Extraterrestrial Languages

A young woman discovers that dancers at a local discotheque are being driven to acts of insane violence.

“The place was full of swarming, pugnacious, dangerous missellneous reptile's… Teenager's everywhere pounded their way on top of each other crazily strangling, biting and slashing each other's with broken glass, smashed records or sharpened blades… ”

16-year-old Jennifer Gibbons (1963–1993) wrote Discomania in 1980, alongside her twin sister June-Alison, who was also writing her own novel, The Pepsi Cola Addict, in the bedroom that they shared.

Jennifer offered Discomania to the same English vanity press who would publish June-Alison's book, but Discomania was turned down for being “too violent, too sexual, and too futuristic.”

Long thought to have been lost or destroyed, June-Alison had in fact preserved the typescript of this unique, furious, funny, and strange novel, which we present with her blessing, alongside additional texts from June-Alison, and editors David Tibet and Ania Goszczyńska.

A revolutionary way of seeing bodies and built environment that unites radical politics and trans aesthetics. 

From a leading author and queer theorist known for reframing many of the most pressing questions about counter-intuitive ways of being. 

Anarchitecture, a radical aesthetic practice of unmaking the built environment, staged a vigorous confrontation with urban renewal and gentrification projects in the 1970s. In Anarchitecture After Everything, Jack Halberstam identifies a powerful lexicon of transformation within anarchitecture, joining the movement’s practices of cutting and splitting with the destabilizing power of transness to detonate acts of formal violence in our time. 

Anarchitecture describes the aesthetic practice of splitting and cutting, dismantling and undoing, unmaking, unbuilding, and ultimately unworlding. The trans body splits bodily coherence, dismantles the gender binary, and unbuilds bodily meaning. In these chapters, Gordon Matta-Clark’s cuts, along with Alvin Baltrop’s 1970s images of collapsing warehouses and Beverly Buchanan’s post-demolition fragmentary sculptures, return with a vengeance through the contemporary aesthetic gestures of Yve Laris Cohen, Jesse Darling, Nicole Eisenman, Kiyan Williams, Cassils, boychild, and Every Ocean Hughes. Anarchitecture unmakes space and offers a new rhetoric for emptiness. In its conclusion, the book explores this rhetoric through Renee Gladman’s anarchitectural experiments with language. 

By reading anarchitecture through transness and transness through anarchitecture, Halberstam helps us see the trans body as a space of radical unmaking and as a portal to new lexicons for transformation.

An essential history for understanding how we mother now, and how motherhood itself became a medium—winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology.

From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, Mother Media tells the story of how we arrived at our contemporary understanding of what a mother is and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth-century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. The book charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the many ingenious attempts to remediate nursemaid and mother via speculative technologies and screen media. 

Growing out of her previous award-winning book The Distance Cure, which considered technologized care, the book lays bare the contradictions of techno-parenting and how it relates to conceptions of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. The author offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (for example, Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (for example, the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined. Ultimately, Zeavin grapples with a simple contradiction: technology is seen and judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family.

Hannah Zeavin is Associate Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure and Mother Media (MIT Press) and Founding Editor of Parapraxis. In 2021, she cofounded The Psychosocial Foundation.

Why sexuality is at the point of a "short circuit" between ontology and epistemology.

Consider sublimation, conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around), even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, "What is sex?" rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series, Alenka Zupančič approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan "orthopedists of the unconscious."

Zupančič argues that sexuality is at the point of a "short circuit" between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.

Sarah Schulman, fervente militante pour les droits humains, livre dans cet essai une brillante analyse des défis sociaux et psychologiques inhérents à tout mouvement de solidarité. En prenant appui sur plusieurs exemples historiques (lutte pour le droit à l’avortement dans l’Espagne postfranquiste, lutte contre le VIH/sida dans le New York des années 1990, mobilisation contre le génocide à Gaza…) ainsi que sur sa propre expérience de femme queer et juive, l’autrice décortique les rouages de la solidarité et entreprend de questionner les fantasmes qui y sont traditionnellement associés. 

En filigrane, cet ouvrage pose une question fondamentale : quelle place pouvons-nous prendre dans un monde de plus en plus polarisé, et comment agir en solidarité avec les populations opprimées à l’échelle mondiale, locale ou individuelle ? L’autrice analyse les conditions nécessaires à tout mouvement de solidarité et montre l’importance de l’écoute active, la nécessité d’intervenir lorsque l’on est confronté à une injustice, la capacité à tolérer l’imperfection, ou encore la reconnaissance du coût moral et social inhérent à toute mobilisation. 

