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Armen Avanessian
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This is how it happens. One day you are fine, next day you are a speculative realist. One day you go out, next day you know Armen Avanessian. Ideas come and go, people come and go, but sometimes you know there had been a longing, a sense of loss and failure only after the fact, after you come across an idea, after you talk to a person. This was Armen, the most understated Austrian you can imagine, grey hair in a good way, metal glasses in a good way, serious in a good way, funny in a good way. Somebody you had been waiting for. You: The person from the 1980s, the 1990s, the pomo person, stuck in the irony, in the games, in the language that was everything and the reality that was nothing, even though you knew this was not true, and it was not everything that postmodernism was about, it was Derrida`s cruelty as well as Baudrillard`s circus, it was playful and beautiful and free, it was Lyotard and Lévinas and the Other, it was political, even if people do not want to see that anymore – but it was also over for a long time, over in a sense that it had not lost its meaning, but its relevance for today. The questions were different. So was postmodernism a failure? Armen would be sceptical about such a statement as he is sceptical about almost everything. But that is only on the surface, the calm, distinguished scholar who chooses to be on the outside of academia and publish one book after another with the still furious publishing people of Merve instead of boring students and himself to death with stuff that had been thought before. He is not actually a philosopher, he is a literature guy, but when he came across Quentin Meillassoux and all that had not been thought before in this and only this way – he was hooked. He is in a way the spokesman at least in Germany for this new philosophical movement, the first real movement since postmodernism and in a way about to do away with it: relativism, ontological mindlessness, a world that does not exist. The world does exist, very much so; it actually existed well before man and it will exist well after man. This is the starting point for the speculative realists. If philosophy after Kant claimed that we cannot say anything about the world that is not based on our very existence, on our very reason, then this is what Armen would call the correlationist folly. It is strange that philosophy has not been more shaken by all the discoveries that were made by Darwin, Einstein and the likes – but now is the time of reckoning. If we are not the center of the world, we cannot be the center of philosophy. This is a copernican moment. This is Armen`s game.

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DISCREET

Agustina Woodgate
Armen Avanessian
Alexander Martos
09.07.16
60 min
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60hertz

DISCREET is a new kind of intelligence agency that is currently under development. Between June 22 and July 11, 2016—during the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Paranoia, Terror, Anxiety and Safety are discussed by the founding agents as well as it’s basic mission statement, its goals, strategies, and actions for an open-source secret service organization. DISCREET seeks to respond to the massive increase of means available to entities worldwide not under democratic control. 

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Precarious Breakfast

Armen Avanessian
Mark Fisher
04.03.16
60 min
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60hertz

You know what a Zirbelstube is? Well, think of it as a light brown hell built from wood. In Austria and other strange places people take this for Gemütlichkeit. Anyway, in such a place, at a rather early time of the day, philosophers Armen Avanessian and Mark Fisher, author of among others “Capitalist Realism” and “Ghosts of My Life”, met to talk about of course Accelerationism but also and mainly about smartphones, depression and the way academics like them live today, caught between the notion of freedom and the dread of poverty, yes, poverty. Because this is what thinking amounts to today: symbolically, maybe, a bit, financially, realistically, close to nothing. What does this mean? Well, listen.

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The three in a Nietzschean pose; and look who has the whip

Listen, We Have a Jingle!

10.02.16
60 min
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60hertz

Armen Avanessian visited Ari Benjamin Meyers together with Marie-France Rafael in his studio in Kreuzberg for 60Hz. At the end of 60 minutes 60Hz finally has the only thing that was still missing for such an amazing radio show: a jingle, or rather one out of 60 jingles. You’ll hear about Marie’s and Ari’s new book ‘Music on Display’ and his work as a composer, (post)contemporary artist, his upcoming shows, the book launch on February 19th at Spike Berlin, his childhood discovery of Satie and Vexation’s 840 repetitions, his discovery now of our hidden singing talents, and basically everything you ever wanted to know about the history of radio (jingles) and why its frequency should be measured not in hertz but in hurts: Ari explains it all while sitting and playing at his piano. And all this you get if you make it beyond the first 10 minutes of us recording a jingle for 60Hertz (or hurts) totally out of tune.

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The Future Was Yesterday

18.01.16
60 min
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60hertz

Christopher Roth, Armen Avanessian, Georg Diez and Paul Feigelfeld talk about Christopher’s upcoming exhibition BLOW OUT (opening at Esther Schipper on January 22, 2016), loops, Theo-Angelo Adornioni, beauty, science fiction, reactors, bunkers, Quentinporary architecture, and more. During the conversation, they wander through the still unopened exhibition, while Armen takes a lot of pictures, before he reads some Adorno to the magical soundtrack of Bobby’s video work.

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The Mehringdamned

04.01.16
60 min
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60hertz

Gregor Quack and Harald Staun talking about Literary Theory, the editor of Ferdinand von Schirach about his job, Johanna Warsza and Florian Malzacher on the Orbanization of Polish Politics, Anne Waak and Christian Werner on (the impossibility) of Monogamy, Anne Philippi about lipstick as investment, Jeanne Tremsal and Georg Diez about sex addiction, Timo Feldhaus asking the wrong questions, Tom Lamberty declaring Publishing as Love, Christoph Knoth twittering and Annika Kuhlmann still not too drunk to quote Wittgenstein.

Marie-France Rafael
People

I must say I have difficulties figuring her out. Let me try with some facts: I first met Marie as a colleague at the Free University Berlin, where she was (and still is) working and teaching as an art historian. Actually her name was (or still is) Marie-France, but she isn’t French, even though she feels more at ease writing in French than in German – maybe this has something to do with the fact that she grew up in Munich – like some 120% of my German friends in Berlin it seems by the way. Actually, she grew up speaking Romanian as I found out later. Although technically speaking she has an American passport, and for good reasons. Anyhow, as you can tell I have difficulties figuring her out or even reporting some relevant facts. Maybe it helps to mention a few things she likes best, or to put it differently, that she only likes the best : she only publishes with the best publishers, likes the best food, and of course the best shoes, actually many of them. Did I mention that she is also a fantastic swimmer. I also lately found out that she used to make really beautiful court-métrages back in her Paris years – and will hopefully do so again soon. Maybe this might explain why I immediately found her fascinating when knowing even less about her than I do today, already when she was Marie-France, my academic colleague from the department of art history.

DISCREET

Agustina Woodgate
Armen Avanessian
Alexander Martos
09.07.16
60 min
share

Precarious Breakfast

Armen Avanessian
Mark Fisher
04.03.16
60 min
share

Listen, We Have a Jingle!

10.02.16
60 min
share

The Future Was Yesterday

18.01.16
60 min
share

The Mehringdamned

04.01.16
60 min
share