Jean Paul Martinon

This book starts from this simple premise: thinking the activity of curating. To do that, it distinguishes between 'curating' and 'the curatorial'. If 'curating' is a gamut of professional practices for setting up exhibitions, then 'the curatorial' explores what takes place on the stage set up, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the curator. It therefore refers not to the staging of an event, but to the event of knowledge itself. In order to start thinking about curating, this book takes a new approach to the topic. Instead of relying on conventional art historical narratives (for example, identifying the moments when artistic and curatorial practices merged or when the global curator-author was first identified), this book puts forward a multiplicity of perspectives that go from the anecdotal to the theoretical and from the personal to the philosophical. These perspectives allow for a fresh reflection on curating, one in which, suddenly, curating becomes an activity that implicates us all (artists, curators, and viewers), not just as passive recipients, but as active members. As such, the Curatorial is a book without compromise: it asks us to think again, fight against sweeping art historical generalizations, the sedimentation of ideas and the draw of the sound bite. Curating will not stop, but at least with this book it can begin to allow itself to be challenged by some of the most complex and ethics-driven thought of our times.

Masculinity? This book attempts to answer this one-word question by revisiting key philosophical concepts in the construction of masculinity, not in order to re-write or debunk them again, but in order to provide a radically new departure to what masculinity means today. This new departure focuses on an understanding of sexuality and gender that is neither structured in oppositional terms nor in performative terms, but in a perpendicular relation akin to that which brings space and time together. In doing so, this book doesn’t aim to establish yet another theory within the field of masculism or men’s studies, but to put forward a personal account of how a revised understanding of the relationship between space, time, and gender can thoroughly alter concepts of masculinity. virility and patriarchy.

Is writing about peace after the Rwandan Genocide self-defeating? Whether it is the intensity of the massacres, the popularity of the genocide, or the imaginary forms of cruelty, however one looks at it, everything in the Rwandan Genocide appears to defy once again the possibility of thinking peace anew. In order to address this problem, this book investigates the work of specific French and Rwandese philosophers in order to renew our understanding of peace today. Through this path-breaking investigation, peace no longer stands for an ideal in the future, but becomes a structure of inter-subjectivity that guarantees that the violence of language always prevails over any other form of violence. This book is the very first monograph in philosophy related to the events of 1994 in Rwanda.

This book explores the ways deconstruction addresses the issue of futurity (what Jacques Derrida calls the "to-come," [l'à-venir]). In order to achieve this, it focuses on three French expressions, venue, survenue, and voir-venir, each taken from the work of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Catherine Malabou. The idea behind this focus is to elude the issue of the one and only "to-come," as if this was a uniform and coherent entity or structure of experience, and to put forward instead the possibility of a multiplicity of structures, each with a different intonation or pitch. Overall, this book makes an original contribution to the way deconstruction addresses the issue of futurity in the act of writing and translation