En dressant des parallèles entre différents mouvements sociaux, Sarah Schulman met en lumière certaines dynamiques transversales à tout acte de solidarité et montre l’importance de la convergence des luttes dans un contexte mondialisé. Ode à la libération des populations opprimées, cet ouvrage apparaît aujourd’hui indispensable pour quiconque souhaite oeuvrer à la construction d’un monde plus juste. 

Sun of an Ignored Putrid Productivity is a speculative novel about the influence of artificial intelligence and accelerating technological progress on our human interactions. The dialogical script is based on personal reflections and pop-cultural, scientific and philosophical references from the beginnings of cybernetics to more recent voices. Randomly generated, constructed and quoted contents cannot be distinguished from each other. The borderline between fact and fiction becomes blurred. What is left is a flickering effect, disorientation, which reflects our perception of reality under conditions of never-ending information overflow.

Legal-high addict, gaming enthusiast, and principal shareholder of AstroLabs™, Lex Rameses, has recently discovered—and purchased—Proserpina: a planet with a near-identical ecosystem to Earth’s. Yet, although his humanistic, hipster pretensions mean that many people admire him, there is still one thing standing in the way of his space-colonization program: as of yet, there is no way to travel to Proserpina safely.

Enter a cast of mad scientists, Astro–Marxists, a neurorobotic AI hivemind, an extinction anxiety addict, the victims of an interrelated crypto-currency gaming scam, and a seemingly endless succession of ravers and gamers in search of the ultimate hallucinogenic, carcinogenic, neü-space-age high…

The Ultraviolet Catastrophe is raucous, hilarious, irreverent, and wildly smart, taking aim at techno-salvation fantasies, startup culture, and the eternal humiliation of having a body under the ridiculous conditions of late capitalism. Finlay's new novel is as unexpected and unique as all of her work. Read it now.
— Elvia Wilk, author of Oval and Death by Landscape 

A collection exploring the intersections of gender and religion in post-secular knowledge production and visual culture.

Over the last three decades, religious practices and belongings have gained increased visibility across the globe, turning secularity and its relationship with religion into subjects of intense interdisciplinary and international debate. Previously marginalized in gender studies, the secular and the religious now attract growing interest in academic and activist feminism, prompting a critical reflection on secularity's emancipatory potential. This publication aims to foster this interest by providing a platform for interdisciplinary and transregional discussions on the complex dynamics of secularity, religiosity, and gender, as well as new approaches to explore these relationships.
 The contributions examine the entanglements and boundaries of religions and secularities in everyday life, art, culture, and knowledge production. By presenting relevant case studies, this book underscores an understanding of religion as both a category of knowledge and a marker of identity.

Recorded and transcribed throughout the 1960s, Carla Lonzi’s Self-portrait ruptures the narration of post-war modern art in Italy and beyond. Artmaking struck Lonzi as an invitation to be together in a ‘humanly satisfying way’, and this experiment in art-historical writing is a testament to her belief. Lonzi abolishes the role of the critic, her own, seeking change over self-preservation by theorising against the act of theorising.

The life and work of Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) is inseparable from the cultural, political, and social history of Italy in the decades following the Second World War; she occupies a singular position, which today merits reevaluation. A reputed art critic of the 1960s artistic scene, both friend and collaborator of such figures as Carla Accardi, Luciano Fabro, Giulio Paolini, and Jannis Kounellis, she wrote “Autoportrait” in 1969, a “love letter” to the artists and to creation, but also a farewell chorus to art criticism and the art world. The following year she founded Rivolta Femminile, an active feminist collective, thus becoming the central figure of Italian feminism.

Interviews with Carla Accardi, Getulio Alviani, Enrico Castellani, Pietro Consagra, Luciano Fabro, Lucio Fontana, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Nigro, Guilio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Mimmo Rotella, Salvatore Scarpita, Guilio Turcato, Cy Twombly.

Afterword by Claire Fontaine.
Translated by Allison Grimaldi Donahue.

978-1916425088
105 b&w illustrations
21.6 x 13.9 cm
364 p.
Paperback
November 2021