Essays

States of the Body Produced by Love is a modern mystical journey through love – a many-headed snake twisting through devotion, sacrifice and the dream of returning home. 

In her visionary debut, Nisha Ramayya conjures an opalescent world by way of Tantric ritual and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems. States of the Body Produced By Love weaves essays, poetry and images together to offer fierce meditations on diasporic identity, language and resistance. From grief to bliss, this book explores the many states of the body seized by love in an incantation that never leaves its hold.

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.

Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: ‘before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’ Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. 

This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota, where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew. 

A collection of interviews that deal explicitly with the relationship between daughter and mother, the sexuation of language, the symbolic order, and the importance of both history and philosophy for the liberation of the feminine subject.

For Luce Irigaray, one of the most original French feminist theorists, deconstructing the patriarchal tradition is not enough. She admits that it is not an easy task, but she believes that it is necessary to also define new values directly or indirectly suitable to feminine subjectivity and to feminine identity. She begins this project by analyzing and interpreting the absence of the feminine subject in the definition of dominant cultural values. She then wonders how these new values can be constructed without simply reversing the roles. Far from implying a hierarchy, difference affirms the coexistence and fruitful encounter of two different identities. These two heterogeneous identities, masculine and feminine, are not socially but ontologically constructed and describing the feminine requires establishing methods other than those already used by the masculine subject. Why Different? is a collection of interviews, conducted in both France and Italy, that deal explicitly with the relationship between daughter and mother, the sexuation of language, the symbolic order, and the importance of both history and philosophy for the liberation of the feminine subject. In Why Different? Irigaray elaborates on issues brought up in her other books, Speaking is Never Neutral, I Love to You, Thinking the Difference, and To Be Two and brings them to fruition. 

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer.

Translated by Camille Collins. 

In this book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward. (The texts in this book are in French only.)

Translated from English by Aline Wiame (original title: The Minor Gesture, Duke University Press, 2016).

Marking a return for Laura Mulvey to questions of film theory and feminism, as well as a reconsideration of new and old film technologies, this urgent and compelling collection of essays is essential reading for anyone interested in the power and pleasures of moving images.

Its title, Afterimages, alludes to the dislocation of time that runs through many of the films and works it discusses as well as to the way we view them. Beginning with a section on the theme of woman as spectacle, a shift in focus leads to films from across the globe, directed by women and about women, all adopting radical cinematic strategies. Mulvey goes on to consider moving image works made for art galleries, arguing that the aesthetics of cinema have persisted into this environment.

Structured in three main parts, Afterimages also features an appendix of ten frequently asked questions on her classic feminist essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in which Mulvey addresses questions of spectatorship, autonomy, and identity that are crucial to our era today. 

Published Jan, 2020. 

Assaf Gruber’s films examine how art affects individuals who are not necessarily drawn to it. What may seem to be the unladen weight of culture, sometimes turns out to be its own rendering.

The films’ plots emerge from their characters’ personal environments, addressing the manner by which personal stories become intertwined with political ideologies, and the way in which social relations between private and public spheres are shaped. Gruber’s protagonists include: a sixty-year-old man, who due to his religious background was rejected multiple times from East German art academies during the 1970s; a retired security guard from the Old Masters Gallery in Dresden who now wants to spend the rest of her life as a volunteer in an Avant-garde museum, and the Chinese owners of a manufacturing company for contemporary sculpture, based in Poland. 

The publication is composed of eight chapters, each focusing on a discussion that turned out to be a significant factor in the films’ production. The tran- scription of each conversation is placed next to film stills with subtitles superimposed. This conceptual design allows Gruber to present the films as the third party in each chapter, as if they too are commenting, questioning, and completing the dialogue. 

Contributors: Paolo Caffoni (Ed.)

This book brings together contributions from participants and guests of Film in the Present Tense – International Symposium on Current Developments in Analog Film Culture, held in Berlin. It reflects a contemporary discussion around the use, value and purpose of analogue film from a multiplicity of perspectives: artists, filmmakers, scholars, archivists, curators, technicians and manufacturers. Film in the Present Tense intends to provide a documentation of the collective momentum that characterized the symposium and it responds to the persistent desire to keep talking about analogue film.

Organized by LaborBerlin in collaboration with Filminstitut Udk Berlin.

