Speculative Drawing: 2011-2014

by Armen Avanessian, Andreas Töpfer, Nils F. Schott (translator)

Speculative Drawing presents fifteen books—from monographs and translations to collections of essays—that emerged from the research platform Speculative Poetics, conceived by Armen Avanessian in 2011. This book gives a somewhat different introduction to contemporary speculative philosophy, raising questions on how thinking works and how thinking occurs in drawings or illustrations. How does a poetic thinking work that's not about but with art?

Andreas Töpfer's drawings in this book are not illustrations of the texts. Rather it's the other way around: they need to be read so that the texts can start to refer to them. In this sense, Speculative Drawing does not provide a shortcut to the theories presented; it does not aim to build a representational relationship between a pictorially correct understanding and a correlative conceptual thought. Instead, the drawings provide an occasion to think about thinking—a speculative thinking and writing in concept and through images.

Genres: Art, Philosophy

317 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Armen Avanessian is an Austrian philosopher, literary theorist, and political theorist. He has taught at the Free University of Berlin, among other institutions, and held fellowships in the German departments of Columbia University and Yale University. His work on Speculative Realism and Accelerationism in art and philosophy has found a wide audience beyond academia.

Reviews

[Whoisstan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant Book. Analyze story flow/relationships/shifts with intricate drawing. Beats any literary analysis I have ever read. I can stare at them forever.

[Lucie de Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

what is going on in here

[Assem A. Hendawi · Rating 5 out of 5]

That is some great book! Although I skipped a couple of chapters but it's indeed a very interesting "speculative" take on speculative realism/aesthetics.