Milieus of Minutiae: Contextualizing the Small in Literature, Philosophy and Science

Elizabeth Brogden & Christiane Frey (Eds.)

Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2024

From catastrophic weather and steady warming caused by the accumulation of carbon particles in the Earth’s atmosphere to societies brought to a standstill by microscopic viruses, the new millennium has reminded us of how the minutest of phenomena can have outsized effects. This notion is one that has preoccupied the European and Anglo-American cultural imaginary since at least early modernity. Milieus of Minutiae brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to investigate various forms of minutiae prior to and beyond the advent of magnification.

See Milieus of Minutiae, Conference, ICI Berlin

Size Matters: Größe in der Fotografie

Linda Conze (Ed.)

Berlin: DISTANZ, 2024

Alles verändert sich, wenn in Bildwelten am Größenregler gedreht wird: Dinge werden hervorgehoben, aus dem Zusammenhang gerissen, überhöht und umgedeutet. Sie rücken nah heran, werden studierbar oder verschwimmen vor den Augen. Mit der Größenverschiebung in der Fotografie geht ein signifikanter, oft unbemerkter Bedeutungswandel einher. Die Publikation Size Matters. Größe in der Fotografie beleuchtet, dass gerade die dimensionale Beweglichkeit dem Medium Wirksamkeit in kulturellen, sozialen und politischen Kontexten verleiht. 

See The Everyday in Dramatic Closeness, Exhibition, ICI Berlin

Pasolini: Dialogues avec la France / Dialoghi con la Francia

Marco Antonio Bazzocchi et al. (Eds.)

Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025

Tout au long de son œuvre, Pasolini n’aura cessé de s’adresser à la France, de l’interpeller, et la France lui a répondu. De quelle France a-t-il parlé ou a-t-il rêvé ? Quels écrivains et cinéastes, quelle poésie, quelle langue et quelle théorie entrèrent dans sa vie, dans ses vers et dans ses images ? D’autre part, de quel Pasolini la France a-t-elle parlé et parle-t-elle encore ? De quoi est fait son rêve de Pasolini ? En interrogeant les formes de ce dialogue entre Pasolini et la France, qui fut et qui est encore aujourd’hui à la fois intellectuel, sensuel et résolument intranquil, ce volume montre l’étrange et inextinguible actualité de Pasolini. Also Open Access.

Thinking Collectives / Collective Thinking

Eva Bentcheva et al. (Eds.)

Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025

Thinking Collectives/Collective Thinking delves into the dynamics of collective artistic practices, and looks in particular at histories, personal experiences, and theories in the context of global Asias. Featuring contributions from artists, curators, and activists, it focuses on the diverse contexts that shape both making and researching art. This ‘Companion’ book aims to bridge historical and theoretical knowledge with first-hand experiences and serves as a resource for a ‘worlded’ art history and contemporary practice.
Also Open Access.

A World of Possibilities: The Legacy of The Undivine Comedy

Kristina M. Olson (Ed.)

Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025

Published in 1992, Teodolinda Barolini’s The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante was a clarion call for a paradigmatic shift in reading Dante’s Commedia. Bringing together an international cadre of scholars, A World of Possibilities: The Legacy of ‘The Undivine Comedy’ illustrates the generative influence that Barolini’s approach has exerted across continents, disciplines, and generations. It testifies to the variety of interpretations that originate in her method, and opens new perspectives on Dante’s oeuvre and the significance of literature. Also Open Access.

Falatório/Chatter

Stella do Patrocínio; Iracema Dulley & Marlon Miguel (Eds.)

Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025

Falatório/Chatter delves into the life and work of Stella do Patrocínio (1941–1992), who was confined in Rio de Janeiro’s Colônia Juliano Moreira psychiatric asylum from the age of twenty-one until her death. The unique form of relentless speech that Do Patrocínio produced while institutionalized was dismissed by doctors as mere ‘logorrhoea’. Yet her falatório is far more: a defiant and poetic act that resists erasure by psychiatry, racism, and patriarchy. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, this book presents transcriptions of Do Patrocínio’s chatter in Portuguese and English, amplifying her voice as a testament to survival, power, and resistance. Also Open Access.

Archive of Dreams: A Surrealist Impulse

Przemysław Strożek et al. (Eds.)

