e-flux Journal #108

<p>It is April now, which T. S. Eliot once called the cruelest month. In Eliot’s April, lilacs rose from the ground as if to mock the dead of World War 1. Today, as the pandemic rages on, many lives are on pause, while many others end. And yet, the flowers bloom.</p> <p>We might say that this issue of <em>e-flux journal</em> asks how Covid-19 preys on existential vulnerabilities through essays written well before the current crisis, and others in response to it. If Covid-19 has merged the biological and the political, how then do we reconcile the strengthening of national borders to protect populations with the stoking of fear and racism through self other or friend enemy paradigms, imagined or real? Even if nation-states and intergovernmental organizations are often the problem as well as the solution both sickness and cure how might our global interdependencies and vulnerabilities go beyond the ecological and techno-industrial waste that fuels the exhausting openness of globalization?</p> <p>Or, as one author who experienced the pandemic in both Shanghai and New York asks: “How to harvest the energy from such permanent existential untranslatability and transform it into something productive?”</p> <p><strong>Editorial</strong><br /> Editors</p> <p><strong>One Hundred Years of Crisis</strong><br /> Yuk Hui</p> <p><strong>Anti-philosophy and the Politics of Recognition</strong><br /> Boris Groys</p> <p><strong>An Informal and Incomplete Journey</strong><br /> Xiaoyu Weng</p> <p><strong>What Is Wrong with My Nose: From Gogol and Freud to Goldin+Senneby (via Haraway)</strong><br /> Maria Lind</p> <p><strong>Climate Propagandas</strong><br /> Jonas Staal</p> <p><strong>Traces, Signs, and Symptoms of the Untranslatable</strong><br /> María Iñigo Clavo</p> <p><strong>Alienated Accumulations: Does Time-Based Media Belong in the Museum?</strong><br /> Daniel Muzyczuk</p> <p><strong>Killing Swarm, Part 3</strong><br /> Franco Bifo Berardi and Massimiliano Geraci</p> <p><strong>Futuro, Presente, Passato: Remembering Germano Celant (1940–2020)</strong><br /> Shumon Basar and Hans Ulrich Obrist</p>