Intra/Sections: Towards Post-Anthropocentric Concepts of Multiplicity

Jenny Haase & Kathrin Thiele (Eds.)

Paderborn: Brill/Fink, 2025

The global socio-ecological crisis is making it increasingly clear that ‘we’ do not only act in interpersonal social and political relationships, but that non-human forms of life and relationships must also be taken into account in the critical analysis of our present. In light of that realization, this volume opens the question of the Menge (multitude, crowd) towards a post-anthropocentric perspective on multiplicity. Based on speculative readings of works by K. Barad, M. de la Cadena, and C. Vicuña, the essays illuminate how a human-and-more-than-human intra/sectional approach can help deconstruct the western hegemonic framework.
See Intra/ Sections, Workshop, ICI Berlin

The Prop

Elena Gorfinkel & John David Rhodes

New York: Fordham University Press, 2025

What are film props? What do they do? This book answers these questions by a close attention to those material objects that are used to construct cinematic worlds. The term “prop” is short for property. This truncated term’s etymology belies the expansiveness of the concept and indicates the micro and macro scales at which the prop operates. Props are the material—often literal—furniture of cinema’s diegetic reality. And yet, the prop has rarely—almost never—been taken as an object of analysis and theorization in its own right.
See The Prop and its Properties, Lecture, ICI Berlin

Farsi Male: Variazioni sul Masochismo

Vittorio Lingiardi

Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2025

Succede a tutti di farsi male, ma possiamo imparare a riconoscere le sofferenze che ci colpiscono alle spalle da quelle a cui noi stessi, più o meno consapevolmente, ci consegniamo. Vittorio Lingiardi delimita un territorio vastissimo e oscuro: percorre la storia dei nostri dolori e traccia un confine tra convivenza e connivenza. Masochista è un aggettivo che turba, ma qui non si parla di fruste e manette: lo sguardo è sulla personalità e sulle relazioni. Lingiardi ci accompagna in stanze interiori, arredate con gli spigoli aguzzi dell’autocritica, le mensole inaccessibili dell’ideale dell’Io, le casseforti del sabotatore interno, le lavatrici interminabili del senso di colpa. Un racconto sulla vita di tutti i giorni, con un finale sul masochismo politico e il dolore del mondo.
See Corpo psichico, medico, vivente, Lecture, ICI Berlin

The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon

Yannick Giovanni Marshall

London: Zed Books, 2025

The End of the Supplication contends that Black freedom struggles are anti-colonial movements against anti-Blackness and the permutations of slavery, and as such they are ill-served by a dominant Civil Rights discourse that escapes neither the paternalism of white abolitionism nor the caricatures of minstrelsy. The book traces the roots of the white supremacist ideology behind the disarmed, supplicant-negro figure, and it shows how this ideology continues to inform present liberal presentations of Black people as passive subjects at the mercy of white power.
See Unweighed Lives, Lecture, ICI Berlin

trans* Werden: Queere Zeitlichkeit und Transitionen in Videoblogs

Sarah Horn

Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025

Das Buch trans* Werden. Queere Zeitlichkeiten und Transitionen in Videoblogs widmet sich in einer medienwissenschaftlichen Analyse ausgewählten Videos von trans* Videobloggern, die ihre geschlechtlichen Transitionen in den 2010er Jahren auf YouTube dokumentieren. In selbstdokumentarischen Praktiken verbunden mit den Wirkungen des Testosterons auf die Körper offenbart sich trans* Sein als ein komplexes und ungewisses Werden, das in medialer Umgebung als queere Zeitlichkeit erfahrbar wird. Hierbei stehen die Effekte der Mediatisierung im Fokus der Analyse.
Also Open Access.

The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos

Laura U. Marks

Durham: Duke University Press, 2024

In The Fold, Laura U. Marks offers a practical philosophy and aesthetic theory for living in an infinitely connected cosmos. Drawing on the theories of Leibniz, Glissant, Deleuze, and theoretical physicist David Bohm — who each conceive of the universe as being folded in on itself in myriad ways — Marks contends that the folds of the cosmos are entirely constituted of living beings. From humans to sandwiches to software to stars, every entity is alive and occupies its own private enclosure inside the cosmos. With this guide for living within the enfolded and unfolding cosmos, Marks teaches readers to richly apprehend the world and to trace the processes of becoming that are immanent within the fold.

Corpse Magic: Echoes Active in the Slayer-Slain Nexus

Michael Taussig

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025

Corpse Magic is a response to the global ubiquity of violence. In this bracing new work, the influential anthropologist Michael Taussig puts killings in Colombia, by gangs and guerrillas, police and the military, and agents of agribusiness, in conversation with mass shootings and police killings, disproportionately of Black people, in the United States. In both contexts, he examines the effects of violent killing on its victims, its perpetrators, and those who witness and relive it through media footage. In this powerful and imaginative work, Taussig asks what kind of power the dead continue to have; what kinds of magic can manage that power; and what, if anything, can stop seemingly endless cycles of violence.

The New Fascist Body

Dagmar Herzog

Berlin: Wirklichkeit Books, 2025

The success of new far-right movements cannot be explained by fear or rage alone – the pleasures of aggression and violence are just as essential. As such, racism is particularly intense when it is erotically charged, migration presenting as a sexual threat to white women being one of many examples. Germany’s strikingly successful right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland is, according to the historian Dagmar Herzog, characterized by this “sexy racism,” with its second main feature being that of an obsessive hostility to disability – both elements resonating strongly with Nazism. The New Fascist Body, connects an analysis of fascism’s libidinous energy with its animus against bodies perceived as imperfect. Only by studying the emotional and intellectual worlds of past fascisms can we understand and combat their current manifestations.

Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield

Yolanda Ariadne Collins

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024

Forests of Refuge questions the effectiveness of market-based policies that govern forests in the interest of mitigating climate change. Yolanda Ariadne Collins interrogates the most ambitious global plan to incentivize people away from deforesting activities: the United Nations – endorsed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. This book situates these challenges in the inattentiveness of global environmental policies to roughly five hundred years of colonial histories that positioned the forests as places of refuge and resistance. It advocates that the fruits of these oppressive histories be reckoned with through processes of decolonization.

Uninhabited: Science Fiction and the Decolonial

Ben Woodard

London: Zer0 Books, 2025

Is it inhabited? This question makes the shared stakes of science fiction and colonialism obvious, wherein the wide imaginaries of empire and what counts as life and the moral and technological possibilities of terraforming and the impulse for exploration are all fused. Science fiction, and the genres that preceded and grounded it, such as scientific romance and tales of lost civilizations, emerged alongside the birth of industrialized global trade and imperial rushes for new resources. If the scientific romance dramatized the effects of new technologies on history and forms of life, then lost civilization stories dealt with themes of the alien, the forgetting of history, and more explicitly, with episodes of war and oppression.