Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex

Juana María Rodríguez

Durham: Duke University Press, 2023

In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena. Drawing on state archives, illustrated biographies, documentary films, photojournalistic essays, graphic novels, and digital spaces, she focuses on the figure of the puta, the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess and brings the language of affect and aesthetics to bear upon understandings of gender, age, race, sexuality, labor, disability, and migration. Highlighting the criminalization and stigmatization that surrounds sex work, she lingers on those traces of felt possibility that might inspire more ethical forms of relation and care.

See Queer Lessons from a Sexual Life, Lecture, ICI Berlin

Ecologies of Ecstasy:

Mysticism, Philosophy, and Vegetal Life

Simone Kotva

New York: Columbia University Press, 2026

What might religious practice learn from plants? Recent years have seen the emergence of critical plant studies, and philosophers have found a radical mode of thought in vegetal life. Ecologies of Ecstasy recasts religious contemplation as a form of vegetal being, arguing that spiritual practice is rooted in the generation of life on earth.
It brings together feminist, queer, and ecocritical readings of Christian mysticism with continental philosophy and the works of Michael Marder, Emanuele Coccia, and Luce Irigaray. Entwining Christian contemplation with philosophies of vegetal life, this book offers new ways to understand mysticism and spiritual practice.

See Scales of Mysticism, Workshop, ICI Berlin

Kant Machine: Critical Philosophy after AI

Yui Hui

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026

What could be called an intelligent machine? Are machines capable of being moral? Does an algorithm for perpetual peace exist? In Kant Machine, Yuk Hui considers how current debates on artificial intelligence echo historical philosophical discussions about the workings of the mind. In asking how we can understand AI in light of the challenges Kant posed to both rationalism and empiricism, and how revisiting Kant can help us better comprehend the nature and limitations of contemporary technologies, Kant Machine is an essential critical contribution both to Kant studies and to the philosophy of digital technology.

See Intelligence and Technodiversity, Symposium, ICI Berlin

He Heru A Comb

Whiti Hereaka

Zurich: Diaphanes, 2026

In her text Whiti Hereaka unfurls a stunning cosmology around the heru, combing with it through time and space to make "stories of ocean blue, blood red, bone white", thus shattering the silence left by the museum description "Zugang ungeklärt" (access unclear). From a seemingly simple comb, Hereaka creates a mirror work of reverence and beauty. It is a text in nine sections, “a part for each tooth, and a part for each space between them”. The parts tell stories of love, loss, longing, including tales of whales from whose bones objects were made, of a carver creating a comb, of Māori gods and the power of women, of colonial whalers fishing their prey almost to extinction in the South Pacific, of a writer who cuts her hair and moves across worlds weaving connections.

Of Interest to the General Public

Maaza Mengiste

Zurich: Diaphanes, 2026

Inspired by the history of the 1868 Napier expedition and the burning of the palace fortress at Magdala, Of Interest to the General Public is a ­narration by the Ethiopian writer and photographer Maaza Mengiste. She combines photographs and text to re-imagine the journey of the stunning and elaborately made royal cloak from Ethiopia – out of battle, through fire, over mountains to cross the waters into Berlin, Germany. The œuvre of Maaza Mengiste, who currently lives in New York, is composed from voices and stories that have been excluded, from gaps that seem inexplicable, from images, objects and places that pulse with pasts unresolved.

The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

Jasper Bernes

Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2017

A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people's working lives. Jasper Bernes argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.

Planetary Longings

Mary Louise Pratt

Durham: Duke University Press, 2022

In Planetary Longings eminent cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt posits that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first mark a turning point in the human and planetary condition. Examining the forces of modernity, neoliberalism, coloniality, and indigeneity in their pre- and postmillennial forms, Pratt reflects on the crisis of futurity that accompanies the millennial turn in relation to environmental disaster and to the new forms of thinking it has catalyzed. The book demonstrates that the changes on either side of the millennium have catalyzed new forms of world-making and knowledge-making in the face of an unknowable and catastrophic future.

Indexicalism:

Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox

Hilal Bensusan

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021

The book articulates a metaphysical view of the other, both human and non-human (or the Great Outdoors as Meillassoux called it), that can never be totalised into a single or univocal whole. Engaging with analytic and continental philosophy, Bensusan enlists Levinas, Whitehead, Heidegger, Kripke, Deleuze, Derrida, Benso, Harman, Garcia, Cogburn, McDowell and Haraway, in such a way that proves to be transformative for both crucial aspects of their work, as well as for contemporary approaches to thinking about what it means to be in our world and to reckon with the responsibilities that press upon us from the outside.

Performing Embodiment: Choreographies of Affect, Language, and Social Norms

Alberica Bazzoni & Federica Buongiorno (Eds.)

Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2026

Combining the notions of performativity and embodiment, this book situates the body in the realm of processes, movement, and poiesis, seeking to generate alternative configurations to mind–body dualism. Focused on language, literature, dance, affect, gender, sport, and disability, the contributions to this volume emphasize doing over being: the body does and is done; it is engaged in a movement of co-constitution with the world. Such a relational process is best described through the notion of choreographies — patterns of movement which capture the embodied dynamic of passivity and activity, design and improvisation, inner and outer states, and which fittingly describe the modalities through which social norms discipline bodies, or are challenged by them.

Formes de l’échec:

Déclinaisons et enjeux d'une notion dans la tradition italienne et au-delà

Franco Costantini et al. (Eds.)

Sesto San Giovanni: Éditions Mimésis, 2026

Échouer, rater quelque chose, dériver : l’échec, notion polyédrique à la fois subjective et collective, se configure comme un prisme d’analyse privilégié pour interroger les relations entre un auteur et son époque ainsi que les dynamiques qui s’instaurent à l’intérieur du texte même, entre une oeuvre et sa réception critique, un sujet littéraire et son monde (et mode) de représentation. Subi ou recherché, constaté ou craint, blâmé ou revendiqué, l’échec s’offre à des lectures changeantes et multiples, toujours culturellement et historiquement déterminées.