Robert Fleck

Deleuze schickt mich in die Bibliothek (Deleuze Sends Me to the Library)
Über Bücher und Menschen (On Books and People)
VOLUME 190

“You haven’t read any of it?”—Otto Schulmeister

In 1983, Robert Fleck, then a student of Gilles Deleuze’s in Paris, had to admit to an acquaintance, Otto Schulmeister, editor-in-chief of the daily Die Presse, that he had studied Deleuze’s readings of Kafka but never actually read a page of Kafka himself. The idea was born for the popular column Alte Bücher—neu gelesen (Old Books—Read Afresh), which ran in the Viennese paper’s Saturday supplement for seven years. With cheeky naïveté—he knew his sources—Fleck wrote his way through the canon of bourgeois literature: features on Kafka, Hugo, Rilke, Proust, Fontane, Céline, Dickens, Melville, and others chart a subjective literary history. The FUNDUS volume is rounded out by two essays on Deleuze, a widely noted sketch on the “new French aesthetics” of the generation of Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Barthes, and portraits of Szittya and Soupault. The book invites readers to discover the well-known art critic and exhibition organizer as a man of letters and playful master of the minor form.

Robert Fleck (b. Vienna, 1957) was director of the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, and the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn. Since 2012, Fleck has been professor of art and the public sphere at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art.