No sooner had the 21st century dawned than it was already presenting new horrors, idiocies and occasional moments of bliss. Diedrich Diederichsen is one of the few people who still dares to make connections in this confusion, which has been intensified and accelerated by the media, while holding on to a sophisticated concept of criticism.
In this miracle bag of a reader with essays and commentaries, albeit only from the first twenty-three years of the century, Diederichsen demonstrates his stupendous knowledge of all trends in art, cinema, television, literature, music, theater, theory and politics, which extends to the finest branches of counterculture.
He is able to generate sparks from epistemology as well as from The Simpsons, René Pollesch's productions or TV series such as Underground Railroad. And he succeeds at linking the one with the other like no one else, jumping from Theodor W. Adorno to the Duck family or from a Hamburg building site to a feminist art installation (and back). Not since Walter Benjamin has there been such an impressive demonstration of what contemporaneity can mean.
