Working the contemporary : history as a project of crisis, today

Osborne, Peter (2019) Working the contemporary : history as a project of crisis, today. In: de Assis, Paulo and Schwab, Michael, (eds.) Futures of the contemporary : contemporaneity, untimeliness and artistic research. Leuven, Belgium : Leuven University Press. pp. 135-146. (Orpheus Institute Series) ISBN 9789462701830

Abstract

What might it mean to “work” the concept of the contemporary, under current conditions, in the sense of Georges Canguilhem’s famous account of “working a concept”? The contemporary, it is argued, has been “worked” by history itself into a global form. Two aspects in particular will be stressed: its immanent relationship to the temporality of crisis, and a renewed sense of history itself as a “project of crisis” (Tafuri), a putting into crisis, or a production of the present as crisis. History as project, it is suggested, is the negativity of the unity of global crisis. How might this sound?

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