With a career spanning more than sixty years, the renowned painter Gerhard Richter is one of the greatest artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book celebrates the artist’s continued dedication to experimentation and innovation. The Abstract Pictures were created when Richter, a few years ago, poured colored enamel paints onto a glass plate and allowed them to flow into one another in order to take shapes. He then captured these ephemeral moments with his camera and selected 100 of these “pictures� for inclusion in the book alongside equally abstract texts formed by randomly generated letter combinations. An artwork of its own, this intimate volume inspires both close looking and a beautiful interpretation of abstraction.

This book explores the implications for today's critical concerns of the work of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Although his writings are considered to be among the most powerful and suggestive theoretical enterprises of the twentieth century, his ideas are strangely resistant to cooptation by the established doctrines of various critical programs. The innovative essays gathered here engage this resistance by examining the notion of the ghostly in Benjamin's work.
The contributors show that the urgent and haunting truths Benjamin offers point toward new forms of responsibility, even as they withdraw from straightforward meaning and transparent forms of expression. These truths reside in a figurative elsewhere, a ghostly space that his texts delimit but never fully inhabit, and these essays seek to do justice to the ghosts of Benjamin that are already on board with us.
Through close textual readings and thoughtful contextualizations, internationally known Benjamin scholars engage a wide range of issues, including: the status of the image in Benjamin's literary reflections and in his meditations on cinema and visual culture; abiding Benjaminian notions of messianism, aura, reproducibility, semblance, and melancholy; Benjamin's relation to Freud; his innovative rethinking of history, virtuality, and translation; and his reflections on tragedy and prophecy, the geometrical dimensions of writing, and the relation between eros and language.
The contributors are Norbert Bolz, Fritz Breithaupt, Stanley Corngold, Peter Fenves, Eva Geulen, Miriam Hansen, Beatrice Hanssen, Lutz Koepnick, Tom McCall, Kevin McLaughlin, Bettine Menke, Rainer Nagele, Gerhard Richter, Laurence Rickels, and Sigrid Weigel.

In 1988, Gerhard Richter created one of the most controversial and fascinating political painting-cycles of all time, with his Baader-Meinhof series. In 2002, he returned to the theme of media and political truth with his artist's book "War Cut." For this project, Richter photographed 216 details of his abstract painting "No. 648-2" (1987), and, working on a long table over a period of several weeks, combined these 4 x 6-inch details with 165 texts on the Iraq war, published in the German "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" newspaper on the dates of the war's outbreak (March 20 and 21, 2003). "My method was to attach a number of texts to a number of images without having to think about whether something would be better positioned to the left or the right, above or below," Richter told an interviewer, for a "New York Times" feature on the publication. "I placed these images so that a connection develops in terms of colors, structures and other characteristics. . . . Some images match the cruelty and the madness described in the texts shockingly well. And others can even serve as illustrations when the texts speak of deserts and other landscapes." Originally published only in German in 2004, this long-awaited English version of this important artist's book presents Richter's powerful attempt to accommodate the extremity of war. For this edition, Richter applied the same process of text selection to "The New York Times," using the same dates of the war's outbreak.

In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, author and film director Alexander Kluge and celebrated visual artist Gerhard Richter have composed December, a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest month of the year. In stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology, Kluge toys as readily with time and space as he does with his characters. In the narrative entry for December 1931, Adolf Hitler avoids a car crash by inches. In another, we relive Greek financial crises. There are stories where time accelerates, and others in which it seems to slow to the pace of falling snow. In Kluge's work, power seems only to erode and decay, never grow, and circumstances always seem to elude human control. When a German commander outside Moscow in December of 1941 remarks, "We don't need weapons to fight the Russians but a weapon to fight the weather," the futility of his struggle is painfully present. Accompanied by the ghostly and wintry forest scenes captured in Gerhard Richter's photographs, these stories have an alarming density, one that gives way at unexpected moments to open vistas and narrative clarity. Within these pages, the lessons are perhaps not as comforting as in the old calendar stories, but the subversive moralities are always instructive and perfectly executed. Praise for Alexander Kluge"More than a few of Kluge's many books are essential, brilliant achievements. None are without great interest."-Susan Sontag "Alexander Kluge, that most enlightened of writers."-W.G. Sebald

