Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

Search books by title, author, publisher, keywords...

Cover of Bodies To Wear

Everyday Analysis

Bodies To Wear

Patricia Gherovici

€10.00

This pamphlet takes as a model Jacques Lacan’s 1964 seminar in which he presented four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive.[i] In a similar manner, it reflects on some key concepts that underpin the author's clinical work as a psychoanalyst with trans-identified analysands. It argues for the re-discovery of four terms that expand Lacan’s central insights and apply to the question of trans today.

The first one is that of realness and it develops Lacan’s notion of the Real as not identical with reality; realness is often used by trans persons to describe the authenticity of their gender performance for it is a supreme truth beyond any verification.

The second concept is the concept of plasticity as developed by Catherine Malabou and applied to Schreber’s case discussed by Freud and Lacan. Plasticity leads to a conversation about beauty and its function in trans discourse.

The third concept is that of the nothing articulated with a certain type of laughter, a nothing introduced by Democritus and discussed by Barbara Cassin, Alain Badiou and Madlen Dolar. Lacan famously identified the “nothing” as one of the objects of psychoanalysis. I push the analysis to the point where one can understand a wish to “not being” (as found in suicide) as leading to the goal of “being again.” The meden was deployed by Barbara Cassin in her book Lacan the Sophist, and in discussion with Alain Badiou.

Finally, the last concept is that of the clinamen or turbulence in atomic philosophy (Lucretius) and in contemporary discourse; this turbulence throws new light on the role of accidents, and how accidents can turn into destiny (tuché). The classical concepts of the clinamen and turbulence have been explored systematically by Michel Serres. This turbulence echoes with Lacan’s notion of the sinthome as a symptom that does not need to be cured but leads to a re-creation of oneself that makes life livable.

The pamphlet offers a new twist to philosophical references the author discussed in Transgender Psychoanalysis (2017). Taken together, these four clusters of concepts provide a foundation for Gherovici's thinking about psychoanalysis. She rethinks Lacan's notions of the Real, the nothing, the endless transformations of the body that pertain to plasticity, the clinamen, the death drive - all of which are shown to be key to her understanding of the trans experience as revealed in her clinical practice.

[i] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.

Published in 2025 ┊ 115 pages ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of Feminist Fatwas

Everyday Analysis

Feminist Fatwas

Rafia Zakaria

Essays €10.00

Feminist Fatwas traces how Muslim feminists are resisting misogynistic interpretations of the Quran (like the verse male clerics have used to condone wife-beating). 

For centuries, the translators and interpreters of the Holy Quran have been men. This is changing now as more and more Muslim feminists cast their eye on the patriarchal contexts of these interpretations. Feminist Fatwas tells the story of  Verse 34 in Chapter 4 which has been interpreted by male clerics as condoning a husband beating his wife. This essay traces the groundbreaking work of knocking down this misogynist Quranic interpretations. The story of how Muslim feminists are doing this work is a chronicle of the slow and quiet feminist revolution taking place within Islam as women take on significant and powerful roles. 

Rafia Zakaria is a Pakistani-American attorney, feminist, journalist, and author. She has written for The Nation, Guardian Books, The New Republic, The Baffler, Boston Review, and Al Jazeera. In 2021, she published Against White Feminism, in which she critiques the emphasis that conventional feminist thought places on the experiences of white women while excluding women of color

Cover of Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy

Polity Press

Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy

Catherine Malabou

Philosophy €28.00

Many contemporary philosophers – including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben – ascribe an ethical or political value to anarchy, but none ever called themselves an “anarchist.” It is as if anarchism were unmentionable and had to be concealed, even though its critique of domination and of government is poached by the philosophers.

Stop Thief! calls out the plundering of anarchism by philosophy. It’s a call that is all the more resonant today as the planetary demand for an alternative political realm raises a deafening cry. It also alerts us to a new philosophical awakening. Catherine Malabou proposes to answer the cry by re-elaborating a concept of anarchy articulated around a notion of the “non-governable” far beyond an inciting of disobedience or common critiques of capitalism. Anarchism is the only way out, the only pathway that allows us to question the legitimacy of political domination and thereby wfree up the confidence that we need if we are to survive.

Cover of Mucus in my Pineal Gland

Capricious

Mucus in my Pineal Gland

Juliana Huxtable

Poetry €30.00

Mucus in My Pineal Gland is the debut collection of New York-based artist and writer Juliana Huxtable (born 1987). Gathering poems, performance scripts and essays, this startling volume expands Huxtable's critique of gender, sexuality, politics, whiteness and history while establishing her as a singular poetic voice.

