Aesthetics of Standstill

Summary

Essays consider the temporality and the aesthetics of “standstill.”

"Standstill” could be the name for the kind of experience that is the hiatus between social expectations and real possibilities of agency. Standstill may also be the name of an aesthetic strategy to instill a nonlinear time of resistance and experience into the political protocol of progress. Finally, standstill can be the name for the temporal fissure in the midst of the subject, for the lapse between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of a statement, the limit that is the border between the inside and the outside. It can be the name for the mode of potentiality, for the moment of gesture, or, with Walter Benjamin, the medium of the dialectical image. The essays of this book traverse these dimensions of standstill as an in-between of time.

Contributors Georges Didi-Huberman, Reinhold Görling, Barbara Gronau, Adrian Heathfield, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Oliver Marchart, Rita McBride, Christoph Menke, Aernout Mik, Misha Kavka, David Lapoujade, Mirjam Lewandowsky, Via Lewandowsky, Peter Osborne, Christine Ross, Marcel Odenbach, Jacques Rancière, Ludger Schwarte, Martin Seel