This seminar revolves around the problem whether, how, and under what conditions humans can succeed in creating something radically new. To access the complex and rather abstract problem of the possibility (or impossibility?) of the new, it will focus on the domains of art and politics. Pursuing a set of interrelated guiding questions-'What structural or specific differences, parallels, or intersections exist between inventive, transformative art and inventive, transformative politics?' or 'What role do individuals, collectives, and institutions, spontaneity, planning, and chance play in such endeavors?'-it is the seminar's aim to think through potentialities and limitations, modes and degrees, and, thereby, the meaning of newness. Taking buzzwords such as 'avant-garde' and 'revolution', 'innovation' and 'disruption' as its points of departure, the course, on the one hand, will critically examine differing conceptions of the new: Is aesthetic and socio-political novelty best understood in terms of 're-combination', of 're-configuration', or of 're-appropriation'? Or are these terms too weak to capture the nature and significance of radical change; of an inherently transgressive phenomenon that exceeds such conceptualizations and that can only be hinted at with reference to the 'event' or the 'miracle'? On the other hand, the discussion of theoretical approaches to the new (as developed by, e.g., Benjamin, Heidegger, or Marcuse, Badiou, Mouffe, or Butler) will be complemented by investigations into concrete artistic and political attempts to bring about new beginnings through practices of, among other things, pre-figuration, pre-enactment, and experimentation. Particular attention will be paid to points of contact, intersection, and even convergence between artistic and political projects that, during the last one-hundred years, have strived after realizations of the possibility-or, with Derrida, the 'impossible possibility'- of the new: i.e., to works and texts that, interweaving the visual and the conceptual registers, disclose or anticipate an imagery and imagination that fundamentally challenges, that breaks away from, and that, occasionally, supersedes what is in place. In order to analyze transformative artistic and political action in late modernity-and, especially, under the conditions of technology-we will study the 'cases' of individual and collective agents of the new such as Malevich, Breton, and Le Corbusier,Dada, Fluxus, and the Situationists.Also, we will look into artistic/political interventions and practices in the contexts of the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and Indignados movements, of the Arab Spring, and of the European 'refugee crisis'; practices and interventions by Autumn Knight, Julie Mehretu, Sylvain George, or Ai Weiwei that both reflect and shape the contemporary space of (im-)possibility of the new.

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