Meditations, maxims, aphorisms, notes, and comments address topics that range from pathos and genius to careerism and club sandwiches.
Marcus Steinweg's capacity to implicate the other is beautiful, bright, precise, and logical, grounded in everyday questions, which to him are always big questions. ―from the foreword by Thomas Hirschhorn
The houses of philosophy need not be palaces. ―Marcus Steinweg, “House,” The Terror of Evidence
This is the first book by the prolific German philosopher Marcus Steinweg to be available in English translation. The Terror of Evidence offers meditations, maxims, aphorisms, notes, and comments―191 texts ranging in length from three words to three pages―the deceptive simplicity of which challenges the reader to think. “Thinking means getting lost again and again,” Steinweg observes. Reality is the ever-broken promise of consistency; “the terror of evidence” arises from the inconsistency before our eyes. Thinking is a means of coping with that inconsistency. 
Steinweg is known for his collaborations with Thomas Hirschhorn and the lectures and texts he has provided for many of Hirschhorn's projects. This translation of The Terror of Evidence includes a foreword by Hirschhorn written especially for the MIT Press edition. 
The subjects of these short texts vary widely. (“The table of contents is in itself excessive and ambitious,” writes Hirschhorn.) They include pathos, passivity, genius, resentment, love, horror, catastrophe, and racism. And club sandwiches (specifically, Foucault's love for this American specialty), blow jobs, and dance. Also: “Two Kinds of Obscurantism,” “Putting Words in Spinoza's Mouth,” “Note on Rorty,” and “Doubting Doubt.” The Terror of Evidence can be considered a guidebook to thinking: the daily journey of exploration, the incessant questioning of reality that Steinweg sees as the task of philosophy.

The Terror of Evidence (Untimely Meditations)

Politics & Social Sciences

Steinweg, Marcus

Philosophy

MIT Press]

Meditations, aphorisms, maxims, notes, and comments construct a philosophy of thought congruent with the inconsistency of our reality.
Those who continue to think never return to their point of departure. ―Inconsistencies
These 130 short texts―aphoristic, interlacing, and sometimes perplexing―target a perennial philosophical problem: Our consciousness and our experience of reality are inconsistent, fragmentary, and unstable; God is dead, and our identity as subjects discordant. How can we establish a new mode of thought that does not cling to new gods or the false security of rationality? Marcus Steinweg, as he did in his earlier book The Terror of Evidence, constructs a philosophical position from fragments, maxims, meditations, and notes, formulating a philosophy of thought that expresses and enacts the inconsistency of our reality. Steinweg considers, among other topics, life as a game (“To think is to play because no thought is firmly grounded”); sexuality (“wasteful, contradictory, and contingent”); desire (”Desire has a thousand names; It's earned none of them”); reality (“overdetermined and excessively complex”); and world (“a nonconcept”). He disposes of philosophy in one sentence (“Philosophy is a continual process of its own redefinition.”) but spends multiple pages on “A Tear in Immanence,” invoking Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and others. He describes “Wandering with Foucault” (“Thought entails wandering as well as straying into madness”) and brings together Derrida and Debord. He poses a question: “Why should a cat be more mysterious than a dog?” and later answers one: “Beauty is truth because truth is beauty.” By the end, we have accompanied Steinweg on converging trains of thought. “Thinking means continuing to think,” he writes, adding “But thinking can only pose questions by answering others.” The question of inconsistency? Asked and answered, and asked.

Inconsistencies (Untimely Meditations)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

The first monograph on New York–based contemporary artist Richard Phillips, best known for his large-scale paintings that are ultracool in execution and very hot in effect. Richard Phillips’s hyperrealistic oil paintings embody themes as broad as power, politics, celebrity, fashion, ideology, beauty, and sex, and pose questions about the status of painting today: Does the medium remain valid, or has it become a historical pastime? Pornography, propaganda, advertising, entertainment, fashion—Phillips incorporates material from a range of sources to confront what is at the core of contemporary image making, from the power of celebrity branding to complicity between viewer and viewed. The book’s exploitative design strategy celebrates the commercial and fashion alliances of the artist’s practice, while revealing the complex politics behind the imagery the artist chooses to paint.

Richard Phillips: Negation of the Universe

Rizzoli

Life has taken Julie Mehretu from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to New York the long way. Now the New York Times writes that her canvases--multilayered, futuristic visual worlds where historical and fictional landscapes meet--"make history painting important again." Each one pulls from diverse sources, noteworthy among them Japanese manga, Chinese landscape art, Ethiopian illuminated books, Baroque engraving in the style of Dürer, graffiti and the geometric abstractions of Kazimir Malevich and Vasily Kandinsky. And they are often structured on architectural drawing, which appeals to Mehretu "because there is no way that you could make architecture that doesn't work." Plans for buildings are metaphors "for systems, for rational efforts to construct the world that we exist within, even though so many things happen in a very organic or irrational way." These angular architectural spaces swarm with organic forms, with communities marching to war, confronting systems and creating elaborate new civilizations. Human relationships unfold, interacting with the built and controlled world. Of her interest in these warring factions and in the "aggressive and forceful nature of history," Mehretu says that, "most of my personal ancestry comes from different cultures that, at one time or another, were at war." This is the first comprehensive monograph on a strong new talent in contemporary painting.

Julie Mehretu: Black City

Rubio, Agustín Pérez

Reference

Hatje Cantz

Corinne Wasmuht

Hüsch, Anette

Zbikowski, Dörte

Kerber Christof Verlag

Inkonsistenzen

Matthes & Seitz Verlag

Evidenzterror

Proflexionen

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