Author(s): (ed.) L.Greenfield, D. S. Phillips, K.Schroedinger

Contributors: Nicola Baldini, Erika Balsom, Petra Belc, Christa Blümlinger, Britt Al-Busultan, Anja Dornieden, Juan David Gonzáles Monroy, Guy Edmonds, Scott Fitzpatrick, Tiago Ganhão, Sally Golding, Luisa Greenfield, Philip Hoffman, Emmanuel Lefrant, Olga Moskatova Aurélie Percevault, Deborah S. Phillips, Martin Reinhart, Nicolas Rey, Julian Ross, Katia Rossini, Kerstin Schroedinger, Guy Sherwin, Björn Speidel, Peter Taylor, Esther Urlus, Stefanie Weberhofer, Philip Widmann, Zero Pixel, Ulrich Ziemons

LIBRARY contains four essays and two interviews, with the pre-dominant concern of sexual questions: the subjects in art, film, and literature—the issues tied to Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, Madonna’s sexual assault in Dangerous Game, Clunie Reid’s use of language, Richard Prince’s obsession with books, and Paul Meyersberg’s articulation about sex.

‘Like Carol Reed’s crippled trapeze artist now devoted to sensuality, Paul Buck is more than a suitable case for treatment. A personable deviant, Buck’s culpable, desiring proximity steeps these writings, inasmuch as they are apostrophised by his appearance in cameo, inside and outside the text. Buck stalks his work, addressing us in collusive asides. Rather than the disinterest of resistable objectivity, Buck’s criticism is moved by a profound personal investment in his subjects; he does not elide his complicity, nor does he quiet moral considerations. Discussing Richard Prince’s library or Madonna’s instrumentality, Buck makes the possessive, accountable case throughout. His underlying subject is the snarl of art and life, and the perils that abound in their confusion in the personal and their forced dichotomy in culture at large. Art, for Buck, cannot be an apology for the failures of experience, but instead is a compulsive and risky exposure, like a heretical grace, modelling life for our benefit.’ - Ed Atkins

‘Translator, poet, collagist, archivist, novelist, and all-around intellectual impresario, Paul Buck has a formidable knowledge of culture that he shines like a laser in LIBRARY on Richard Prince, Madonna, Abel Ferrera, and the erotics of painting and representation.  He approaches the critical essay like a crime scene investigation. LIBRARY is a fantastic read’. - Chris Kraus

 

If Our Wealth Is Criminal Then Let's Live with the Criminal Joy of Pirates collects two short stories and an essay by Jacob Wren. In the first story, 'The Infiltrator, ' certain ongoing, rarely mentioned, difficulties for the activist Left are explored with unlikely candour. In 'Four Letters from an Ongoing Series, ' the postal service becomes an unwitting accomplice to the gatekeepers of potential culture. Finally, in the essay 'Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith, ' questions of art and emptiness shift focus in relation to the agency that at all times surrounds us.

Celebrated as a courtesan and poet, and as a woman of great intelligence and wit, Tullia d'Aragona (1510-56) entered the debate about the morality of love that engaged the best and most famous male intellects of sixteenth-century Italy. First published in Venice in 1547, but never before published in English, "Dialogue on the Infinity of Love" casts a woman rather than a man as the main disputant on the ethics of love.

Sexually liberated and financially independent, Tullia d'Aragona dared to argue that the only moral form of love between woman and man is one that recognizes both the sensual and the spiritual needs of humankind. Declaring sexual drives to be fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, she challenged the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemned all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin.

Human beings, she argued, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honorable love must be based on this real nature. By exposing the intrinsic misogyny of prevailing theories of love, Aragona vindicates all women, proposing a morality of love that restores them to intellectual and sexual parity with men. Through Aragona's sharp reasoning, her sense of irony and humor, and her renowned linguistic skill, a rare picture unfolds of an intelligent and thoughtful woman fighting sixteenth-century stereotypes of women and sexuality.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, both its tyrannical and emancipatory possibilities, the manifesto seeks to uproot forces of repression that have come to seem inevitable—from the family, to the body, to the idea of gender itself.

CORNER football+society VOL.1 comprises all contributions from the first six issues of the eponymous artist-run magazine, published in Romanian between 20015-2017. 

