The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin

I travel far across the city, cut it knowingly, concealing behind me the entrances to tunnels, altering the signage. I traverse the grimiest bowels, skirt the farthest wettest edges like a silverfish active only in the hallucinatory hours, to avoid becoming known, to avoid any collusion between my body and theirs, its. 

Under the neon sky of a sick city, which might be London, a nameless governess oscillates between lucidity and dissociation, solitude and communication, wage labour and escape attempts. A wild and unreliable narrator-without-character—ardent, delirious, complicit, vengeful, and paranoid—she embodies a perverse and chaotic resistance. Simultaneously demonic and angelic, both maniacal and generous in her fury, accidentally elegant, tongue tied and barbed, she veers towards defiance as devotion. An anti-Bildungsroman in the collapsing first person, Yes, I Am A Destroyer is an unbecoming record of memory and forgetting, of a relentless undoing. 

‘Any girl who learns how to read is already a lost girl, wrote the infamous confessionalist Rousseau. But if that lost girl, with insatiable pronoun, bastard spawn perhaps of the exiled Genevan, palmed a pen and confessed—how would that read? What can she know? With relentless intelligence and urgent prosody, Mira Mattar shows us. She invents a narrator in the raging anti-tradition of Violette Leduc and Albertine Sarrazin, leaps beyond the cloying contract of capital with the feminine, of intimacy with violence, to animate a lush document of the refusal of subjection. Much like the young Jean-Jacques, she’s a tutor underpaid for her sensitivity. She is, like him, a thief of small things, a sponge for the edifying comportments of the employing class. What she makes of her servitude—a fabulously grotesque encyclopedia of sensing—is dedicated to female anger. Scrubbing, washing, chewing, frigging, barfing, stealing, moisturising, shitting: every surface, every gesture, is appropriated to her bodily resistance.  ‘Live anyway’ is her stoic motto. This glorious tract ends with a call for the anarchical vigour of the animal body we share. Read it and flourish. You will perhaps be invoiced.’ 
–> Lisa Robertson 

Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. She is an independent researcher, editor, and tutor. A Palestinian/Jordanian born in the suburbs of London, she continues to live and work there. She has read and published her work widely. Yes, I Am A Destroyer is her first book.

“I wrote (more or less, for promises are always hard to keep, even those made to oneself ) for five days a week for a year. I wrote no more than a page, or rather, I wrote only for the length of the analytic hour, fifty minutes (though I also practiced the variable session at times)… I followed Freud’s model of train travel for his theory of free association, acting ‘as though, for instance, [you were] a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which [you] see outside’. As for my characters, many of their names begin with A. Some of these women exist or existed, others are from fiction, or write fiction. Some are friends or acquaintances. None are credited but a keen reader could recognise many of them. I invented nothing. I am the aleph.”

The first complete translation of Egon Erwin Kisch's Karl Marx in Karlsbad. Originally written in 1946, this book recounts Marx's visits to the spa town of Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary in Czechia) in 1874, 1875 and 1876.

Karl Marx spent three consecutive summers in the spa town of Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic) in 1874, 1875 and 1876. Egon Erwin Kisch's 1946 text Karl Marx in Karlsbad reconstructs these three stays.

When Marx arrived in Karlsbad to take the waters for the first time, he was suffering, tired, tense, overworked and overly nervous, in other words, he was burnout. Years of political and theoretical work under agonising hardship and constant oppression had left Marx with pleurisy, inflammation of the lungs, inflammation of the nerves in his head, a carbuncle, a lung abscess and sciatica. Marx's recovery in Karlsbad, surrounded by princes, ministers, aristocrats, chamber singers, adventurers, spies, and courtesans, is a story full of amusing anecdotes and surprises. 

E.E. Kisch, described by Anna Seghers as a "detective," investigated this lesser known period of Marx's life and resolved some mysteries of international importance.

For the first time fully translated, the essay is introduced by its editor, Sezgin Boynik, presenting Kisch within the context of interwar leftist avant-garde internationalism. The afterword by Sam Dolbear and Hannah Proctor revisits the emotional life of Marx and his daughter Eleonor during their visits to Karlsbad, without insulating them from the forces of history. Dolbear and Proctor are both writers and researchers, who have previously worked together on an essay on revolutionary childhood, as co-editors of a series of pamphlets on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, and on dreams, sleep, work, puppets, play, and proletarian children's theatre.

Designed by Ott Kagovere, the book features etchings and photographs of Karlsbad from the 19th century, as well as a colour reproduction of Christian Schad's portrait of Kisch with tattoos.

