ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Reader of documenta 14, one of the world’s largest exhibitions that took place between Kassel and Athens in 2017. This book was the theoretical companion to the exhibition and included entries as diverse as Darwish’s poetry and Flaubert’s prose, philosophy by Bennett and Derrida, official texts regarding colonialism and slavery, and reproductions of relevant artworks. Speaking to theoretically informed and activism-driven voluntarism, it aimed to perform a form of cultural cosmopolitanism across geographical, social, and gendered borders in at least two ways: firstly, by spelling out the “simultaneous failure not only of modern representative democratic institutions but also of ethical practices of hospitality”; secondly, by considering a number of diverse bodies (from unrepresented and undocumented living bodies to indigenous ones that have disappeared) as a continuum of ghosts haunting theoretical discourses and politically active art institutions, thus reinforcing a sense of debt vis-à-vis a cosmopolitanism-to-come. The chapter revisits intimacies, either critical or not, that are shared between concepts, bodies, or texts, in order to understand the foundation, conditions, and limits of a certain cosmopolitanism in the context of documenta 14 and, more broadly, at the crossroads of theoretical discourses and the contemporary art field.