With texts and conversations by: Mihnea Anţilă, Octav Avramescu, Violeta Beclea-Szekely, Matei Bejenaru, Declan Clarke, Irina Costache, Ion Dumitrescu, Florin Flueras, Bogdan Ghiu, Christopher Johnson, Cosima Opârtan, Florin Oprea, V. Leac, Andrei Mihail, Vasile Mihalache, Anca Verona Mihuleţ, Petrica Mogoş, James Montague, Cat Năstăsoiu, Pompiliu Nicolae-Constantin, Alexandra Pirici, Florin Poenaru, Ovidiu Pop, Powerpuff, Corneliu Porumboiu, Anamaria Pravicencu, Claudiu Revnic, Matei Sâmihaian, Ben Shave, Ştefan Tiron, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu and artworks by: Enric Fort Ballester, Alex Bodea, Irina Botea + Jon Dean, Ion Grigorescu, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Cătălin Mihalache, Monotremu, Dan Perjovschi, Alexandra Pirici & Jonas Lund, Raluca Popa, Gabriele de Santis, Sergiu Sas.

CORNER fotbal + societate is a periodical publication that proposes a crossdisciplinary approach, taking football and its complex contemporary and historical context as a starting point. This material foregrounds less (re)presented subjects and follows its evolution and social determinations. Aiming to intersect the culture of sport with various fields of knowledge such as anthropology, art, contemporary dance, architecture and economics, it follows less discussed aspects such as horizontal organisation, representation of minorities, gender power relations, subcultures and the relationship between the individual, group and society - amongst other topics. Under the current conditions, where both sport and art are being confiscated by the media and transformed into commodities, CORNER reclaims the democratic and emancipatory aspects of football, alongside a critical analysis of its functioning and reception modes.

A collection of political, philosophical, and literary essays from the acclaimed novelist and French feminist writer Monique Wittig. Monique Wittig's first collection of essays centering on women's struggle for liberation from sexism and classism. These nine essays comprise a thoughtful and unique approach to the study of historical materialism and dialectics, and transverse philosophical, political, and literary theory.

Monique Wittig describes this collection as a focus on "lesbian materialism," in which she examines men and women as distinct classes rather than as "essentialist" categories. "Lesbians are not women," writes Monique Wittig, and she presents powerful ideas about how the idea of "woman" is socially constructed and used to convey certain images. It is not enough, she argues, to transform economic oppression because not all oppression is, at the source, economic.

Sexism will continue to exist even in a society where all people have equal economic opportunities. Only by transforming our thought processes, and in turn, our language, can we transform our society into one in which there is no longer the dominant and the dominated: "In other words, this means there cannot any longer be women and men, and that as classes and categories of thought or language they have to disappear, politically, economically, ideologically." Controversial and abstract, these are essays that challenge and provoke on both intellectual and emotional levels.

For Wallace Stevens, “Poetry is the scholar’s art.” Susan Howe—taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides—embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson’s intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. “Dickinson’s life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text….”

Flusser introduces an infernal creature from the oceanic abysses, who slowly emerges, not from the oceans, but from man's own depths to gaze spitefully into his eyes and reflect back at his own existence.

Originally published only in German in 1987, this version has been edited and translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, Ph.D. candidate at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski, from the original, unpublished and extended Brazilian-Portuguese version of the manuscript recently found at the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Universität der Kunst, Berlin. This edition is also accompanied by a selection of previously unpublished excerpts from Flusser's correspondence with Milton Vargas and Dora Ferreira da Silva, with whom he discussed the development of the present text.

Including essays about Barbara Hammer, Agnès Varda, Camille Billops, Jane Arden, Penny Slinger, Ana Mendieta, Hito Steyerl, Mati Diop, Catherine Breillat, Carol Morley, Ulrike Ottinger, Charlotte Prodger, Charlotte Pryce, Rosalind Nashashibi & Lucy Skaer, Gloria Camiruaga, Margarethe von Trotta, Astra Taylor, Lina Wertmüller, and more.

Including essays about Lucrecia Martel, Alice Rohrwacher, Cecilia Mangini, Chantal Akerman, Mika Rottenberg, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Agnès Varda, Barbara Hammer, Laida Lertxundi.

The first issue contains interviews with women including Carolee Schneemann, Mania Akbari, Laura Mulvey, Alice Diop, Bette Gordon, and Lis Rhodes. It contains pieces on the films of women including Kathleen Collins, Sally Potter, Chantal Akerman, Moyra Davey, Camille Henrot, Naomi Kawase, Germaine Dulac, Alice Guy-Blaché.

