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Description

To Boris Groys, everything in the modern world ultimately falls into two categories – it's either art, or it's garbage. Both are useless, functionless objects that simply… lie there. The difference comes when we immunize art from the destructive power of time to which we happily deliver our garbage. In this collection of essays and interviews, Groys expounds on these lines of thinking, taking in art, the dialectic of work, the afterlife, politics, utopia, philosophy, faith, revolution, the avant-garde and digitalization.
Boris Groys' philosophical writings critique the political economy of heterotopia: economic resources are finite and not everything in modernity receives the same degree of care. His writings on art concern the things of the after-life, with only the politics of immortality ensuring that one's own form of life never becomes a piece of garbage. Groys sees modern history is a history of aestheticizations, and with every aestheticization comes a claim of protection. Western society tends to aestheticize with a desire to protect everything, including the Anthropocene and all of the exotic species dwelling within it. If we can present ourselves as objects of reverence worthy of admiration and care, then can we too survive the ravages of time?
Bringing together previously unpublished texts, newly translated work and interviews, this is a coruscating trip through the complex and challenging philosophical and cultural problems that Boris Groys has made it his life's work to deal with.

Table of Contents

ToC
Introduction: Imagination Degree Zero - Marcus Hurwitz
Part One
1. Into the Russian Soul – interview
2. Russland auf der Suche nach Seiner Indentitaet
3. Pavel Filonov's Life Machines
4. Das Kunstwerk als nicht-funktionale Machine
5. Wisdom as the Feminine World Principle: Vladimir Soloviev's Sophiology
6. Elements of Gnosticism in Dialectical Materialism
7. Gebaute Idologie
8. Alexandre Kojève: The Artwork as Embodiment of the Aesthetical Judgment
9. Alexander Kojeve: Self Production
10. Lenin's Image
11. Trotsky, or Metamorphoses of Engagement
12. The Cold War Between the Medium and the Message: Western Modernism vs. Socialist Realism
13. Avant-garde and Politics. The End of Art and the End of Humanism? – interview
14. Soviet Oikonomia – interview
15. Lenin and Lincoln: Two Figures of Modern Death – interview

Part Two
16. Anti-Philosophy and the Politics of Recognition
17. Fundamentalism as a Middle Ground between High and Mass Culture
18. Changing Topologies of the Class Struggle
19. Discourses of Distrust: Conspiracy Theories and the Critique of Ideology
20. Totalitarian Legacies

Part Three
21. Die dunkle Seite der Kunst
22. Der ein-gebildete Kontext
23. Die Herstellung des Anderen
24. The Museum as Cradle of Revolution
25. The Mimesis of Thinking
26. Exhibiting the Exhibition, or Nostalgia in Reenactment
27. Exhibition in post- Internet
28. The Future Belongs to Tautology
29. Art Topology: The Reproduction of Aura
30. Followership vs. Spectatorship: The Two Regimes of the Contemporary Image
31. Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction
32. Immortal Bodies
33. Caring For Tradition
34. The Community Without Commonality - interview

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 22 Jan 2026
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 288
ISBN 9781350457850
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Boris Groys

Boris Groys is an art critic, media theorist, an…

Anthology Editor

Marcus Hurwitz

Marcus Hurwitz is a philosopher, art critic, and w…

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