How do our ceaseless conversations with what has passed and with those who have passed something on to us propel us into a precarious future? In a series of evocatively titled theses, including 'Wrinkles', 'Inheriting a Feeling', 'Weight of the World' and 'Making Treasures Speak', Gerhard Richter engages the quintessentially human dilemma of how to receive an intellectual, cultural or political inheritance. In dialogue with philosophers including Heraclitus, Arendt and Derrida; writers such as Montaigne, Holderlin, Kafka and Knausgaard; artists such as Michelangelo, Picasso, Anselm Kiefer and Art Spiegelman; filmmakers such as Jean-Marie Straub; scholars and scientists Freud and Einstein; and pop-cultural phenomena the rock band The Who and the Broadway play The Inheritance, Richter contemplates the problem of interpreting an inheritance that resists full transparency. Richter argues that inheriting is not the same as yearning for a former presence or nostalgically striving to preserve an identity. At once philosophical and poetic, his aphoristic theses illuminate how the constantly shifting nature of our relationship to what we inherit from others makes us who we are.

The Richter Interviews collects together a series of conversations between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Gerhard Richter over the course of more than two decades of discussion and collaboration. Subjects range from Richter's place within art history to artists' books, architecture, religion, unrealised projects and his advice for young artists. The collection also includes a previously unpublished interview focused on Richter's much-lauded window for Cologne Cathedral, unveiled in 2007. Obrist's vast knowledge and interrogating mind coupled with his longstanding friendship with Richter make him a unique interlocutor for an artist whose work spans more than 60 years and ranges from painting to photography, glass to printmaking, watercolours to books. Obrist deftly guides the reader through a dazzling array of topics and offers an invaluable historical perspective on Richter's place within the art world of the 20th and 21st centuries. Illustrations of discussed artworks by Richter feature throughout the texts for visual reference - making this an indispensable guide to the thinking and creative processes of one of the world's most admired artists.

In this book, Gerhard Richter explores the aesthetic and political ramifications of the literary genre of the Denkbild, or thought-image, as it was employed by four major German-Jewish writers and philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer. The Denkbild is a poetic mode of writing, a brief snapshot-in-prose that stages the interrelation of literary, philosophical, political, and cultural insights. Richter's careful analysis of the linguistic characteristics of this mode of writing sheds new light on pivotal concerns of modernity, including the fractured cityscape, philosophical problems of modern music, the experience of exiled homelessness, and the disaster of Auschwitz. Thought-Images not only reorients our understanding of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in important ways but also establishes significant links between these writers and contemporary French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida.

Following in the steps of Gerhard Richter's catalogue raisonne of drawings, published 20 years ago, HENI Publishing's new monograph devoted to Gerhard Richter's recent drawings will illustrate 80 works produced between 1999 and 2021. Drawings 1999-2021 highlights a recent period of extraordinary creativity and inventiveness that includes expansive series of graphite drawings on paper, vivid watercolours and overpainted photographs of forests. Like the accompanying exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, this publication offers a rare chance to study the most intimate aspect of Gerhard Richter's work.

This book explores the implications for today's critical concerns of the work of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Although his writings are considered to be among the most powerful and suggestive theoretical enterprises of the twentieth century, his ideas are strangely resistant to cooptation by the established doctrines of various critical programs. The innovative essays gathered here engage this resistance by examining the notion of the ghostly in Benjamin's work.
The contributors show that the urgent and haunting truths Benjamin offers point toward new forms of responsibility, even as they withdraw from straightforward meaning and transparent forms of expression. These truths reside in a figurative elsewhere, a ghostly space that his texts delimit but never fully inhabit, and these essays seek to do justice to the ghosts of Benjamin that are already on board with us.
Through close textual readings and thoughtful contextualizations, internationally known Benjamin scholars engage a wide range of issues, including: the status of the image in Benjamin's literary reflections and in his meditations on cinema and visual culture; abiding Benjaminian notions of messianism, aura, reproducibility, semblance, and melancholy; Benjamin's relation to Freud; his innovative rethinking of history, virtuality, and translation; and his reflections on tragedy and prophecy, the geometrical dimensions of writing, and the relation between eros and language.
The contributors are Norbert Bolz, Fritz Breithaupt, Stanley Corngold, Peter Fenves, Eva Geulen, Miriam Hansen, Beatrice Hanssen, Lutz Koepnick, Tom McCall, Kevin McLaughlin, Bettine Menke, Rainer Nagele, Gerhard Richter, Laurence Rickels, and Sigrid Weigel.

