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Cover of Dialogue on the infinity of love

University of Chicago Press

Dialogue on the infinity of love

Tullia D'Aragona

€23.00

Celebrated as a courtesan and poet, and as a woman of great intelligence and wit, Tullia d'Aragona (1510-56) entered the debate about the morality of love that engaged the best and most famous male intellects of sixteenth-century Italy. First published in Venice in 1547, but never before published in English, "Dialogue on the Infinity of Love" casts a woman rather than a man as the main disputant on the ethics of love.

Sexually liberated and financially independent, Tullia d'Aragona dared to argue that the only moral form of love between woman and man is one that recognizes both the sensual and the spiritual needs of humankind. Declaring sexual drives to be fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, she challenged the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemned all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin.

Human beings, she argued, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honorable love must be based on this real nature. By exposing the intrinsic misogyny of prevailing theories of love, Aragona vindicates all women, proposing a morality of love that restores them to intellectual and sexual parity with men. Through Aragona's sharp reasoning, her sense of irony and humor, and her renowned linguistic skill, a rare picture unfolds of an intelligent and thoughtful woman fighting sixteenth-century stereotypes of women and sexuality.

Language: English

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Cover of Mandible Wishbone Solvent

University of Chicago Press

Mandible Wishbone Solvent

Asiya Wadud

Poetry €18.00

Brooklyn-based poet Asiya Wadud's fifth collection of poetry, Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent, engages migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art-though not necessarily in that order-with a dynamic urgency and graceful restraint held in balance by a deep literary investment in the historical aesthetics of abstraction.

Punctuated by images of Wadud's own original art, the poems and prose of Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent offer an indirect meditation of the concepts of the drift ("Embedded in the act of drift can be the prior commitment or desire against drifting") and the isthmus ("An isthmus is a passageway, a threshold, underbrush, thicket, and deliverance"). Wadud constructs a latticework through which language circulates and creates new patterns that probe the natural world's edges, fissures, gaps, and seams. Further, the lyric poems suggest a relationship between speaker and environment that yearns to invert or dissolve the subject-object divide, creating instead an isthmus that joins and allows a drifting between them.

Cover of Moon Mirrored Indivisible

University of Chicago Press

Moon Mirrored Indivisible

Farid Matuk

Poetry €18.00

Multilayered lyric poems that resist systems of power and foster intimacy. 

An inheritor of lineages marked by colonial and gendered violence, Farid Matuk approaches the musical capacities of verse not as mere excitation or decoration, but as forms that reclaim pleasure and presence. Entering the sonic constellations of Moon Mirrored Indivisible, the reader finds relief from nesting layers of containment that systems of power impose on our bodies and imaginations. In this hall of historical mirrors, fictions of identity are refracted, reflected, and multiplied into a vast field of possibilities. Matuk’s meditations on place and power offer experiments in self-understanding, moving through expansive conversations between a lyric “I” and others, including poets, the speaker’s partner, ancestors, and the reader, and creating spaces for strange intimacy. Each of the book’s four sections of poems builds on the other to ask how we might form a collective—a people—not founded in orthodoxies of originality but in the mutual work of mirroring one another.

Cover of Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting

University of Chicago Press

Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting

Jennifer Soong

Poetry €30.00

An audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting.  

In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting’s long-standing associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion’s relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions? 

Soong uncovers forgetting’s influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting’s shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality—and that such malleability is part of forgetting’s nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.

Cover of Exhibiting for Multiple Senses

Valiz

Exhibiting for Multiple Senses

Eva Fotiadi

Essays €25.00

Exhibiting for Multiple Senses looks into artistic and curatorial research practices that emphasize the multisensory character of the human body in the encounter with artworks. For some time now, numerous contemporary artists and curators have moved beyond the primacy of the visual in the experience of art exhibitions. The book discusses this shift by bringing together experimental exhibition-making, curatorial theory, art, design, and museum research, disability activism and crip theory. Its intent is to demonstrate resonances between curatorial theory and practice and between disability and crip art activism. While the latter is still often regarded as relevant for only small portions of visibly disabled people, in recent years neurodiversity and invisible disabilities have proven to be relevant for the sensory experiences of much larger parts of exhibition audiences.