Egon Erwin Kisch (1885-1948) was an Austro-Hungarian and Czechoslovak writer and journalist, who wrote in German.

Foreword by Sezgin Boynik; afterword by Sam Dolbear and Hannah Proctor.

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

The straplines of a number of advertisements drawn from magazines of the 1950s are turned into drawings, as though a particularly vain and narcissistic woman speaks (as of course she does), She is ‘en pleine forme’ of her beauty. (2016).

A collection (montage) of biographies and themes written by Jairus Banaji.
Wanting Something Completely Different discusses a range of political figures, themes, directors and writers in a series of brief, evocative descriptions ('vignettes') aimed at laying out a vision of a modern, cosmopolitan left that can think creatively about the world we live in. The political figures include both thinkers and activists from a wide range of backgrounds—from Frantz Fanon and the Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani to the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The themes range equally widely from the death of Walter Benjamin (reconstructed here from a remarkable documentary on the same theme) and the slaying of Pasolini to the work of British Marxist Perry Anderson, or the corrupt nature of India's leading corporate groups, or the outstanding contributions of Italian and U.S. Black feminists to feminist theory. And under the rubrics which discuss film and literature, there is the same striving for diversity and depth.

The vignettes collected in this Rab-Rab book first circulated on Facebook over some seven years or more and are reproduced here with a new introduction and extensive bibliographical references and notes.

Jairus Banaji is a historian and revolutionary Marxist activist. He received the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2011. His academic work has ranged widely across sources and languages, with major books on Late Antiquity and commercial capitalism as well as numerous papers and articles.

A veritable panorama of Art Brut at an international level, through 180 works selected from Bruno Decharme's collection.

Art brut has never ceased to shake up the history of art and nourish minds resistant to norms as it questions classic notions of art and creation as well as those relating to the normal and the pathological. But who are they, these artists of a special kind, witnesses to another world, strangers to stylistic trends and influences? They stay—or are kept—away from the culture of fine art as well as the codes and places that constitute it such as schools, academies, museums, art fairs, etc.

Featuring A.C.M., Noviadi Angkasapura, Anselme Boix-Vives, Marie Bodson, Giovanni Bosco, Gustavo Enrique Buongermini, Aloïse Corbaz, Fleury-Joseph Crépin, Egidio Cuniberti, Henry Darger, Fernand Desmoulin, Janko Domsic, Dong-Hyun Kim, Jaime Fernandes, Eugen Gabritschevsky, Pietro Ghizzardi, Madge Gill, Paul Goesch, Jorge Alberto Hernández Cadi, Paul Humphrey, Zdeněk Košek, Joseph Lambert, Gustave Pierre Marie Le Goarant de Tromelin, Augustin Lesage, Pascal Leyder, Alexander Pavlovitch Lobanov, Ramon Losa, Dwight Mackintosh, Lázaro Antonio Martínez Durán, Mettraux, Edmund Monsiel, John Bunion Murray, Iwona Mysera, Koji Nishioka, Masao Obata, Jean Perdrizet, M. Pierron, Photographies Spirites, Miloslava Ratzingerová, Marco Raugel, Achilles G. Rizzoli, Leopold Strobl, Harald Stoffers, Mose Tolliver, Melvin Way, Scottie Wilson, Adolf Wölfli, Anna Zemánková, Carlo Zinelli, Unica Zürn.

A complete survey of the cast, forged, and fabricated metal sculptures made by Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen since 2017.

The artist's practice addresses the industrial complex of virtual and robotic bodies and their relationship to labor in tech, pornography and gaming. While some sculptures were conceived as individual pieces, others were created with digital counterparts within installations that typically include CGI animation, documentary video, drawing and prints.

By presenting the metal works as stand-alone pieces, this book adheres to Meineche Hansen's concern with the material means of production, highlighting their concrete yet elusive nature. Several pieces in the publication are accompanied by poems written by artist Diego Marcon in response to the works. As an artist's project and an archival document, the publication echoes the tradition of documentary photography devoted to sculpture.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen (born 1981 in Denmark, lives and works in London) is a Danish artist. She produces exhibitions, interdisciplinary seminars and publications that foreground the body and its industrial complex, in what she refers to as a "techno-somatic variant of institutional critique". Meineche Hansen questions the body in the field of industrial representations: robotic or virtual bodies, and their relationship with the working world of industries of gaming, pornography, and new technologies. Her research-led practice has taken the form of woodcut prints, sculptures and CGI animations, often made by combining her own low-tech manual craft with outsourced, skilled digital labour.

Edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.
Poems by Diego Marcon.