According to the nineteenth-century teachings of Nikolai
Fedorov--librarian, religious philosopher, and progenitor of Russian
cosmism--our ethical obligation to use reason and knowledge to care for
the sick extends to curing the dead of their terminal status. The dead
must be brought back to life using means of advanced
technology--resurrected not as souls in heaven, but in material form, in
this world, with all their memories and knowledge.
Fedorov's call to redistribute vital forces is wildly imaginative in
emancipatory ambition. Today, it might appear arcane in its mystical
panpsychism or eccentric in its embrace of realities that exist only in
science fiction or certain diabolical strains of Silicon Valley
techno-utopian ideology. It can be difficult to grasp how it ended up
influencing the thinking behind a generation of young revolutionary
anarchists and Marxists who incorporated Fedorov's ideas under their own
brand of biocosmism before the 1917 Russian Revolution, even giving rise
to the origins of the Soviet space program.
This book of interviews and conversations with today's most compelling
living and resurrected artists and thinkers seeks to address the
relevance of Russian cosmism and biocosmism in light of its influence on
the Russian artistic and political vanguard as well as on today's
art-historical apparatuses, weird materialisms, extinction narratives,
and historical and temporal politics. This unprecedented collection of
exchanges on cosmism asks how such an encompassing and imaginative,
unapologetically humanist and anthropocentric strain of thinking could
have been so historically and politically influential, especially when
placed alongside the politically inconsequential--but in some sense
equally encompassing--apocalypticism of contemporary realist
imaginaries.
**Contributors
**Bart De Baere, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Boris Groys, Elena
Shaposhnikova, Marina Simakova, Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan
Wood, Arseny Zhilyaev, Esther Zonsheim
Published in parallel with the eponymous exhibition at Haus der Kulturen
der Welt, Berlin.
Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Stephen Squibb, Anton
Vidokle
Design by Jeff Ramsey, front cover design by Liam Gillick