Leipzig: Spector Books, 2024

Marking the hundredth anniversary of the first surrealist manifesto and the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research in Paris in 1924, Archive of Dreams is dedicated to the surrealist movement as well as the networks it engendered and the artistic stimuli it provided in the twentieth century. The publication shows how the practices of the avantgardes blurred the boundaries between dream and reality, between the traditional, passive notion of the archive and the idea of active, innovative artistic experiment — and thus ultimately also between the past, the present, and possible futures.

Pulsion de mort: Destruction et créations

Monique David-Ménard & Beatriz Santos (Eds.)

Paris: Hermann, 2023

La notion de pulsion de mort est en discussion sur sa valeur conceptuelle et opératoire depuis sa formulation par Freud en 1920. Captation interne des forces de vie par une destruction immanente et subtile, est-ce le dernier mot de ce que Freud décrivait comme perspective dans l'Au-delà du principe de plaisir? Réunissant des psychanalystes cliniciens et des philosophes dont les travaux se réfèrent avec constance à la psychanalyse, Pulsion de Mort est une réflexion sur les liens entre la pulsion de mort et la méthode psychanalytique et sur le passages de la clinique d'un sujet aux destins de la pulsion de mort dans nos sociétés.

Kampf um das Unbewusste: Eine Gesellschaft auf der Couch

Christina von Braun & Tilo Held

Berlin: Aufbau, 2025

Das Unbewusste als Territorium kultureller und politischer Konflikte und wie die Psychoanalyse heute helfen kann, sie zu lösen. Die Kulturwissenschaftlerin Christina von Braun und der Psychoanalytiker Tilo Held beleuchten die Bedeutung des Unbewussten für gesellschaftliche Phänomene und Entwicklungen. Von Antisemitismus und Totalitarismus über sich wandelnde Geschlechterrollen bis hin zu Fake News und Verschwörungserzählungen. Eine scharfsinnige Darstellung des "Kampfs ums Unbewusste" der letzten zweihundert Jahre bis heute und Vorschläge, wie eine von anderen Disziplinen bereicherte Psychoanalyse zur Überwindung gegenwärtiger Krisen beitragen könnte.

The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism

Irene V. Small

New York: Zone Books, 2024

What would it mean to treat an interval of space as a line, thus drawing an empty void into a constellation of art and meaning-laden things? In this book, Irene Small elucidates the signal discovery of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark in 1954: a fissure of space between material elements that Clark called “the organic line.” A spatial cavity that binds discrepant entities together, the organic line transforms planes into flexible topologies, borders into membranes, and interstices into points of connection. As a paradigm, the organic line has profound historiographic implications as well, inviting us to set aside traditional notions of influence and origin in favor of what Small terms weak links and plagiotropic relations.

To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism since October 7

Nicholas Mizoeff

London: Pluto Books, 2025

Since October 7th 2023, the forces of racial capitalism, settler colonialism and white supremacy have become all too visible in Israel's war on Gaza. Urban, networked Gazan youth have documented and shared their struggle with the world using social media strategies, derived from movements from Tahrir Square to Black Lives Matter. In To See In The Dark, Nicholas Mirzoeff explores how these videos and photos transmitted and viewed outside Palestine, via platforms like Instagram and TikTok, enabled a dramatic switch in public opinion, leading to the global uprising against genocide. In this groundbreaking analysis, he also connects the personal and the political via his own anti-Zionist Jewishness, weaving an autotheory of domestic, political and sexual violence. Through this exploration, he finds new collective anticolonial ways of seeing, combining online and embodied experiences.

Il presente vivo: Temporalità del divenire e del trauma in Lispector, Ortese e Philip

Alberica Bazzoni

Milano: Mimesis Edizioni, 2025

Il presente vivo è l’esperienza incarnata del divenire temporale, in compartecipazione fra il sé e il mondo; di contro, il trauma interrompe e disgrega la temporalità. Avvalendosi degli strumenti della fenomenologia, del femminismo postumano e degli studi decoloniali, e in dialogo con altre dimensioni temporali quali l’epifania, la linearità teleologica e l’atemporalità della metafisica, il volume esplora la relazione fra divenire e trauma in tre capolavori letterari della contemporaneità: Acqua viva di Clarice Lispector, Il porto di Toledo di Anna Maria Ortese e Zong! di M. NourbeSe Philip.