Crisis and Astonishment

Romantic picture books. Stage designs inspired by Spinoza. A.I. imagined scenes from the early modern period. What the narrative perspective cannot achieve, Alexander Kluge has recently displaced on to the peculiar logic of the images. Volume 9 of the Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch begins with a compilation of his most recent works, the images of which express astonishment at the public crises of the 21st century. Kluge's astonishment--whether in the form of animals photographed in war zones, the clash of physical opposites on screens and stages, or machine-generated invisibility on screens--is a constant challenge to our capacity for differentiation. In addition to dialogues with painter Katharina Grosse and poet Ben Lerner, the volume includes a cluster of essays on decolonialism as well as other scholarly contributions on related topics such as technology, iconoclasm, the political and the labor of theory.