Fear and Laughter: A Politics of Not Selves 'For' Self explores the possibility of situating oneself within the tension between comedy and horror. An ethical stance is defined as not selves 'for' self in the immanent relation of thought, forgiveness and laughter. Thought as an image, the Gorgon, a death mask, is worn on the face of the self-conscious comic subject. Theories on fear and laughter by several philosophers and poets-Spinoza, Deleuze, Bataille, Nietzsche, Hegel, Shakespeare, Aristophanes, Baudelaire, Beckett, Bergson and others- are used to illuminate a specific political orientation. The texture of the book's language allows the reader to enter into this division and circuit of fear and laughter, which "act like the shorelines cradling what life really feels like, a mass of beauty and sadness." Beginning with a genealogy of laughter, the book closes with an exploration of the mechanisms of contemporary life that stifle the potential for laughter, while attempting to transcend them.------------about the author: Jake Reeder is an alumnus of The European Graduate School. He is currently working towards his doctoral degree at the London Consortium, studying the concept of possession from Aristotle to Heidegger.

Upward Crashes: Fracture's Topoi: Musil, Kiefer, Darger explores the perception of altitude as a locus of fraction, from the inception of modernity to the present.Citing examples from literature, art, theory and media, it examines the paradoxical trope of a fall or crash into the heights, from a spatial, visual and ethical perspective. Tracing the trajectory of the fractured self in pursuit of 'high grounds' it discusses, among others, works by H lderlin, Musil, Kafka, Kiefer, Darger and Viola. Altitude is not interpreted as infinite space but as a place of appearance, akin to Platonic chora a suspension, a temporary exile outside of matter, where the subject is thrown in force field of tensions that organizes and evokes images, memories, emotions, and occasionally trauma.----"Paola Piglia-Veronese's Upward Crashes ... fractures the classical topoi, or conceptual starting places, of rationality, as she exemplifies these fractures, or rather ex-stases, in the work of Musil, Kiefer, and Darger. Paola's is a major contribution to the literature. A must read "--Victor J. Vitanza----About the author: Paola Piglia, born in Turin, Italy, was educated at the University of California, Berkeley (BA Honours) and European Graduate School, Switzerland, Dept of Media And Communication ( MA, PhD ). As artist and illustrator she has had long affiliations with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin, The New York Times Magazine, Berlin Verlag, Fischer Verlag, The European Commission, and many others. She has lectured at The Royal College of Art, London; Virginia Commowealth University Art School and Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden K nste, Stuttgart, Germany. She lives and works between London and New York.

About the book: Necessity of Terrorism: aggressively reviews the political implication of the terminology and law creation; goes back through history, using a Hegelian-Marxian reading of event by power and violence all merging to recreate a case study of the phenomenon and the Machiavellian usage of it in politics, war and law. Revealing the role of terrorism from above and below in the political and socio-economic development of state, law, culture, and history.

Prize-seeking, pleasure-driven, self-involved intent has run its course. This book confronts the ethics of desire in the moment of truth. The indulgence of desire is the decadence of the human condition. Whenever desire is satisfied, the desire diminishes and we reach a vanishing point. In time, desire returns. The tyranny of desire is observed in the constant turnover of fashion and technology or, on a grand scale, the rise and decline of civilizations. Yet our contemporary moment is a great destiny and our fortune is to have arrived after deconstruction. If Cartesian doubt was evidence that humankind was not open to the truth of reality, deconstruction was evidence that, amid the crisis of meaning in ideology and cultural theory, humankind was foreclosed to ontological truth. The "all for nothing" dead end is in need of something that can only be found by the question of truth.About the author: Rachel K. Ward is a writer based in Paris. She graduated magna cum laude from the European Graduate School where she studied with Jean Baurdillard and others. She works in the intersection of fashion, art and media and has been acknowledged by The New York Times, Vogue Paris, i-D and others.

The author employs a philosophical approach in order to conceptualize the space and time in urban realms of the first decades of the 21st century. The so-called 'hi-tech society' has reached its saturation according to Paul Virilio, William Mitchell, Jean Baudrillard, Wolfgang Schirmacher, Marc Aug. Space and time are interchangeably main concerns and the new definitions of technological culture are critiqued. Jean-Luc Nancy has described how physical communities arrive at an inoperable stage. How those communities will function when altered for micro-urban concerns in virtual space is vital to city officials as well as related business enterprises. However, as issues of governance cast a shadow on communitary freedom, netizens seek more flexible derivations instead of smart(er) urban typologies. This urge for flexibility introduces the new notion of a politics of speed, for which a consensus from all states of power should be eternally pursued in the city of the near future. What kind of a city are we looking at in the 21st century? Or rather, what is, today, a real city? The answer should transcend the dialectics of the real and fantasy. Asli Telli Aydemir received a PhD (magna cum laude) in Media and Communication Studies from the European Graduate School.She was awarded a Young Scholar Grant by the European Science Foundation and recently appointed as a Research Fellow in Istanbul Bilgi University, where she works on an EU-funded project, entitled "Civic-web: Internet, Youth and Participation."

