ALIENATION: This little book by Rahel Jaeggi is stimulating and useful – at a time when ideology criticism and the hermeneutics of suspicion have come under pressure, among other things from people who cultivate 'presence' and the everyday. And what if our actions and institutions are emptied of meaning and go on autopilot – will we be perceived as alienated?
JOURNAL: Are journals as part of the literary public at risk of being erased? The probing criticism, the one that dares to be independent literature, dares to be self-referential, introspective and self-implicating.
LITERATURE: The informal contexts where one could try and fail without having to stand up for every careless word have shrunk. In Eirik Vassenden's 229-page book about the critic, there are no fewer than 317 question marks. We also ask: Do literary scholars necessarily have any advantage when it comes to human knowledge, life experience or social understanding?
Normality: Mark GE Kelly examines how norms affect important parts of life and our understanding of normality – with regard to sexuality, orientation, body image, identity, illness, death, individualism, hedonism, racism and white privilege.
populism: Antonio Gramsci would have united self-righteousness and internationalism. MODERN TIMES talks to philosopher Diego Fusaro in connection with a new Norwegian release.
Our disappointment on social media only stimulates the pursuit of ever more refined manipulation techniques. Detoxification is not the answer, writes Geert Lovink.
The gesture of the participating documentary genre where the camera is given to the other is just a new way of installing and confirming dominance, says Pooja Rangan's critique of documentary "humanitarian impetus".
A new exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin shows the complicated relationship between the thinker Walter Benjamin and the poet Bertolt Brecht.