A manifesto for "toxic girls" that reclaims the wives and mistresses of modernism for literature and feminism. On the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the female modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses." In her blog entries, Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today's "toxic girls" could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.

In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it—from T. S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the Second Wave of feminism—she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the "minor," and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. "ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential." By advancing the Girl-As-Philosopher, Zambreno reinvents feminism for her generation while providing a model for a newly subjectivized criticism.

The only collection of Rattray's prose: essays that offer a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition. Since its first publication in 1992, David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible has functioned as a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition running through Western civilization from Pythagoras to In Nomine music to Hölderlin and Antonin Artaud. Rattray not only excavated this tradition, he embodied and lived it. He studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne but remained a poet, outside the academy. His stories "Van" and "The Angel" chronicle his travels in southern Mexico with his friend, the poet Van Buskirk, and his adventures after graduating from Dartmouth in the mid-1950s.

Eclipsed by the more mediagenic Beat writers during his lifetime, Rattray has become a powerful influence on contemporary artists and writers. Living in Paris, Rattray became the first English translator of Antonin Artaud, and he understood Artaud's incisive scholarship and technological prophecies as few others would.

As he writes of his translations in How I Became One of the Invisible, "You have to identify with the man or the woman. If you don't, then you shouldn't be translating it. Why would you translate something that you didn't think had an important message for other people? I translated Artaud because I wanted to turn my friends on and pass a message that had relevance to our lives. Not to get a grant, or be hired by an English department."

Compiled in the months before his untimely death at age 57, How I Became One of the Invisible is the only volume of Rattray's prose. This new edition, edited by Robert Dewhurst, includes five additional pieces, two of them previously unpublished.

A selection of 22 texts that were written between 1989-2019 that problematize Creischer's constant struggle for a vocabulary to analyze and criticize, to comment and intervene in the social fabric she finds herself surrounded by. Rather than neatly discriminating between form and content, between emancipation and information, Creischer's lessons suggest various ways of inscribing one into the other of juxtaposing opposing poles.

Alice Creischer is a German artist, writer and theorist. Her artistic practice and theoretical work focuses on issues of economic and institutional critique, globalization and the history of capitalism.

A book on reading, writing, memory and forgetting in a library of living books.

This publication documents a project inspired by Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, in which performers memorize a book to form a collection of living books to be read in libraries by visitors. The publication brings together eighteen text contributions from artists and theoreticians, and a visual essay.

The project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine starts as a group of people who dedicate themselves to memorizing a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. The “books” pass their time in libraries reading, memorizing, talking to each other, going for walks outside, prepared to be read by a visitor. The readings take place as intimate one-to-one encounters where the “book” recites its content to the reader. Over time the project grew into a library collection of more than eighty living books in twelve different languages across Europe and beyond. The project developed into a bookshop, a publishing house and an exhibition format, and hosted workshops, lectures and talks and, eventually, a book.

The publication brings together eighteen text contributions from artists and theoreticians with a varying degree of proximity to the project. Their reflections touch on memory and forgetting; on the practice of learning by heart and its corporeality; on reading, re-reading, reading aloud, reading for oneself and for others; on writing, re-writing and translating; on invisible and impossible literatures; on alternative temporalities and their respective economies; on archives, libraries, bodies and other sites for conservation; on the problems of authorship and originality; on immateriality and its discontents; on the equivocal borders between reality and fiction; and on the strange and unforeseeable dynamics of people and stories coming together, disseminating and unexpectedly crossing paths again. The second part of the book is a visual essay that documents the processes of memorizing, reading and re-writing.

Contributions by: Mette Edvardsen, Kristien Van Den Brande, Johan Sonnenschein, Bruno De Wachter, Lizzie Thompson, Sébastien Hendrickx, Victoria Pérez Royo, Jon Refsdal Moe, Bojana Cvejić, Melanie Fieldseth, Jeroen Peeters, Lara Khalidi, Emiliano Battista, Thomaz Bîrzan, Susanne Christensen, Olivia Fairweather and Laurence Rassel.

Following in the tradition of Sara Ahmed (the originator of the concept “feminist killjoy”), Wunker brings memoir, theory, literary criticism, pop culture, and feminist thinking together in this collection of essays that take up Ahmed’s project as a multi-faceted lens through which to read the world from a feminist point of view.