The fifteenth volume of the book series ‘Cultural Inquiry’ has just been released and is available, on the newly founded ICI Repository, as a web version optimized for screen-reading. It can also be downloaded in several ebook formats, and its print version is available from booksellers and in stock at the Berlin bookstores b_books, Pro qm, and Saint George’s English Bookshop. With this publication, the ICI Berlin becomes the publisher of the series. The volume gathers papers originally presented at the ICI Fellow workshop in 2017, whose participants, members of the ICI research project ‘ERRANS, in time’, had resolved to present their work by reflecting on words that start with the prefix ‘re-‘ exclusively. Their project, thus, translates rather effortlessly into the genre of the glossary.
The prefix ‘re-‘ might, at first glance, appear transparent and directional. It has, quite recently, become the focus of debates around the legacies and limitations of ‘critique’. A lexicon of ‘re-‘words, it has been suggested, might afford a more nuanced scholarship attuned to affective and activist involvements, in contrast to the negativist import of the ‘de-‘reliant idioms of critique. While the glossary certainly presents a less polarized account, it also seeks to complicate the linear and teleological models commonly accepted as structuring the relations between past, present, and future, opening onto errant temporalities.
