In 1985, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated “Les Immatériaux” at Centre Georges Pompidou. Though widely misunderstood at the time, the exhibition marked a “curatorial turn” in critical theory. Through its experimental layout and hybrid presentation of objects, technologies, and ideas, this pioneering exploration of virtuality reflected on the exhibition as a medium of communication, and anticipated a deeper engagement with immersive and digital space in both art and theory. In Spacing Philosophy, Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein analyze the significance and logic of Lyotard’s exhibition while contextualizing it in the history of exhibition practices, the philosophical tradition, and Lyotard’s own work on aesthetics and phenomenology. “Les Immatériaux” can thus be seen as a culmination and materialization of a life’s work as well as a primer for the many thought-exhibitions produced in the following decades.

The idea of a limit of reason, a measure that defines reason and that it must not overstep, has been a constitutive part of philosophy since its beginnings in Greek thought. Placing itself in opposition to the madness of hubris, the excesses of tragedy, and the stories of religion and myth, philosophy expels its others just as much as it thrives on them. It begins and ends at the limit; it is drawn towards its outside, and exists as a perpetual attempt to find a line of demarcation that always ends up passing through its interior.

The present collection analyzes the phenomenon of limit and excess, through readings that range from tragedy and Greek thought, through early Christianity and the Renaissance, to modern phenomenology and philosophy of language.

Adorno’s understanding of realism in the present is often taken to have been simply negative. In the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, too, the negative view is predominant; there are, however, traces of another concep-tion of realism. Adorno proposes, although with some caveats, that what he calls an adequate conception of realism is not only possible, but also something that art in the present cannot and must not avoid.