On October 5, 2012, the German national newspaper Die Welt published its daily issue--but things looked . . . different. Quieter. The sensations of the day, forgotten as soon as they're read, were missing, replaced with an unprecedented calm, extracted with care from the chaos of the contemporary. That calm was the work of Gerhard Richter, who had been granted control over Die Welt for that single day, taking over and imprinting all thirty pages of the newspaper with his personal stamp: images from quiet moments amid unquiet times, the demotion of politics from its primary position, the privileging of the private and personal over the public, and, above all, artful, moving contrasts between sharpness and softness. He had created an unprecedented work of mass art. Among the many people to praise the work was writer Alexander Kluge, who instantly began writing stories to accompany Richter's images. This book, the second collaboration between Kluge and Richter, brings their stories and images together, along with new words and artworks created specifically for this volume. The result, Dispatches from Moments of Calm, is a beautiful, meditative interval in the otherwise unremitting press of everyday life, a masterpiece by two acclaimed artists working at the height of their powers.

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Richter’s book is to examine how these basic yet far-reaching assumptions teach us to think with Adorno—both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations. These contexts and constellations range from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the difficulty of inheriting a tradition, from the primacy of the object to the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one. Richter vividly shows how Adorno’s highly suggestive—yet often overlooked—concept of the “uncoercive gaze� designates a specific kind of comportment in relation to an object of critical analysis: It moves close to the object and tarries with it while struggling to decipher the singularities and non-identities that are lodged within it, whether the object is an idea, a thought, a concept, a text, a work of art, an experience, or a problem of political or sociological theory. Thinking with Adorno’s uncoercive gaze not only means following the fascinating paths of his own work; it also means extending hospitality to the ghostly voices of others. As this book shows, Adorno is best understood as a thinker in dialogue, whether with long-deceased predecessors in the German tradition such as Kant and Hegel, with writers such as Kafka, with contemporaries such as Benjamin and Arendt, or with philosophical voices that succeeded him, such as those of Derrida and Agamben.

This artist s book presents 84 reproductions of sketches taken from a notebook made by Gerhard Richter between 2004 and 2009. Some sketches feature figurative motifs, human forms and faces, while others appear as purely abstract shapes, configurations and patterns.

Following the limited edition hardback November title published in 2013 by HENI Publishing, the paperback edition has been released in both English and German languages to the trade. November presents German artist Gerhard Richter s series of the same name comprised of 54 ink drawings so called due to their creation throughout the month of November in 2008. Richter assumed this method after accidentally dripping ink on to a sheet of highly absorbent paper and realising that two related images formed on the front and back. He then began to manipulate the ink in various ways changing its consistency and applying lacquer or pencil to add further detail. Reworking this method on 27 sheets of paper, he was able to create 54 images in total, presented here as facsimiles, so that both sides of each piece of paper can be viewed at the same time. These are labelled with the date that they were produced and arranged in order. The book also contains an overview of the series, featuring thumbnail

This book makes available for the first time in English--and for the first time in its entirety in any language--an important yet little-known interview on the topic of photography that Jacques Derrida granted in 1992 to the German theorist of photography Hubertus von Amelunxen and the German literary and media theorist Michael Wetzel. Their conversation addresses, among other things, questions of presence and its manufacture, the technicity of presentation, the volatility of the authorial subject, and the concept of memory. Derrida offers a penetrating intervention with regard to the distinctive nature of photography vis-a-vis related technologies such as cinema, television, and video. Questioning the all-too-facile divides between so-called old and new media, original and reproduction, analog and digital modes of recording and presenting, he provides stimulating insights into the ways in which we think and speak about the photographic image today. Along the way, the discussion fruitfully interrogates the question of photography in relation to such key concepts as copy, archive, and signature. Gerhard Richter introduces the volume with a critical meditation on the relationship between deconstruction and photography by way of the concepts of translation and invention. "Copy, Archive, Signature" will be of compelling interest to readers in the fields of contemporary European critical thought, photography, aesthetic theory, media studies, and French Studies, as well as those following the singular intellectual trajectory of one the most influential thinkers of our time.

