overcoded by a serial sequence of international biennials – competing for contemporaneity – seemingly without end? This essay approaches these questions via a consideration of the debate about the transitional symbolic significance of the 1989 Third Havana Biennale. It contrasts three historical problematics of ‘the contemporary’ as models through which to think the cultural function of biennials: (i) the critique of anthropology, or, the coeval; (ii) socialist post- coloniality, or the avant-garde construction of traditions; (iii) the historical contemporaneity of a global capitalist modernity.

Paragrana, 2016

Wie verändert sich die Form der Biennale, wenn Biennalen Teil eines weltumspannenden Systems von ... more Wie verändert sich die Form der Biennale, wenn Biennalen Teil eines weltumspannenden Systems von Kunstinstitutionen werden und der historischen Zeitlichkeit einer globalen Kontemporanität

Socialist Register, Mar 18, 1998

The Communist Manifesto is without doubt the most influential single text written in the nineteen... more The Communist Manifesto is without doubt the most influential single text written in the nineteenth century, in any language, by some considerable way. Indeed, it may stand as a metonym for the desire called 'history' which coursed through that century in the wake of the French Revolution. Situated at the hinge between Hobsbawm's ages of revolution and capital (1789-1848 and 1848-1870), as described in the first two volumes of his great trilogy on the long 19th century, from the French Revolution to the First World War,' the Manifesto presents the historical dialectic between these two terms ('revolution' and 'capital') in two equally extraordinary, though no longer equally convincing, ways: from the standpoint of the prospectively successive revolutionary historical roles of the social classes of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, respectively. It is in the disjunction between these two presentations that the meaning of the text must be sought today. For with the disappearance of the horizon of proletarian revolution, and the retreat to the spirit world of the famous 'spectre' of communism, the text has undergone a profound transformation. In short, the Manifesto appears to have been transformed from an eschatological tour &force, in which the end of capitalism was assured ('What the bourgeoisie. .. produces, above all, is its own gavedigger<), into what Marshall Berman has notoriously described as a 'lyrical celebration of bourgeois works'? a celebration, more specifically, of the revolutionary temporalit y of capitalism; a capitalism whichwithout a hndamental countervailing forceappears now as open-ended. From the standpoint of the philosophy of history, communism as the eschatological absolute has given way to the 'bad infinity' of capitalism-'the affirmation as negation of the finite'3capitalism without end, amen. O r at least, so it would seem. But does the rest of the Manifesto