Jean-Paul Martinon

Goldsmiths, University of London · Department of Visual Cultures

Today, everyone is a curator. What was once considered a hallowed expertise is now a commonplace activity of global proportions. Can this new worldwide activity be ethical and, if yes, how? This book argues that curating can be more than just selecting, organizing, and presenting information in galleries or online. Curating can also constitute an e...

As is well known, the biblical sixth commandment, “Thou shall not kill”, is intimately linked to the First Commandment, “I am the Lord”. By linking the two at the top of Moses's two-column table, language is given priority: the name of God can be uttered only when the possibility of death has been set aside. In this way, the linking of these two co...

For the past eighteen years, I have taught the practice, history, theory and ethics of curating. Throughout this time, one of the most recurrent themes has been the impossibility of ascribing a limit to curating. Where does it end and where does it begin? In order to teach curating, that is, in order to provide some kinds of limits to it, I had to...

Africa. Who are you? I deliberately don’t say here, “What are you?” As we know, the interrogative pronoun “what” is an attempt to grab the essence of something. As Heidegger says: “whatness [Wassein], comprises what one commonly calls… the idea or mental representation by means of which we propose to… grasp what a thing is.” As such, questions sta...

The philosopher Bourahima Ouattara claims that Africans have a unique feature that can help them fight against the west’s economic, cultural and intellectual hegemony and therefore against globalization. This feature is that of ‘being’ outside of all conceptuality. Being outside (or being-third), sub-Saharan Africans are therefore able to expose th...

This edited collection of essays explore the difference between curating as the activity of staging a (visual) event and the curatorial, this event of knowledge taking place on that stage. Authors include: Raqs Media Collective, Irit Rogoff, Stefan Nowotny, Suzana Milevska, Ariella Azoulay, Stefano Harney, Helmut Draxler, Bridget Crone, and Charles...

This books explores the concept of peace after the Rwandan genocide. It offers a philosophical analysis of this concept using both western philosophy (mainly Levinas and Derrida) and Rwandan thinkers (mainly Kagame and Balibusta).

This book addresses the temporality of masculinity.

This book explores the notion of "futurity" (or à-venir in French) in the work of Derrida, Malabou and Nancy.

Throughout the 28th century, numerous philosophers of history and time have questioned the most ingrained of all our beliefs: does time progress in a linear way and is the future simply the next chapter in this narrative?2 This essay proposes to rethink the future of museums outside of this narrative structure, one for which the future is reduced t...