De/Constituting Wholes: Towards Partiality Without Parts

How can the power of wholes be resisted without essentializing their parts? Drawing on different archives and methodologies, including aesthetics, history, biology, affect, race, and queer, the interventions in this volume explore different ways of troubling the consistency and stability of wholes, breaking up their closure and making them more dynamic. Doing so without necessarily presupposing or producing parts, an outside, or a teleological development, they indicate the critical potential of partiality without parts.

Manuele Gragnolati is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, and Associate Director at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Christoph F.E. Holzhey is founding director of the ICI Berlin and holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University as well as a PhD in German Literature from Columbia University.