The Way of Love

BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT by Isabel Burr Raty with contributions by Kristin Rogghe, Elke Van Campenhout, Gosie Vervloessem, Pablo Diartinez and Tim Vets, is an experimental catalog summarizing Isabel Burr Raty’s research on conceptualizing and manufacturing eco-erogenous para-pharmaceutical products. It tells the story of the BKFF, a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their orgasmic juices to produce beauty bio-products, used for treatments in the BK Spa, critically discussed in the BK Focus Group and moving forward into becoming a village, where every-body harvests each other. The catalog comes with contributing text, “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout, and other reflections on the project.

Isabel Burr Raty is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), living between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.

Avant que Black Lives Matter et #MeToo ne viennent secouer l’Amérique et le monde occidental, bell hooks montrait, dans cet essai incisif, que l’abolition du racisme et l’éradication du sexisme vont de pair. Sans le féminisme, la lutte antiraciste reste une affaire d’hommes. Sans l’antiracisme, le féminisme s’expose à servir de courroie aux logiques de domination raciale. L'autrice insiste sur le bien-fondé de la rage qui anime les masses populaires et la jeunesse noire et sur la nécessité d’en faire un moteur de changement social radical. Elle propose une théorie et une pratique révolutionnaires, dont la fin est une communauté solidaire fondée sur l’égalité réelle et la volonté de tou.te.s de travailler au changement.

Traduit de l'anglais par Ségolène Guinard.

GLORIA JEAN WATKINS, connue sous son nom de plume BELL HOOKS, née en 1952, est une intellectuelle, féministe, et militante étasunienne. Elle a publié plus de trente livres et de nombreux articles, et est apparue dans plusieurs films documentaires. Traduits dans de nombreuses langues, ses ouvrages sont considérés parmi les plus importants sur la question aux Etats-Unis et suscitent un réel engouement en France depuis quelques années. Les éditions divergences ont déjà traduit et publié trois de ses ouvrages dont La volonté de changer et A propos d'amour.

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.

A rigorous and mind-blowing account of the dynamics of capitalism today through an in-depth exposition of software, speculative finance, and the highest scales of arbitrage.

At the centre of Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo's argument is the idea that capital does not belong to humans, it belongs to—and is governed by—itself. Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with the rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this:

"The critical orthodoxy is slowing; it's tired, it's not especially good at the internet, it's probably never manned a Starbucks counter or an anonymous cubicle. Its younger adepts—though digitally native—are chronically underemployed, unavailable, drowning in the student debt (or student opportunity cost) required for entry into the critical apparatus. Few have any patience for the numbing slop-speak of the LinkedIn economy, the libertarian enclave of forex and HFT and memecoins, the quarter-zip depravity of employment at the charnel houses of McKinsey or Deloitte or Accenture, the blazingly random mood-swings of venture capital that lubricate all of the above. This impatience is—in the parlance of the above—a blocker: it means that the critical apparatus underestimates the power of the software economy, struggles to articulate the morphological density of digitally-realized capitalism, comprehensively ignores the functional death of labor, and doesn't understand scale."

Introduction by Charles Mudede.
Afterword by Alex Quicho.

"A masterpiece... Nick Land for adults."
— 0nty

Adorno’s Noise is a collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays. Adorno’s Noise takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno’s aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno’s orbit.

“This work by Carla Harryman, startlingly astute, once again proves how necessary an encounter with her writing has become for us today. Her grasp of theoretical and poetic exigencies is unbypassable, and she moves lightly, lifting the prose poem into the amplitude of a new articulation.” — AVITAL RONELL

“Adorno’s ‘noise’ may be nothing more than the consonance of late modern capital talking to itself, but Carla Harryman listens to Adorno listening, and what she hears is a very different sort of dissonance, something Adorno himself may have been deaf to. Listening for a noise that can’t be heard, Harryman attends to the disruption of signal the aesthetic artifact called a corpse at the limit of Adorno’s magisterial eloquence, where thought steps over the body. Atonally faithful to his negativity the afterglow of torment passing through figures of speech while refusing the authority of a masterful dialectic, Harryman makes our unthought horizon “normality is death” audible, presencing a body that can’t be redeemed by aesthetics the bosy wants tobe art and fails at it. From Gender the Status of Dogs to works by Sun Ra, Anais Nin, Robert Smithson, and Kenzaburo Oe, this radically asynthetic writing moves thru polyphonic configuration of word, image and concept. Synthesia? Emotional truth? The intersection between abstraction and narration? Practicing a militant ethic of non-mastery as every one of its sentences sounds like a sensory organ in the process of becoming its own theoretician. Adorno’s Noise reinvents the “essay as form,” but it doesn’t stop short of reinventing thinking.” — ROB HALPERN

Carla Harryman is the author of twenty-four books of poetry, prose, plays, and essays. Harryman is widely acknowledged as an innovator in poetry, prose, and inter-disciplinary performance. An active collaborator, she is one of ten co-authors of The Grand Piano, an Experiment in Collective Autobiography: San Francisco, 1975-1980 (2006-2010). Open Box, a CD of music and spoken text performance created with composer and musician Jon Raskin was released on the Tzadik label in 2012. Her Poets Theater plays and music/text collaborations have been performed nationally and internationally, including at dOCUMENTA 13, where she presented the closing keynote performance Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a music/text work that folds segments of Adorno’s Noise into her poetic adaptation of Adorno’s lecture. She is the editor of two critical volumes: Non/Narrative, a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory ( 2012) and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (with Avital Ronell and Amy Scholder, Verso, 2006).

Other books by Carla Harryman include the collection of poetry and performance writings published in French and English editions Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (2017); A Voice to Perform (Split/Level 2020); the epistolary essay, Artifact of Hope (2017); the diptych W—/M— (2013), Gardener of Stars: A Novel (2001), and two volumes of selected writing: Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays (1989) and There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (1995). Her grants and awards include The Foundation of Contemporary Art, New York, Opera America Next Stage (with Erling Wold), and The Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty in Creative Activity Award from Eastern Michigan University, where she serves on the faculty of an interdisciplinary creative writing program.