Art without Death: Conversations on Russian Cosmism

by Anton Vidokle, Arseny Zhilyaev, Hito Steyerl

Today, many of us can remember the disappeared indigenous cosmologies as parts of ourselves, lost to colonialism, industrialization, communist revolutions, and capitalist wars. Many names have been given to ideological or historical grand narratives to soothe the pain of loss, to register those losses and render them searchable, but these memorializing mechanisms still fail to register the pain of losing something much larger that cannot be named—a deep relation to the world, to the cosmos, and to ourselves that gives us strength and sovereignty without need for any other earthly power of right or dominion.

What if another kind of modernity had been developed which was even more radical—so much so that its forward arrow actually sought to conserve and preserve previous lifeworlds against the ravages not of vanguardist reforms but of time itself? And reanimate those worlds. It would project a different kind of modernity altogether, beyond right or wrong sides of history, without victors and victims.

Genres: Art, Philosophy, Nonfiction

158 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Anton Vidokle is an artist and founder of e-flux. Born 1965, Vidokle lives in New York and Berlin.

Reviews

[melancholinary · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is an interesting conundrum on the speculation of the evolution of human abilities somewhere in this book; the notion of how human could make themselves as immortal as jellyfish. Instead of needing a house to protect, why not develop some sort of bio-evolution mechanism for the human to be as strong as a tardigrade. Instead of needing food to survive, why not develop some sort of adapted-digestion system so one human could consume flying bacteria, sunlight and radiation from trans-communication technology. In this sense, this is the idea that opposes Mumford's monotechnic with esoteric occult Bolshevik undertones. Also important to be noted that Russian Cosmism could also conceptually approached as a museology process. Nikolai Fedorov lives!

[GreyAtlas · Rating 1 out of 5]

THIS WORK CONTAINS TOLKIEN AND RAND SLANDER. the rest is ok, but 1 paragraph earned it 1 star. Esther Zomhiemwhatever commited a felony.

of people as mediocre as Rand’s simplistic writing.
That’s why I was enormously surprised when I
learned much later how great an influence her books
had on the American political and economic elite:
the novels are basically written on the level of teenage
heroic fantasies of omnipotence, and are full
of grudge. So it’s still pretty incredible to me that
such mediocre writing had this toxic effect on several
generations of people who came to occupy key
corporate and government positions. It’s as though
the President of the United States is being secretly
guided by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (which is arguably
a far better book than The Fountainhead).


NO. NO NO NO NONONONONONONONONONONONO HOW DARE SHE. CRIMINAL. I AM OFFENDED.

[Vietzsche · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Progeny of Fedorov