Gerhard Richter (born 1932) is predominantly known for his paintings and drawings, which strike a playful balance between photo-realism and abstraction, while at once delving into often controversial political commentary. His works have explored a multitude of media, from photo-based, monochrome and brightly colored paintings to ink-doused papers and thin, multicolored strips of pure pattern. Beyond his artistic works, and particularly in recent years, Richter has published extensively on his vision of art and artistic values: in letters, interviews, public statements, excerpts and articles, Richter has established himself as a brilliant advocate of contemporary painting. Richter has also increasingly explored the possibilities of the book as medium in a series of extraordinary artist's books. "Gerhard Richter: Books" takes an in-depth look at his work in this medium. It features a book-length interview with the artist by internationally renowned art critic and historian Hans Ulrich Obrist, who walks us through the Richter archive and discusses the work with the artist himself, affording the reader an entirely new perspective on his works. The book also includes a new text by Kunstmuseum Winterthur director Dieter Schwarz.

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Richter’s book is to examine how these basic yet far-reaching assumptions teach us to think with Adorno—both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations. These contexts and constellations range from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the difficulty of inheriting a tradition, from the primacy of the object to the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one. Richter vividly shows how Adorno’s highly suggestive—yet often overlooked—concept of the “uncoercive gaze� designates a specific kind of comportment in relation to an object of critical analysis: It moves close to the object and tarries with it while struggling to decipher the singularities and non-identities that are lodged within it, whether the object is an idea, a thought, a concept, a text, a work of art, an experience, or a problem of political or sociological theory. Thinking with Adorno’s uncoercive gaze not only means following the fascinating paths of his own work; it also means extending hospitality to the ghostly voices of others. As this book shows, Adorno is best understood as a thinker in dialogue, whether with long-deceased predecessors in the German tradition such as Kant and Hegel, with writers such as Kafka, with contemporaries such as Benjamin and Arendt, or with philosophical voices that succeeded him, such as those of Derrida and Agamben.

Theodor W. Adorno's multifaceted work has exerted a profound impact on far-ranging discourses and critical practices in late modernity. His analysis of the fate of art following its alleged end, of ethical imperatives "after Auschwitz," of the negative dialectic of myth and freedom from superstition, of the manipulation of consciousness by the unequal siblings of fascism and the culture industry, and of the narrowly-conceived concept of reason that has given rise to an unprecedented exploitation of nature and needless human suffering, all speak to central concerns of our time. The essays collected here analyze the full range of implications emanating from Adorno's demand that the task of critical thinking be to imagine a mode of being in the world that occurs in and through a language that has liberated itself from the spell of an alleged historical and political inevitability, what he once tellingly called a "language without soil." Adorno' s finely chiseled sentences perform a ceaseless gesture of thoughtful vigilance, a vigilance understood not in the sense of moralizing or ethical normativity but of a rigorous attention to the presuppositions of thinking itself. The volume's fresh readings conspire to yield a refractory and unorthodox Adorno, a suggestive and at times infuriating thinker of the first order, whose intellectual gestures sponsor politically conscious modes of theoretical speculation in a late modernity that may still have a future because its language and aspirations are without soil. Also included is an annotated translation of a seminal interview Adorno gave in 1969 concerning the relationship of Critical Theory to political activism. In it, the dialectical interplay between thought and action forcefully emerges.

The twenty-one original essays in this volume offer a rigorous reconsideration of modern forms of paternity and friendship as they emerge in works by writers and philosophers from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Exploring various models of these twin themes, contributors examine writings of canonical figures such as Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, Kleist, and Brentano, as well as Kafka, Benjamin, and Arendt. Together, the essays combine an emphasis on the German literary-philosophical tradition with comparative approaches, offering both theoretical discussions and sophisticated readings of crucial texts that have helped shape our contemporary literary engagement with paternity and friendship. This collection honors Stanley Corngold, an influential scholar and teacher who taught German at Princeton University for more than forty years.

