Biomedical Visions: Epistemology, Medicine, and Art Practice

Elizabeth W. Hughes & Alfred Freeborn (Eds.)

Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2025

We live in an age of biomedical visions. There seems to be no end to the demystification of the body through visualization technologies and the promise of health is irresistible. Yet alongside these promising technologies, inequalities in healthcare persist. Life and illness play out in the gap between visualized bodies and ideological notions of health and disease. The collection brings together epistemology, medicine and art to understand what biomedicine looks like and how we might view it differently.

See Biomedical Visions, Discussion, ICI Berlin

The Minor Gesture

Erin Manning

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016

In this wide-ranging and probing book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward. 

See Minima Formalia, Conference, ICI Berlin

Powers of Reading: From Plato to Audiobooks

Peter Szendy

New York: Zone Books, 2025

Peter Szendy offers a subtle, persuasive, and unprecedented account of the time of reading and its scene of address, one that is as archaic as it is contemporary. When we read, are we listening to a voice or being read to? If it is not a private and monologic exercise, how do we understand the populated scene of reading? What reads when we read, and how does reading push and pull between temporalities and voices? Why do we keep leaving the text when we seek to obey the injunction to stay within its terms?

See A Hundred Years of the Future of the Book, Symposium, ICI Berlin

Bourgeois Coldness

Henrike Kopheiß

Brussels: Divided Publishing, 2025

Bourgeois coldness refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning – a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces – institutional and affective – stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning. Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.

The Unconscious: A Cultural History from Hippocrates to Philip K. Dick and Beyond

Antonio Melechi

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2026

“Know thyself”—the injunction that was once inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo—became a touchstone for classical and modern philosophers before being embraced as the endgame of psychoanalysis by Freud and his followers. The conceptual baggage that Freud took on his armchair journey into the unconscious mind is well known—and so, too, is the more recent science on implicit memory, blindsight and automatic processing—but the history of the unconscious beyond the consulting room and laboratory has largely been overlooked. From ancient dream theory to psychedelic mind-expansion, The Unconscious traces the wider social and scientific history of the unconscious mind.

When History Returns: Psychoanalytic Quests for Humane Learning

Deborah P. Britzman

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2024

When History Returns brings together psychoanalytic theories of learning with the antinomies of social strife. From a psychoanalytic perspective, history returns through transitional scenes of inheriting a past one could not make, experiencing a present affected by what came before, and facing a future one can neither know nor predict. Taking such scenes as the subject of education, Deborah P. Britzman provides new approaches and vocabulary for conceptualizing experience and understanding, as expressed in psychoanalysis, literature, film, clinical case studies, and warm pedagogy. 

Sick Architecture

Beatriz Colomina et al. (Ed.)

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2025

Illnesses, wellness, and architecture are inseparable. Medical professionals and architects have always been in a kind of dance, often influencing one another, though the dance is not always synchronized. Drawing from a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies from ancient Greece to twentieth-century India to present-day New York City, Sick Architecture highlights a topic that has shaped our lives from the very beginnings of architecture to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond.

Impossible Recovery: Julian of Norwich and the Phenomenology of Well-Being

Hannah Lucas

New York: Columbia University Press, 2025

In Impossible Recovery Hannah Lucas explores the entanglement of illness and revelation in the writings of medieval mystic Julian of Norwich (1342–after 1416), the first known woman to author a book in the English language, illuminating the unexpected commonalities between the medical and the mystical and their significance for philosophies of health. Framed by an original application of post-Heideggerian philosophy, the book offers a vivid new interpretation of the medieval mystic as crafting a proto-phenomenological theology of well-being. Refracted through Julian’s Revelations, this book advances a powerful existential query about the possibilities of recovery—of well-being, and of medieval history.

Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists is Shaping the Memorial Landscape

Cat Dawson

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2025

For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled both who is part of a culture and who is not, often overlooking histories that complicate the stories they tell. Yet in the last 50 years in the United States, the role of monuments has changed significantly. Numerous historical monuments have been removed or toppled, bringing to the fore a long-repressed conversation about the relationship between the monumental landscape and national identity. In Monumental, Cat Dawson takes up the social, political, and art historical causes and ramifications of this important shift.

Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education

Helena Pedersen

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019

Within the education system, acts of violence toward animals take place and are manifested on a routine basis in science classes, in lecture halls, in school canteens, and during study visits to zoos, farms, and slaughterhouses. Taken for granted as ”necessary” for teaching and learning, this violence profoundly affects animals as well as students. It also provides new entry points for understanding education as a multispecies power regime, driven by numerous other investments than knowledge dissemination alone. What, then, is the nature of this educational violence, and how exactly does education work through techniques of interference with student and animal bodies?

Asimmetria: Lotta di Classe alla Fine di un Mondo

Yuri Di Liberto

Milano: Mimesis, 2022

Pandemie, cambiamento climatico, desertificazioni e un capitalismo finanziario ormai autoreferenziale. Il futuro è già qui. Eppure, se da un lato sembriamo abitanti di un incubo avverato, dall'altro lato la battaglia contro le disuguaglianze, la distruzione ambientale e l'alienazione collettiva è tutt'altro che finita. Le promesse disattese di un capitalismo parassitario ci spingono ad armarci di impegno e coraggio per organizzare le lotte che verranno.