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Critique is a form of thinking and acting. It is determined by its objects, yet never accesses them immediately but is always mediated through its own forms of (re)presentation. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as topoi such as the break, the marginalization, the tearing and opening indicate. However, these multifarious attempts to "build on the structure through demolition" (Benjamin) testify to the dependence of all articulation on the forms of (re)presentation ["Darstellung"]. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated which generate their critical statements less argumentatively than through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene-whereas the theatrical scene as a stage of critique has been contested intensively during the 20th century. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.
List of contents
7 - 34 An Introduction to "The Stakes of Form" (Sami Khatib, Holger Kuhn, Oona Lochner, Isabel Mehl, Beate Söntgen)37 - 52 How to Do Materialistic Dialectics with Words? Adorno and the Resistance of Presentation (Heiko Stubenrauch)53 - 68 Expression and Suffering; Semblance and Mimesis (Notes on an Enigmatic Passage in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory) (Eva Geulen)69 - 92 Marx, Real Abstraction, and the Question of Form (Sami Khatib)95 - 116 Forms of Critique, Modes of Combat (Birgit M. Kaiser, Kathrin Thiele)117 - 138 "To Arlene on Wings of Love": Shared Forms of Life, Art, and Writing (Oona Lochner)139 - 172 Decorating Charleston Farmhouse: Bloomsbury's Experiments in Forms of Life, Work, and Art (Beate Söntgen)175 - 184 Feedback Systems: Artwriting as Critique? (Isabel Mehl)185 - 196 On Slowing Down and Not Being Shy. A Conversation (Chris Kraus, Isabel Mehl)197 - 212 The Horse's Eye (Lynne Tillman)213 - 224 Editing as the Practice of Criticism (Masha Tupitsyn)225 - 238 ECZEMA! (Maria Fusco)239 - 258 Roland Barthes' Critical Writing from the Materials of Cy Twombly-and the Criticism of Form in the Early Texts of Lukács and Benjamin (Thomas Glaser)261 - 296 Gesture and Citability: Theater as Critical Praxis (Bettine Menke)297 - 324 The Stakes of the Stage: Piscator's Scenography as a Practice of Critique and Benjamin's Discontent with the "Zeittheater" (Mimmi Woisnitza)325 - 342 Why Streets Are No Longer Paved with Theater Gold: Critique and Stage Form(s) (Sebastian Kirsch)343 - 344 List of Illustrations345 - 352 Contributors