History is marked by catastrophic events that defy meaning and understanding. The 20th century was a century of prosperity and progress; it was also history's bloodiest. The death toll from war and genocide reached 140 million people. Trauma of this magnitude poses grave challenges to memory and thought. This work explores failures of memory and cognition - the blackout - as a condition that plagues history, and is particularly problematic in an era of media, in which memory is increasingly disembodied and virtualized, undermined by a Generalized Media Disorder. Technologies of media and war are creating a condition in which the virtual world is displacing the ethical world. BLACKOUT traces this phenomenon through a century of upheaval - from World War I, which exceeded all previous notions of destruction, to the War on Terror, a perpetual war in a realm of perpetual media. World War II is particularly significant in its deployment of previously unfathomable technologies of disappearance - extermination, nuclear weapons, and the massive incineration of cities in Germany and Japan. The blackout is a space of memory and thinking that collapses with catastrophe and falls into a stupor. Our humanity has been nearly extinguished by the tremendous violence it has enacted, pushing philosophy, language and ethics to their limits. Joan Grossman is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and video artist, based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been shown in more than 20 countries. She also teaches media theory and production, and received her doctorate in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland.

This is a collection of essays, most published here for the first time, on Gilles Deleuze's ideas about history and science. Its focus is on ontological or metaphysical questions: What are the legitimate social entities that can be used in historical explanations, given a materialist metaphysics? What are the legitimate inhabitants of the material world, natural and artificial, and what role should science play in determining their legitimacy? What can philosophy contribute to this enterprise? --- Manuel DeLanda is the author of five philosophy books, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), A New Philosophy of Society (2006), and The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (Forthcoming). He teaches two seminars at University of Pennsylvania, Department of Architecture: "Philosophy of History: Theories of Self-Organization and Urban Dynamics," and "Philosophy of Science: Thinking about Structures and Materials." He also holds the Gilles Deleuze chair at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

New media theorists, performance artists, media culture commentators, and politicians have celebrated life online-the virtual unknown-as shamanic, Eastern, mysterious, transformative, and exotic. SHAMANISM + CYBERSPACE shows that this rhetoric is actually a familiar version of the other, and that imperialism is at its core. This book combines postcolonial, deconstructionist, and performance theory to reread new media theory and shamanism itself, specifically in South Korea. It unravels and reweaves discourses on originary reproduction, confronting the proliferating violence in media and nationalism. Perhaps most radically, it proposes a new theory of "media mourning" to help us see and hear shamanism colliding with contemporary media art worlds, collapsing time and space, upending gender and racial categories, and confounding the boundaries between East and West. Most importantly, the book introduces a new opening toward instigating the impossibility of the other in philosophy while critiquing how shamanism is used to image the other in cyberspace culture. Mina Cheon (Korean-American), PhD, MFA, is a new media artist, writer, and educator who divides her time between Baltimore, New York, and Seoul. She is currently a full-time professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, teaching studio and liberal arts. SHAMANISM + CYBERSPACE (2009) is her first book, adapted from her dissertation, The Sh]man in Cyberspace: Dilemmas of Reproduction (2008), which was completed for her doctoral degree in Philosophy of Media and Communications at the European Graduate School (EGS), Switzerland. As an artist, she has shown internationally, with solo exhibitions at spaces including the Lance Fung Gallery in New York (2002); Insa Art Space, Arts Council, Seoul (2005); and C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore (2008). From installation and performance to video and interactive media, her artwork deals with issues of media, space, borders, and conflicts between nations, especially the triangular relationship between South Korea, North Korea, and the United States. Recently her work has extended into the realm of looking at other national conflicts, including those between neighboring Asian nations such as Korea, Japan, and China, and the plethora of images of hatred and racism found in popular media and cultures of Asia.

Instead of smoothing over contemporary art's violent and iconoclastic dimensions, instead of sanitizing and making complex artworks docile in terms of archival possibilities, this book suggests we abandon our fantasy of mastery over representation and respond in kind to the archive-as-artwork, to "living" archives, and to reenactments of history with their seamless connections between fiction and non-fiction. Among the concepts examined are Vilem Flusser's techno-imagination, Lygia Clark's and Helio Oiticica's participatory aesthetics, and Paulo Bruscky's and Eduardo Kac's literal performances of the archive. They contribute to the erosion of the archive's former boundaries, stability, function, and meaning. Writing alongside the artists as much as about them, Osthoff examines the archive mise-en-abyme, as it grows increasingly recombinant and generative. Simone Osthoff received her Ph.D. from the European Graduate School and is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Visual Arts at Pennsylvania State University. An art critic and historian of contemporary art, her numerous essays, focusing on media art practices and issues of historiography, have been published internationally and translated into over eight languages.

