To Boris Groys, everything in the modern world ultimately falls into two categories – it’s either art, or it’s garbage. Both are useless, functionless objects that simply… lie there. The difference comes when we immunize art from the destructive power of time to which we happily deliver our garbage. In this collection of essays and interviews, Groys expounds on these lines of thinking, taking in art, the dialectic of work, the afterlife, politics, utopia, philosophy, faith, revolution, the avant-garde and digitalization. Boris Groys’ philosophical writings critique the political economy of heterotopia: economic resources are finite and not everything in modernity receives the same degree of care. His writings on art concern the things of the after-life, with only the politics of immortality ensuring that one’s own form of life never becomes a piece of garbage. Groys sees modern history is a history of aestheticizations, and with every aestheticization comes a claim of protection. Western society tends to aestheticize with a desire to protect everything, including the Anthropocene and all of the exotic species dwelling within it. If we can present ourselves as objects of reverence worthy of admiration and care, then can we too survive the ravages of time?Bringing together previously unpublished texts, newly translated work and interviews, this is a coruscating trip through the complex and challenging philosophical and cultural problems that Boris Groys has made it his life’s work to deal with.