Theodor W. Adorno's multifaceted work has exerted a profound impact on far-ranging discourses and critical practices in late modernity. His analysis of the fate of art following its alleged end, of ethical imperatives "after Auschwitz," of the negative dialectic of myth and freedom from superstition, of the manipulation of consciousness by the unequal siblings of fascism and the culture industry, and of the narrowly-conceived concept of reason that has given rise to an unprecedented exploitation of nature and needless human suffering, all speak to central concerns of our time. The essays collected here analyze the full range of implications emanating from Adorno's demand that the task of critical thinking be to imagine a mode of being in the world that occurs in and through a language that has liberated itself from the spell of an alleged historical and political inevitability, what he once tellingly called a "language without soil." Adorno' s finely chiseled sentences perform a ceaseless gesture of thoughtful vigilance, a vigilance understood not in the sense of moralizing or ethical normativity but of a rigorous attention to the presuppositions of thinking itself. The volume's fresh readings conspire to yield a refractory and unorthodox Adorno, a suggestive and at times infuriating thinker of the first order, whose intellectual gestures sponsor politically conscious modes of theoretical speculation in a late modernity that may still have a future because its language and aspirations are without soil. Also included is an annotated translation of a seminal interview Adorno gave in 1969 concerning the relationship of Critical Theory to political activism. In it, the dialectical interplay between thought and action forcefully emerges.

In this book, Gerhard Richter explores the aesthetic and political ramifications of the literary genre of the Denkbild, or thought-image, as it was employed by four major German-Jewish writers and philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer. The Denkbild is a poetic mode of writing, a brief snapshot-in-prose that stages the interrelation of literary, philosophical, political, and cultural insights. Richter's careful analysis of the linguistic characteristics of this mode of writing sheds new light on pivotal concerns of modernity, including the fractured cityscape, philosophical problems of modern music, the experience of exiled homelessness, and the disaster of Auschwitz. Thought-Images not only reorients our understanding of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in important ways but also establishes significant links between these writers and contemporary French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida.

Gerhard Richter's groundbreaking study argues that the concept of "afterness" is a key figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity. It pursues questions such as: What does it mean for something to "follow" something else? Does that which follows mark a clear break with what came before it, or does it in fact tacitly perpetuate its predecessor as a consequence of its inevitable indebtedness to the terms and conditions of that from which it claims to have departed? Indeed, is not the very act of breaking with, and then following upon, a way of retroactively constructing and fortifying that from which the break that set the movement of following into motion had occurred?

The book explores the concept and movement of afterness as a privileged yet uncanny category through close readings of writers such as Kant, Kafka, Heidegger, Bloch, Benjamin, Brecht, Adorno, Arendt, Lyotard, and Derrida. It shows how the vexed concepts of afterness, following, and coming after shed new light on a constellation of modern preoccupations, including personal and cultural memory, translation, photography, hope, and the historical and conceptual specificity of what has been termed "after Auschwitz." The study's various analyses--across a heterogeneous collection of modern writers and thinkers, diverse historical moments of articulation, and a range of media--conspire to illuminate Lyotard's apodictic statement that "after philosophy comes philosophy. But it has been altered by the 'after.'" As Richter's intricate study demonstrates, much hinges on our interpretation of the "after." After all, our most fundamental assumptions concerning modern aesthetic representation, conceptual discourse, community, subjectivity, and politics are at stake.

Werner Hamacher’s witty and elliptical 95 Theses on Philology challenges the humanities—and particularly academic philology—that assume language to be a given entity rather than an event. In Give the Word eleven scholars of literature and philosophy (Susan Bernstein, Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Peter Fenves, Sean Gurd, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Jan Plug, Gerhard Richter, Avital Ronell, Thomas Schestag, Ann Smock, and Vincent van Gerven Oei) take up the challenge presented by Hamacher’s theses. At the close Hamacher responds to them in a spirited text that elaborates on the context of his 95 Theses and its rich theoretical and philosophical ramifications. The 95 Theses, included in this volume, makes this collection a rich resource for the study and practice of “radical philology.� Hamacher’s philology interrupts and transforms, parting with tradition precisely in order to remain faithful to its radical but increasingly occluded core. The contributors test Hamacher’s break with philology in a variety of ways, attempting a philological practice that does not take language as an object of knowledge, study, or even love. Thus, in responding to Hamacher’s Theses, the authors approach language that, because it can never be an object of any kind, awakens an unfamiliar desire. Taken together these essays problematize philological ontology in a movement toward radical reconceptualizations of labor, action, and historical time.