The Ethics of Uncertainty asks what it means to live, act, decide, and respond responsibly, in the aporia of freedom itself - a freedom which on one hand opens us to the open space of possible possibilities, and on the other, leaves us no stable ground or measure for pre/determined decision making. The aporia of freedom is conditioned by the indeterminate space of knowing we must make decisions, and yet, at the same time, we cannot call on an absolute authority or measure as a guide. Aporias open us to freedom, the place where, as Derrida has taught us, an ethical decision may occur. Allowing indeterminacy to exist in our becoming allows a continuous coming to be with others - a becoming always open to the "to come" (Derrida) of the future. Always drawing us toward the possibility of making a decision within the fabric of indecision, aporias give us the possibility of ethical becoming. Overall, this text points us to the possibility of living an ethical life in a world without absolute measure - an ethics, in other words, of uncertainty. Michael Anker currently teaches philosophy at the College of New Rochelle in New York and a workshop at the European Graduate School (Switzerland).

Volume 62 of this ground-breaking 100 volume collection is organized into four sections: Psychology as Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Its Critics, Research in Gestalt Psychology, and The Iconoclasts.
A showcase of German-psychological thinkers and thought through the 20th century, this volume includes several new translations of articles by pyschologists whose work is rarely available in English.

Includes: Gunther Anders, "Victims of Aggression"; Hannah Arendt, "From the Life of the Mind; " Ernst Bloch, "On Fine Arts in the Machine Age, From "The Principle of Hope; " Karl Jaspers, "Existential Philosophy; " Albert Schweitzer, "Philosophy of Civilization; " Karl R. Popper, "An Optimistic View of Our Age; " Ludwig Wittgenstein, From "Philosophical Investigations; " and more.

This volume includes the following works:

Ludwig Feuerbach:
-- The Essence of Christianity
-- Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy
-- Principles of the Philosophy of the Future

Karl Marx:
-- Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession
-- Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law
-- Theses on Feuerbach
-- Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Friedrich Engels:
-- Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
-- The Dialectics of Nature, Letters on Historical Materialism
-- Appendix to "The Condition of the Working Class"
-- Introduction to Socialism
-- Selections from "The Communist Manifesto".

A shared belief among German scientists in the 19th century, as Alexander von Humboldt phrased it, was that science in all its forms has to serve the betterment of human condition. This volume in The German Library, a companion to volume 82 (German Essays on Science in the 20th Century, also edited by Schirmacher), represents the sciences in a comprehensive way: Natural History, Humanities, Social Sciences, Law, Economy, and Technology.

The 20th century has brought us to the high point of the scientific-technological age but paradoxically marks the beginning of a critical loss of confidence in the very powers of science. This volume in The German Library, a companion to volume 36 (German Essays on Science in the 19th Centiry, also edited by Wolfgang Schirmacher), represents the sciences in a comprehansive way: Physics, Biochemistry, Ecology, Ethology, Social Sciences, Law and Culture. Writers and scientists represented include: Robert Bosch, Albert Einstein, Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, Konrad Lorenz, Lise Meitner, Max Planck, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and many others.>

As composer Richard Wagner noted, with Schopenhauer one may finally give voice to the secretly held belief that the world is bad. This blunt honesty was Schopenhauer's trademark. Perhaps no philosopher equaled him in relatinf metaphysical speculation to the seemingly random events of everyday life. This volume includes " On Thinking for Oneself," "On the Affirmation of the Will-to-Live," "On Suicide," "The World as Will: Second Aspect," "On the Fundamental View of Idealism," "On the Metaphysics of Music," "The Foundation of Ethics," and other essential writings.

details a study of original genealogies, biographies, concepts and events leading from anthropogenesis to the teleological 'singularity', providing context for an ever-present undercurrent of written script (organized information) as it is revealed progressively through the real functioning of finite life in its original space-time continuum. is presented as a self-preserving superstructure, positioning ethics as its highest economy. Through the perspective of technological post-human intelligence, the ethical/mathematical economy of reveals its ultimate wonder: write-protection. Surrounded by massive amounts of alternative data in entropy and chaos, functions as an unbreakable, mastered arrangement of information under the perpetual threat of palimpsestual corruption and total annihilation. reveals its ethical write-protection through the blooming manifestation of its algorithm. This Atropos print edition of includes an afterword by Wolfgang Schirmacher, translated by Ira Allen.