Final Issues: Endings in Modern Intellectual History

Histories of avant-gardes are often told through documents of their beginnings: Pamphlets and programs proclaim what the groups behind them stand for, what they want to achieve, and what they oppose. The importance of ‘beginnings’ has been emphasized in cultural theory and historiography alike. However, in contrast, endings seem much harder to grasp – not at least because the late and final stages of political-intellectual projects are often under-documented, as many avant-gardes and collectives in history disperse, fade out, or gradually lose their social and intellectual coherence.

The proposed volume intends to fill this gap. It reconstructs endings in intellectual history, theorizes them and reads them as interventions into the present. In a collection of chapters contributed by international scholars with different transregional expertise, it explores self-dissolutions of political, social, and artistic movements in the 20^th and 21^st century through final issues of periodicals, manifestos, speeches, protocols, and other media. Chapters show how materialized representations of endings give expression to the temporal experiences and expectations of movements and collectives, and shed light on the self-given interpretations of their own past, present, and future afterlives.