Juliana Huxtable is a New York City-based writer, performer, and artist. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including Artforum, Candy, Tropical Cream, and Mousse. She was included in the 2015 New Museum Triennial, curated by Ryan Trecartin and Lauren Cornell.

Cover of The Flesh

Tabloid Publications

The Flesh

Yves B. Golden

Essays €18.00

The Flesh is a collection of Yves B. Golden's poems, lyric essays and social criticism – and often these generic distinctions become blurred. Published by Ediciones La Escocesa (Barcelona, ES), TABLOID facilitated this book's production as editors and book designers. A selection of Golden's texts are also translated by Leto Ybarra, rendering the author's work into Spanish for the first time.

“Respectfully! The Flesh feels like a conjuring and a force of nature—unyieldingly raw, full of delectable sensitivity that shapes a world Yves B. Golden deliveries with formidable honesty—where her word is the journey, the body and the bond. Yves writes: ‘not one bird is declined entry into heaven’. The Flesh is succulent in the mouth of the mother— Yves is a steward of time machines, celestial bliss and untethered healing. The Flesh unties the tongue, waters the mouth and the garden. Within Yves’ 5th book she offers us a timeline in recognizing that all birds and angels alike can touch the sky. We are always, already, held and drenched in glory and deserving of love and safety. The Flesh is Black like obsidian. May our love bloom like the flesh in every lifetime.”
- keioui keijaun thomas

“Yves B Golden has given us a protection spell against tyranny; a Blue Guide for the conscious and the daydream; raw free jazz that knows the standards as well. Golden’s linguistically liberated fantasies can transmute into a body of politically imperturbable ethoses in the same sentence. This book offers information for an evolutionary sensitivity, for the next level of sense-making and particularity of the human being. Though the poet urges us to de-realize the flesh, to split our own heads open, we must also accommodate the flesh’s intangibles that interlock, conjoin, negate, and negotiate: such ‘outward and inward facing conundrums’ go on and on. Welcome this ‘bearer of turbulent news.’”
- Losarc Raal

Cover of Love, Leda

Nightboat Books

Love, Leda

Mark Hyatt

Fiction €17.00

Newly discovered in the author’s archives and published for the first time in the UK in 2023, this portrait of queer, working class London drifts from coffee shop to house party, in search of the next tryst.

Leda is lost. He spends his days steeped in ennui, watching the hours pass, waiting for the night to arrive. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bed with near strangers, as Leda seeks out intimacy in unlikely places. Semi-homeless and estranged from his family of origin, he relies on the support of his chosen one: a community of older gay men and divorced women who feed and clothe him, gently encouraging him to find a foothold in a society which excludes him at every turn. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession—one which sends him spiraling into self-destruction. Pre-dating the British Sexual Offences Act of 1967, Love, Leda was first published in 2023 in the UK. This long lost novel is a portrait of London’s Soho that is now lost, an important document of queer working-class life from a voice long overlooked.

Cover of Active Reception

Nightboat Books

Active Reception

Noah Ross

Poetry €18.00

A vibrant work of lyric, conceptual, and confessional poetic modes pitched to enact a queer politics of liberation.

Active Reception is a book of bottoming lovers, the world around us, and a history of letters, that thinks through a queer mode of writing from the bottom, a kind of coalition based politics of receptivity and expansion that is open to the world around us, its myriad life forms, its systemic oppressions, its hidden ghosts.

Noah Ross is a bookseller, editor, and poet based in Berkeley, CA. Noah is the author of Swell, and an editor of Baest: a journal of queer forms & affects, and Mo0on/IO with Lindsay Choi.

Cover of Metamorphoses

City Lights Books

Metamorphoses

Evan Kennedy

Poetry €17.00

Metamorphoses springs from Ovid's epic poem to explore the slipperiness of identity, its propensity for change and transience. In poems that shift registers from travelogue to elegy, from nature documentary to a simple record of the realities of daily life, Evan Kennedy focuses on transformation, personal and collective, in an empire in decline, in a world transfigured by ecological upheaval.

With a range of reference from Roman household Gods to San Francisco poetic titans to musical celebrities like Madonna and Bob Dylan, Metamorphoses confronts change as an inevitable molecular process.