Marcus Boon Knihy

Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration that emerges from a politics of vibration and which constructs a vibrational space of individual and collective transformation.

Exploring music as a transformative vibrational practice, the book delves into the works of three contemporary musicians, highlighting their unique contributions to the understanding of vibration. It introduces vibration studies as an interdisciplinary field, framing vibration as both a physical phenomenon and a psychological influence. The author argues for recognizing music as a cosmopolitical practice, where societal access to vibration influences individual and collective identities. This perspective reveals the underlying ontology of contemporary music and its ethical implications within various music scenes.

Originally written by Marcus Boon, the book „In Praise of Copying“ was first published by Harvard University Press in 2010 under the „Attribution-ShareAlike“ Creative Commons license. Franz Thalmair has reproduced most of this book manually now. As part of the artistic research project „originalcopy - Post-Digital Strategies of Appropriation“, which runs from 2016 to 2019 at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the book sheds light on the practice of copying from a post-digital perspective. The research project focuses on the tensions between the supposed immateriality of digital technologies and their material manifestations by appropriating contemporary methods of copying and exposing them to artistic processes of transformation and translation. You are free to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially) the book.

Devoted to a deceptively simple but original argument that copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in.

Though contemporary European philosophy and critical theory have long had a robust engagement with Christianity, there has been no similar engagement with Buddhism—a surprising lack, given Buddhism’s global reach and obvious affinities with much of Continental philosophy. This volume fills that gap, focusing on “nothing”—essential to Buddhism, of course, but also a key concept in critical theory from Hegel and Marx through deconstruction, queer theory, and contemporary speculative philosophy. Through an elaboration of emptiness in both critical and Buddhist traditions; an examination of the problem of praxis in Buddhism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis; and an explication of a “Buddhaphobia” that is rooted in modern anxieties about nothingness, Nothing opens up new spaces in which the radical cores of Buddhism and critical theory are renewed and revealed.