Saving Genitality: Toward A Freudian Virtue Ethics

Derrida’s essay “Aletheia” discusses the work of Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama. Reading Derrida, Rabaté investigates how, behind the classical concept of truth as a beautiful naked woman, Derrida argues that any photographic image tells the Truth, but a truth obscured as it comes to light: “nothing is more black than the visibility of light.” Staging a critical conversation with Roland Barthes’s theses in Camera Lucida and Paul Celan’s poems from Breathturn to Lightduress, Rabaté argues for a theoretical approach to truth that counters the prevailing truth-discourses of today. 

In The Completion, legendary philosopher Franco 'Bifo' Berardi offers his analysis of cognitive automation and artificial intelligence. Of the possible worlds imagined in Silicon Valley and in the media discourse around tech boosterism, none will likely materialise. Instead, the unpredictable will intervene in the future of predictive technology. 

In this new edition, in a new venture for Everyday Analysis, Berardi's essay is accompanied by an introduction by Alfie Bown and a series of artworks and illustrations, new and historic- from Borges's labyrinths to the I-ching - offering a reading experience in the spirit of Berardi's work. 

In these essays, Ben Burgis criticizes fashionable radical-liberal identity politics and makes the case for universalism about rights and an unabashedly “class-first” approach to socialist political strategy. This may sound to some ears like a call for abandoning marginalized people. On the contrary, he argues, focusing on economic inequality empowers the victims of bigotry and retrograde social practices the resources and material security to stand up for themselves far more effectively than any diversity trainer or “anti-racism” consultant could represent their interests. As we face a rising tide of reactionary authoritarianism, it’s more important than ever to ditch the identitarian pieties of the recent past and think hard about how the Left can actually win.

In this new collected edition of his recent articles, Simon Critchley - one of the most important living philosophers - takes us through his reflections on death, questions of doubt and reason, the legacy of David Bowie, the nature of fear and empathy in a broken society and a critique of narrative identity - among other things. YOUR LIFE IS NOT A STORY explores the contemporary world and its psychological impact on us, offering us a way to see our situation different and resist its tricks and contrivances.

In this psychoanalytic pamphlet, Croatian philosopher Karlo Pavlović analyses the perversions of the day. Considering the topic of ASMR, a key example of what he calls the generalised deployment of subtle pornography, of depictions of sexuality "in gloves", he argues that society today should be understood through the blue balls phenomenon. This concept, developed playfully by Pavlović, explains that we are all perverts taking the logic of the drive to its extreme; if the whole point of the drive is not to attain its object, but rather, to circle around it, the perverse subject (as the subject of the present times) has, in fact, no problems with this whatsoever.

Karlo Pavlović is completing his PhD in Philosophy at The University of Ljubljana, supervised by Alenka Zupančič.

The Conspiracy of Equals (1796) is often hailed as the first revolution against a revolutionary state. Even if the conspirators were soon found out and put on trial, their ideas of radical equality and liberty shaped future generations of revolutionaries worldwide. An Anarchist Playbook—the first publication in Tenement’s new imprint, No University Press—gathers together many of the key documents from their trial across a myriad forms, with a number of these texts appearing herein in their first English-language translation.

Assembled in the Playbook are the last words of Gracchus Babeuf, the leader of the conspiracy and a radical proponent of the abolition of private property, and of his fellow conspirator Augustin Darthé, as they faced the guillotine. We’ve a letter, written in the popular idiom of the sans-culottes, that urges the common soldier to rebel; the score and lyrics of a street song that names the new class enemy: the wealthy bourgeoisie who have profited from the revolution; a first-time English translation of ‘The Last Judgement of All Kings’—an extraordinary one-act play by Sylvain Maréchal, the unofficial poet of the Conspiracy, that was performed to considerable acclaim in Year II of the Revolution (and that the Workshop is in the process of adapting for contemporary audiences). 

