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Although Steyerl’s arguments in some cases unfold at a relatively abstract level, several of the essays address more directly the character of the art world itself, and its role in beautifying neoliberal capitalism. ‘Contemporary art feeds on the crumbs of a massive and widespread redistribution of…

This new international context is the most obvious cause of the destabilization of the social state, even if it is not the only one. The term ‘globalization’, however, promotes a confusion between two types of phenomena that are combined in practice but different in kind. On the one hand, there are…

[...] Exposed by the opening of its commercial frontiers to the competition of the lowest social and fiscal common denominators, and to systemic financial risks, it is seeing its resources crumble away at the same time as its burdens increase. Having become a universal debtor, it generates a popula…

How should this ‘social state’ be situated within the history of the state as such? The Western state is not a timeless and universal institutional form, but an invention of pontifical lawyers between the 11th and 13th centuries—contrary to a tenacious legend that places the modern age in a direct …

[...] For an organism, the norms by which it functions are identical with its existence, whereas a society, in order to exist and maintain itself, must posit these norms outside itself. Kelsen perceived the necessary externality of fundamental norms, but this led him into the impasse of a purely fo…