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Boris Groys, On the New, 2014, Verso, pb, 208pp, £12.99, 978 1 7816829 2 0.
In legal parlance, Boris Groys is an unreliable witness. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, whose genealogies are fabricated to unseat orthodoxy, Groys holds a distorted mirror to history in order to upturn conventional thinking. His paradoxriddled style is charismatic. He writes fireworks.
On the New, only now available in English, was first published in 1992 in German, extending an earlier Russian text. It bears all the hallmarks of postmodernist nihilism derived from Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. It takes issue with one of the key ideas that the Avant Garde adhered to in its revolutionary phase, latterly considered to have been discredited. Groys's book Art Power, 2008, contains a taster of this new concept of the new in the second chapter, also titled 'On the New'. It is a postmodern theory of the new written by someone who believes that to be an oxymoron. Despite saying 'I don't believe in postmodernity' at the end of 2012, in the first sentence of his book he says: 'In our postmodern times ... no subject is so untimely as newness.' In fact, Groys defines the postmodern in terms of the new, saying: 'Postmodernism is taken to mean fundamental doubt as to the possibility of historical novelty.' Heroically, he seeks to reconstitute the concept...