Many of these texts were never published in their own time, and form a part of the testament left behind by Philippe Buonarroti, a leading conspirator who inspired new generations of revolutionaries across Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the best known works included is the Manifesto of Equals, long considered a founding text of social, communist and anarchist revolutions. The Playbook presents a translation of the Manifesto alongside other key texts by the conspirators, reconstructing the richness and variety of revolutionary communication that informs the editorship, shape, and scope of this volume.

In Perpetual Slavery, Ciarán Finlayson investigates the relationship of art to freedom in the work of Cameron Rowland and Ralph Lemon, who both utilize imagery of labor haunted and structured by the historical experience of slavery.

Finlayson suggests that these two artists' work overcomes the dichotomy between the recording of history and its interpretation by making both the object of artistic experience, thereby providing a space to grasp the continuing effects of slavery.

Ciarán Finlayson is a writer and editor based in New York City. His essays have appeared in periodicals including Artforum, Bookforum, Papers on Language and Literature, Studio magazine, Kunst und Politik, PARSE, Archives of American Art Journal, and 032C. He is the managing editor of Blank Forms. His primary research is on contemporary art with emphases on Marxism, Black studies, philosophy of history, and conceptual art. He writes with the London-based Black Study Group and is a founding member of the political education collective Hic Rosa.

Entropia (vol. I & II) – written by William Kherbek and edited in collaboration with Jack Clarke – is a publication which seeks to recount and re-examine a decade of artistic curation, production, and critique between London, Berlin, and other urban art centres from 2010 to 2020.

Comprised of two volumes, this publication contains a compendium of over one hundred reviews and interviews with luminaries of contemporary art (Vol I), as well as a speculative attempt to create a newly generated algorithmic art(ificial) critic (Vol II). Together they serve to document, excoriate, and theorise an art world which is simultaneously hegemonic and precarious, complicit and constructive, driven by values, yet fed by extraction, all filtered through Kherbek’s precise, aphoristic, acerbic, lens.

The publications include contextual contributions from both Josie Thaddeus-Johns, writer for the New York Times, The Financial Times, Frieze; and Rozsa Farkas, director of London-based gallery Arcadia Missa.

Strange Biology, Charlotte Strange’s first chapbook, opens with a social media advertisement marketing a probiotic as an alternative to the “nuclear bomb” of antibacterial acne medication. As Strange investigates the treatment of the human body as a landscape submissive to medical intervention, they ruminate on the contemporary relationship between microbes, gut-directed medical technologies, and capitalism’s encroachment on life. Drawing on the vernacular of social media marketing, they deftly oscillate between instructive and personal registers, stretching the private across a nexus of microbial interminglings. Strange Biology reflects on the semiotic science of the gut: how the language of medicine defines the mutating edges of the human body. 

This book is for people who love electronic music, people who probably have a synthesizer or two at home. It’s for people who tell themselves that they should find some time for their passion, who blame themselves for not making enough music. This book is for them.

For decades, I thought that I could be a music producer. But over the years, I have discovered that my contribution to the electronic scene wasn’t exactly the music itself. Although I was lucky enough to produce a few successful tracks in Lithuania, back in the ‘90s, my actual achievement turned out to be raising interest in electronic music, for other young people. I’m still surprised when someone remembers my old tracks, but I’m very proud when someone tells me that listening to me speak on the radio about Berlin techno changed their dreams back in the day. Later, in the 2000s, I was part of the early SoundCloud team. The code we wrote has touched hundreds of millions people around the world. No track or song I would have ever produced would have had such an effect. There is a reason that Brian Eno says the evolution of music is moved by technology as much as it is by artists. The people who created Logic and Ableton, those who code SoundCloud and Spotify, design Korg and Roland synths, they influence the course of music on a massive scale. The development of music technology is the work of many people and I’m happy to call myself one of that gang.

This book is a natural extension of those ideas. It’s not based on scientific or journalistic research, but it’s not a biography, either. I imagine this book sitting on a studio desk, or in a gig bag. In the process, I hope that some young music creators will find answers here, and inspirations, to the questions they’ve been wrestling with for a long time.