Kathrin Busch, Georg Dickmann, Maja Figge, Felix Laubscher (Hg.): Das Ästhetisch-Spekulative, Paderborn: Fink 2020. 

New publication: Volume five of the book series published by the DFG Research Training Group “Knowledge in the Arts” with Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
The series is edited by Barbara Gronau and Kathrin Peters, and the designer is Jenny Baese.

Further information about this book can be found here.

Speculation is a risky undertaking. As a bet on unavailable futures, coming presences or alternative pasts, it is characterized by the non-knowledge to which it is directed and from which it takes its starting point. In contrast to economics and futurology, which counteract ignorance with strategies of risk management, the arts explore spaces of possibility beyond secure experience and prognostic value. They are committed to the uncertain - that is, to what one does not (yet) know, but about which one can speculate. In aesthetic speculation, the arts are equally capable of testing plausible and contradictory scenarios, of testing heterochronies and thinking of other bodies. The volume asks, what other knowledges do speculative procedures in art expose? How does the future, the virtual or the utopian become imaginable? And against this background, how can categories such as artistic production, aesthetic experience or the value of the work of art be redefined?