Prompt Thinking

When Socrates was standing before the Athenian tribunal in 399 BC, he said in his defence that the opponents he feared most were the invisible ones, those who had been spreading rumors against him for years but none of whom were being brought to court – it was like fighting shadows. The moment was Socrates, the harbinger of logos and true knowledge, was eventually defeated by rumors and mendacious slander.

Where does the strange power of rumors come from? Everyone knows that rumors are unfounded and based on thin air, but still they pass them rumors spread, and what appeared as a small breeze can grow into a mighty whirlwind and produce serious effects, ruin people’s lives and change the course of events. This book scrutinizes the mysterious power of rumors and seeks to analyse it philosophically, examining along the way some key moments of our cultural history concerning rumors, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Gogol and Kafka.  It also underlines the fact that, although rumors are as old as humankind, the advent of the internet and social media has raised the spreading of rumors to an entirely new level, to the point where we could speak of the rumorization of the social.  The more communication there is, the more the social fabric threatens to fall apart – and the more urgent it becomes to find strategies to counteract this.

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.

This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupancic contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life. She also shows how the libidinal economy of disavowal is a key element of capitalist economy.

The concept of fetishistic disavowal already exposes the objectified side of the mechanism of the disavowal, which follows the general formula: I know well, but all the same, the object-fetish allows me to disregard this knowledge. Zupancic adds another twist by showing how, in the prevailing structure of disavowal today, the mere act of declaring that we know becomes itself an object-fetish by which we intercept the reality of that very knowledge. This perverse deployment of knowledge deprives it of any reality.

This structure of disavowal can be found not only in the more extreme and dramatic cases of conspiracy theories and re-emerging magical thinking, but even more so in the supposedly sober continuation of business as usual, combined with the call to adapt to the new reality. To disrupt this social embedding of disavowal, it is not enough to change the way we think: things need to change, and hence the way they think for us.

The many mass protests that have taken place since 2011 have been characterised by an unmistakable need to challenge, overthrow and destroy the prevailing political representations without proposing new ones. The protests are not concerned with replacing the current government or leader with others, and thus getting a better version of what we already have. Instead, they refuse all leaders, including the most critical opposition leaders: these protests are about dismantling the need for leaders. More and more people are coming to the view that it is not possible to manage the many crises within the framework of the political institutions we have today. 

The new protests are political acts that are neither class struggle nor the establishment of an opposition to those in power. Rasmussen argues that we should understand these protests as the emergence of a new kind of revolutionary action that is as much an anthropological as a political transformation: it is an attempt to break free from all the traditional notions of how the social context that we call society and the nation-state is organised.

The clitoris was absent in anatomy books, in paintings and sculptures, absent in spirit and even body; it has long been the organ of erased pleasure. We assume that this oversight has been repaired in our times: today, the clitoris is not forgotten but honoured. Conferences, books, manifestos, works of art are all devoted to it. The autonomy of clitoral jouissance is recognized. The boundaries of feminism have also moved: queer, intersex and trans approaches claim that the clitoris is perhaps no longer the exclusive preserve of the woman. And yet, there remains a wounded space. Because genital mutilation is still common practice. Because millions of women are still denied pleasure. 

The clitoris continues to mark the enigmatic space of the feminine. Constrained by the extreme difficulty and the extreme urgency of returning to this scorched earth, it is time to give voice to an organ of pleasure which has still not become an organ of thought.

“A project whose glaring absence has been hiding in plain sight, clitoral pleasure has finally found its philosopher. Malabou tells us what we can do with our clitoral brain, uncloaking its agency and anarchic politics. Essential reading for anyone interested in interpreting sex otherwise than phallic and in relation to philosophy’s power to shape the soma.” - Emily Apter, New York University

Mise en scène, écriture – pièces de théâtre, poésie, récits, journaux – et présence sur scène : tout est lié chez Angélica Liddell. L’art et la vie, la fiction et la biographie, la création poétique et la réflexion théorique entretiennent les uns avec les autres des liens évidents et complexes. Ce volume inclut une série de textes qui, depuis une perspective théorique, éclairent en partie la pratique théâtrale de leur auteur, contribuant à la construction d’une poétique toujours inachevée, basée sur une expérience vitale.