Exhibiting for Multiple Senses shares famous and lesser-known examples of experimental exhibitions as well as of artistic practices linked to exhibitions. By mobilizing the senses of touch, smell, taste, and hearing, as well as applications of multimodal technologies and insights from neuroscience, these examples all explore abilities and possibilities of the complex and diverse sensory apparatus that is the human body.

Contributors: David Bobier, Luca M. Damiani, Stephanie Farmer & Hettie James, Eva Fotiadi, David Gissen & Georgina Kleege, Adi Hollander, Lilian Korner, Elke Krasny, Renata Pękowska, Caro Verbeek

Cover of Being a Chair. Essays on Choreographic Poetry

Varamo Press

Being a Chair. Essays on Choreographic Poetry

Janne-Camilla Lyster

Essays €12.00

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on mistakes and crevasses, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to enter another form of existence, say, a chair?

Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays.

Cover of In the Delirium of the Simulation: Baudrillard Revisited

becoming press

In the Delirium of the Simulation: Baudrillard Revisited

Achim Szepanski

Non-fiction €15.00

Third edition featuring afterword by Alessandro Sbordoni & several appendices, including a new translation & edit of “Taylor Swift Does Not Exist”. 

This is a monumental and extensive work from someone who is arguably the most well-versed scholar of Baudrillard, Deleuze & Laruelle in the German-speaking world, Achim Szepanski, the original founder of Mille Plateaux, Force Inc Music Works and NON. This book is dedicated to Jean Baudrillard, who would be described by Achim as the most radical and advanced stimmung in Philosophy. Through this comprehensive and devouring analysis of Baudrillard’s work, the author presents a gripping account of their own philosophy; alongside his magnum opus Die Ekstasie der Spekulation, this book, In the Delirium of the Simulation, provides the strongest case for what might be called, in light of his passing, Szepanskism or Szepanskian Economics. 

From Finance, to non-philosophy and radical experimental music, Szepanski is an anomalous and unique theoretician with one hell of a history. 

CONTENTS:

  • Metabox of Terms: Simulation, Code, Hyperreality, Fractal, Seduction and Implosion 
  • Baudrillard's Maximisation Hypothesis: the System and the Other
  • Baudrillard & Marxism: Signs, Production and Money
  • Distinguishing the Consumer System (or Shopping Mall) from the Landfill
  • Baudrillard & the Financial Simulacrum
  • Excursus on Jonathan Beller's World Computer 
  • Hyperreality & Artificial Intelligence
  • Baudrillard & Quantum Theory
  • Afterword: Hyperculture by Alessandro Sbordoni
  • Appendix 1: Taylor Swift Does Not Exist
  • Appendix 2: Baudrillard: After the Orgy
  • Appendix 3: Imagination & Reality: Psychoanalysis vs Baudrillard
Cover of Paying Attention: Essays on Art and Culture

David Zwirner Books

Paying Attention: Essays on Art and Culture

Lynne Tillman

Essays €45.00

From award-winning novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman, Paying Attention is the first collection of essays devoted to her incisive, provocative, and singular reflections on art and culture.

Paying Attention gathers more than fifty of the best and varied examples of Lynne Tillman’s writings in reference to art and culture published over the course of forty years. In essays that operate outside typical categories or genres, Tillman reflects on forms including film, painting, photography, poetry, and fiction, as well as notions of fame, originality, embodied viewing and thinking, collective activity, aging, illness, American identity, cultural politics, modernity, strangeness, and time. Such is the stuff that relates art to life, and life to art.

Collected mainly from museum and gallery catalogues, artists’ books and monographs, her column in Frieze, and magazines including Aperture and Artforum, these meditations on artists and writers, in the broadest sense of these labels, collide as a portrait of our cultural moment. Tillman’s inventive use of language and lateral thought, her ability to evoke conditions of the larger world in often just two thousand words on a specific artwork or individual, make her one of the most significant critics of our time. As she acknowledges, in a piece on the artist Robert Gober, “In writing on art, words reach for other words, phrases, idioms, and through them more images and ideas leap out.” In her introduction, Elizabeth Schambelan notes that a hallmark of Tillman’s writing alongside artists is an “elegant rendering of complexity,” and in approaching Tillman’s body of work and thought, Schambelan herself imbricates the art, voice, and language of criticism.

Cover of addictive no an adjective

Vibrational Semantics

addictive no an adjective

Anna Barham

Essays €12.00

A text on speaking, listening and being understood made in conversation with iOS speech-to-text software.