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With reference to the mobilization of physics in new feminist materialisms, this chapter argues that the fundamental ontology of matter suggested by physics is of no political relevance. Instead, its position is that devising effective strategies to deactivate the normative power of fundamental ontologies remains politically relevant despite long-standing critiques of essentialism. The chapter proposes that physics can be helpful both for understanding its own irrelevance and for inspiring strategies of deactivation. ; Christoph F. E. Holzhey, 'Emergence that Matters and Emergent Irrelevance: On the Political Use of Fundamental Physics', in Materialism and Politics , ed. by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva, Cultural Inquiry, 20 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 253–68

The article sketches a critical paradigm for interdisciplinary work that is centred on tension as a highly ambiguous and ultimately deeply paradoxical notion. It highlights that a unifying account of what tension is or a systematic classification of its diverse meanings would risk resolving tensions between different approaches and privileging a particular mode of doing so. Successively focussing on aesthetic, socio-political, and physical tensions, the essay articulates tension rather as a broad umbrella term that is stretched by multi-perspectival articulations, unified through its intensive surface tension, and at the same time full of transformative and generative potentials. In particular, it proposes that tensions between different cultural or disciplinary fields can be made productive by inducing tensions within each field so that different fields can be related to each other on the basis of tension rather than some substantial commonality.

Before completing his uncharacteristically hopeful filmic vision of an African Oresteia, Pier Paolo Pasolini invented a theatrical continuation of Aeschylus's trilogy. "Pilade" (1966/70) imagines what happens after Orestes, having being absolved by the Aeropagos in Athens, goes back to Argos. With its clear allusions to political developments in the last century - fascism, the Resistance, and Communist revolutions - the play reads as a mythical allegory for the situation of engaged intellectuals in thetwentieth century. As Christoph F. E. Holzhey's contribution '"La vera Diversità": Multistability, Circularity, and Abjection in Pasolini's "Pilade"' shows, Pasolini's imagined continuation of the Oresteia challenges an ideology of rational foundation and progress by moving through a series of aspect changes prompted by sudden events that allow for some integration while also creating new divisions. After all possible alliances among the principal characters - Orestes, Electra, and Pylades - have been played through, Pylades curses reason for its deceptive, consoling, and violent function and embraces his abjected position of true diversity beyond intelligibility. However, Holzhey argues, rather than functioning as the play's telos, this ending is an open one and participates in the paradoxical performance of a self-contradictory subjectivity and a circular temporality without entirely giving up hope for a truly different alternative.

Before completing his uncharacteristically hopeful filmic vision of an African Oresteia, Pier Paolo Pasolini invented a theatrical continuation of Aeschylus's trilogy. Pilade (1966/70) imagines what happens after Orestes, having being absolved by the Aeropagos in Athens, goes back to Argos. With its clear allusions to political developments in the last century – fascism, the Resistance, and Communist revolutions – the play reads as a mythical allegory for the situation of engaged intellectuals in the twentieth century. ; Christoph F. E. Holzhey, '"La vera Diversità": Multistability, Circularity, and Abjection in Pasolini's Pilade ', in The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini's Multistable Subjectivities, Geographies, Traditions , ed. by Luca Di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, and Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 6 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012), pp. 19–35

Tension/Spannung explores the critical potential of tension by bringing together contributions from several academic and artistic fields, including history of science, philosophy, literature and media studies, political and social theory, visual and performing arts. Both individually and in their combination, they produce a rapprochement and confrontation between different meanings and models of tension that unsettle the apparent self-evidence that any particular model has when considered in an isolated context. ; Christoph F. E. Holzhey, 'Preface', in Tension/Spannung , ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 1 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2010), pp. 7–12

The article sketches a critical paradigm for interdisciplinary work that is centred on tension as a highly ambiguous and ultimately deeply paradoxical notion. It highlights that a unifying account of what tension is or a systematic classification of its diverse meanings would risk resolving tensions between different approaches and privileging a particular mode of doing so. Successively focussing on aesthetic, socio-political, and physical tensions, the essay articulates tension rather as a broad umbrella term that is stretched by multi-perspectival articulations, unified through its intensive surface tension, and at the same time full of transformative and generative potentials. In particular, it proposes that tensions between different cultural or disciplinary fields can be made productive by inducing tensions within each field so that different fields can be related to each other on the basis of tension rather than some substantial commonality. ; Christoph F. E. Holzhey, 'Tension In/Between Aesthetics, Politics, and Physics', in Tension/Spannung , ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 1 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2010), pp. 13–45

Tension appears in many contexts and carries diverse meanings. It tends to be viewed as something to be avoided and reduced in politics; to be explained, worked through, and resolved in therapy or science; to be endured and sustained in modern art; or to be sought after and enjoyed in popular culture. This volume brings together contributions from several academic and artistic fields in order to question the self-evidence of the deceptively simple term 'tension' and explore the possibility of productive transfers among different forms und understandings of tension. Refusing the temptation of a stabilizing synthesis, it establishes a dense web of approaches, providing a new critical paradigm for further inquiry. ; Tension/Spannung , ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 1 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2010)

The intensifying ecological devastation of the planet is being registered across scientific disciplines and activist, artistic, or more broadly cultural endeavours in ways that rethink the temporal dimensions of a catastrophe that can no longer be considered 'looming'. In many political contexts - trying to get scientists heard, mobilizing state power and international agreements to curb the extractivist rapaciousness of global capitalism - it might still seem essential to create a sense of urgency, of a rapidly closing interval, last chance, now or never. Yet taking stock not only of the planetary sum totals of global climate change but its present local manifestations, the devastations of neocolonial extractivism, the irreversible extinctions of countless species, destruction of ecotopes on land and in the sea, has produced a growing awareness that in many crucial senses, it is 'too late' - that the time can no longer be given as 'five minutes to midnight' but has moved a lot closer to the dead of night, whether this is being regarded primarily as a question of the cumulative loss of biodiversity as part of what is now known as the 'sixth mass extinction' or as the approach of several 'tipping points' of global climate change, such as the current ice sheet disintegrations in the polar regions, the greenhouse gas release triggered by the loss of permafrost, and irreversible desertifications. The complexion of ecology, over these last years, has turned from juicy green to dark and brittle. The most decisive recent interventions, while acknowledging the overwhelming pessimist thrust of ecological thought, have tried to use a more complex, more differentiated account of the temporality of environmental ruination in order to reflect on the diminished possibilities for life in these ruins while avoiding familiar registers both of science fiction dystopias and self-healing planets.

Als Pier Paolo Pasolinis Porcile (Der Schweinestall) 1969 auf den Filmfestspielen von Venedig gezeigt wurde, wurde er für seinen skandalösen und frevlerischen Inhalt heftig angegriffen. Während Pasolini selbst den politischen Inhalt seines Films als »apokalyptische Anarchie« beschreibt, der man sich nur mit Distanz und Humor nähern könne, kann Porcile auch als Vorschlag gelesen werden, das Aufgeben von (politischer) Aktivität und der Hoffnung auf eine bessere Zukunft als eine paradoxe Form sowohl der radikalen politischen Kritik als auch der Freude aufzufassen. ; Manuele Gragnolati und Christoph F. E. Holzhey, »Aktive Passivität?: Spinoza in Pasolinis Schweinestall «, in Conatus und Lebensnot: Schlüsselbegriffe der Medienanthropologie , hg. v. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky und Anna Tuschling, Cultural Inquiry, 12 (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2017), S. 49–65

Wie wird das Leben zum Objekt des Wissens? Und wie gestaltet sich das Verhältnis von Leben, Wissenschaft und Technik? Donna J. Haraway und Georges Canguilhem verstehen diese Fragen als politische Fragen und Epistemologie als eine politische Praxis. Die besondere Aktualität von Canguilhems Denken leitet sich aus der von ihm gestellten Frage her, wie sich eine Geschichte der Rationalität des Wissens vom Leben schreiben lässt. Niemand hat die politische Intention dieser Frage besser verstanden als Foucault, der in Canguilhems Nachfolge den Menschen als Lebewesen und dessen Geschichte als Teil der Geschichte der Rationalisierung des Lebens problematisierte. Haraway bezieht sich nicht explizit auf Canguilhem, schließt jedoch in ihrer Auseinandersetzung mit der amerikanischen feministischen Wissenschaftskritik, der Actor-Netzwerk-Theorie, der Philosophie des Pragmatismus und Whiteheads relationistischen Philosophie an die von ihm gestellte Frage an. In dem vorliegenden Band diskutieren namhafte PhilosophInnen, EpistemologInnen und MedienwissenschaftlerInnen aus Frankreich, Belgien und Deutschland offenliegende und verborgene Bezüge, Relationen und Differenzen zwischen dem Konzept des "situierten Wissens" Haraways und der "regionalen Epistemologie" Canguilhems. Es ist eine Diskussion, die zugleich interdisziplinär und international ist und damit in doppelter Weise versucht, dem Anspruch der Situiertheit und der Regionalität des Wissens gerecht zu werden. ; Situiertes Wissen und regionale Epistemologie: Zur Aktualität Georges Canguilhems und Donna J. Haraways , hg. v. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky und Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 7 (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2013)

Wie wird das Leben zum Objekt des Wissens? Und wie gestaltet sich das Verhältnis von Leben, Wissenschaft und Technik? Donna J. Haraway und Georges Canguilhem verstehen diese Fragen als politische Fragen und Epistemologie als eine politische Praxis. Die besondere Aktualität von Canguilhems Denken leitet sich aus der von ihm gestellten Frage her, wie sich eine Geschichte der Rationalität des Wissens vom Leben schreiben lässt. Haraway bezieht sich nicht explizit auf Canguilhem, schließt jedoch an die von ihm gestellte Frage an. ; Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky und Christoph F. E. Holzhey, »Einleitung: Denken mit Haraway und Canguilhem«, in Situiertes Wissen und regionale Epistemologie: Zur Aktualität Georges Canguilhems und Donna J. Haraways , hg. v. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky und Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 7 (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2013), S. 7–34

Wie wird das Leben zum Objekt des Wissens? Und wie gestaltet sich das Verhältnis von Leben, Wissenschaft und Technik? Donna J. Haraway und Georges Canguilhem verstehen diese Fragen als politische Fragen und Epistemologie als eine politische Praxis. Die besondere Aktualität von Canguilhems Denken leitet sich aus der von ihm gestellten Frage her, wie sich eine Geschichte der Rationalität des Wissens vom Leben schreiben lässt. Haraway bezieht sich nicht explizit auf Canguilhem, schließt jedoch an die von ihm gestellte Frage an.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was both a writer and filmmaker deeply rooted in European culture, as well as an intellectual who moved between different traditions, identities and positions. Early on he looked to Africa and Asia for possible alternatives to the hegemony of Western Neocapitalism and Consumerism, and in his hands the Greek and Judeo-Christian Classics morphed into unsettling multistable figures constantly shifting between West and East, North and South, the present and the past, rationality and myth, identity and otherness. The contributions in this volume, which belong to different intellectual and disciplinary fields, are bound together by a fascination for Pasolini's ability to recognize contradictions, to intensify and multiply them, as well as to make them aesthetically and politically productive. What emerges is a 'euro-eccentric' and multifaceted Pasolini of great interest for the present. ; The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini's Multistable Subjectivities, Geographies, Traditions , ed. by Luca Di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, and Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 6 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012)