Unconsolable Contemporary: Observing Gerhard Richter

by Paul Rabinow

In Unconsolable Contemporary Paul Rabinow continues his explorations of "a philosophic anthropology of the contemporary." Defining the contemporary as a moving ratio in which the modern becomes historical, Rabinow shows how an anthropological ethos of the contemporary can be realized by drawing on the work of art historians, cultural critics, social theorists, and others, thereby inventing a methodology he calls anthropological assemblage. He focuses on the work and persona of German painter Gerhard Richter, demonstrating how reflecting on Richter's work provides rich insights into the practices and stylization of what, following Aby Warburg, one might call "the afterlife of the modern." Rabinow opens with analyses of Richter's recent Birkenau both the artwork and its critical framing. He then chronicles Richter's experiments in image-making as well as his subtle inclusion of art historical and critical discourses about the modern. This, Rabinow contends, enables Richter to signal his awareness of the stakes of such theorizing while refusing the positioning of his work by modernist critical theorists. In this innovative work, Rabinow elucidates the ways meaning is created within the contemporary.

176 pages, Paperback

Published November 24, 2017

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Working at establishing a permanent philosophical and anthropological relationship to politics, science, and the self,” Rabinow tells us in a reflexive moment, “is a lifelong undertaking that demands incessant attention and rectification.” (142)

How to continue to observe and make sense in a world where foundational concepts and categories have fallen into question or entirely away: that has been Rabinow’s abiding concern since he participated in the detonation of culture, society, economy, and the human itself. In this work, he takes up a variety of alternative tropes and means for addressing the contemporary — the terms for a Post-ethnographic form of fieldwork and second-order observation. Restiveness. Commitment. Nonjudgment. Adjacency. Indeterminacy. Attention. Strife. Collaboration. Viscerality. Disarticulation. Association. Abetting. Testing. Assembly. These terms suggest a *disposition,* or mood, of pathos and melancholia — knowing that inquiry cannot achieve closure, and yet being compelled to continue. He quotes Adorno: “Distance is manifested not in relaxing the claiming of ideas the truth, but in delicacy and fragility of thinking.” (111)

If there is a master concept here, the shadow of a big hedgehog looming over page after page of foxy observation, it is the idea of metalepsis: “metalepsis Is achieved through the act that consists precisely of introducing into one situation, by means of a discourse, the knowledge of another situation.... Staying on the verge in a metaleptic narrative is extremely difficult.... achieving an effective metaleptic narrative requires more than technical skill. It requires the ability to effectively produce in mood: one in which distance and perspective or troubled, and certain, insignificant; one in which the spectator feels herself observed and involved.” (74)