Dans cet essai recueillant douze conférences et entretiens, Angélica Liddell évoque la création artistique ainsi que son processus dramaturgique très organique et très violent car « la violence poétique est nécessaire pour combattre la violence réelle ». 

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Direction, writing—plays, poetry, stories, journals—and stage presence: everything is interconnected in Angélica Liddell’s work. Art and life, fiction and biography, poetic creation and theoretical reflection maintain obvious yet complex connections with one another. This volume includes a series of texts that, from a theoretical perspective, shed light on the author’s theatrical practice, contributing to the construction of an ever-unfinished poetics rooted in lived experience. 

In this essay, which brings together twelve lectures and interviews, Angélica Liddell discusses artistic creation as well as her highly organic and violent dramaturgical process, for “poetic violence is necessary to combat real violence.” 

Like Freud’s prototypical baby, we struggle over whether to keep our body together or to give it away. We all live these scenes of bodily loss. Freud and Marx both sing harmoniously: what we give up, we give under duress. We are not easy with what we’ve been tasked with, but the task has been the same since birth, doubled in the name of emancipation: first, there’s nothing less than to survive alienation and exploitation, then there’s staying alive for one another’s sake. Perhaps the storied antagonism between Freud and Marx turns on the difficulty of holding these tasks together, balanced on the knife’s edge that separates self-interest from collective liberation.

Capitalism does not produce itself all alone, no matter its disciplines and political-economic constraints on the reproduction of society. If Marx taught us anything, it’s that capitalism produces its own gravediggers, the proletariat—“the unreason of reason,” he quipped, where the dominant social order encounters its unconscious element. Through the bad exchange of capitalism comes a gothic reversal, from preconscious life to premature death, where workers end up burying themselves instead of the system that provides the grave plot. That exchange is felt internally, in a rift that cleaves open the self. Freud, for his part, helps us describe how political economy hammers our lives into unreasonable and reasonable shapes, imaginary and real, as countless and heterogeneous as the individual faces in a collective mass. For each and for all, we bring psychoanalysis to bear on the political-economic problems we suffer in common.

King Ketamine. Beyond the vibecession. Austere Mothers. Sick at Work. Money, Feces, Babies, Gifts. Essays by Juliana Spahr, Peter Coviello, Nicolás Medina Mora, Jyoti Rao, and Hannah Proctor. Images of Red Vienna from Wilhelm Reich’s camera, dispatches from Lebanon, and more.

Dans cet ouvrage, malheureusement son dernier, Mark Fisher revisite des artefacts culturels familiers afin de cartographier les variétés de l’étrange dont ils sont porteurs. Longtemps sensible aux dimensions bizarre et omineuse qu’il devinait, sans les nommer, entre autres dans les œuvres de Lovecraft, les films de David Lynch ou les albums de The Fall, M. Fisher tente ici la synthèse essentielle d’un questionnement qui l’avait hanté, jusqu’à ce livre.

Avec son regard si particulier, celui du critique culturel tout à la fois pop et moderniste, puisant aux sources de la psychanalyse et du marxisme, Fisher se penche sur des objets sensibles pour y saisir les rapports entre présence et absence, entre ce qui devrait être mais n’est pas, ce qui ne devrait pas se présenter mais survient. C’est en compagnie de ces spectres — du titre d’un autre ouvrage — que nous sommes invités à voyager, pour questionner les formes mêmes de nos existences sociales, jusqu’aux frontières de l’étrange.

The apocalypse as such will not take place, as it is already finished. Today, there is no longer any difference between the end of the world and capitalism itself: from Britney Spears’ Till the World Ends to The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time, from Avenger’s Endgame to Donnie Darko, and all the way down to the internet’s Backrooms, the world never ends but is reproduced again and again according to the semio-logic of capital. 

In contrast with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, Semiotics of the End is a manifesto for the imagination of another relationship with the end. If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as Slavoj Žižek, Fredric Jameson, and Mark Fisher put it, it is only because we have not imagined anything yet. The end is just the beginning.

With an Afterword by Matt Bluemink 

A pioneer in queer theory and literary studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brings together for the first time in Touching Feeling her most powerful explorations of emotion and expression. In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion."