Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left Behind

Electrifying, provocative, and controversial when first published thirty years ago, Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" is even more relevant today, when the divisions that she so eloquently challenges—of human and machine but also of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and location—are increasingly complex. The subsequent "Companion Species Manifesto," which further questions the human-nonhuman disjunction, is no less urgently needed in our time of environmental crisis and profound polarization.

Manifestly Haraway brings together these momentous manifestos to expose the continuity and ramifying force of Haraway's thought, whose significance emerges with engaging immediacy in a sustained conversation between the author and her long-term friend and colleague Cary Wolfe. Reading cyborgs and companion species through and with each other, Haraway and Wolfe join in a wide-ranging exchange on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human-nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.

The conversation ends by revealing the early stages of Haraway's "Chthulucene Manifesto," in tension with the teleologies of the doleful Anthropocene and the exterminationist Capitalocene. Deeply dedicated to a diverse and robust earthly flourishing, Manifestly Haraway promises to reignite needed discussion in and out of the academy about biologies, technologies, histories, and still possible futures.

Donna J. Haraway is distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is also affiliated with the departments of anthropology, feminist studies, environmental studies, and film and digital media. She is an active participant in UCSC's Science and Justice Research Center and the Center for Cultural Studies.

Published 2016

Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity. Until now, trans experience has overwhelmingly been understood in terms of two reductive frameworks: trans people are either “trapped in the wrong body” or they are oppressed by the gender binary. Both accounts misgender large trans constituencies while distorting their experience, and neither can explain the presentation of trans people as make-believers and deceivers or the serious consequences thereof. In Beyond Personhood, Talia Mae Bettcher demonstrates how taking this phenomenon seriously affords a new perspective on trans oppression and trans dysphoria—one involving liminal states of “make-believe” that bear positive possibilities for self-recognition and resistance.

Undergirding this account is Bettcher’s groundbreaking theory of interpersonal spatiality—a theory of intimacy and distance that requires rejection of the philosophical concepts of person, self, and subject. She argues that only interpersonal spatiality theory can successfully explain trans oppression and gender dysphoria, thus creating new possibilities for thinking about connection and relatedness. 

An essential contribution to the burgeoning field of trans philosophy, Beyond Personhood offers an intersectional trans feminism that illuminates transphobic, sexist, heterosexist, and racist oppressions, situating trans oppression and resistance within a much larger decolonial struggle. By refusing to separate theory from its application, Bettcher shows how a philosophy of depth can emerge from the everyday experiences of trans people, pointing the way to a reinvigoration of philosophy.

A poetics for reading the everyday objects that populate a hard drive. 

Bespoke online archives like PennSound and Eclipse host an astounding array of “old media” artifacts, posing a handcrafted counterpoint to the immense databases aggregated by digital titans like Google and Facebook. In The Little Database, Daniel Scott Snelson argues for the significance of these comparatively “small” collections, exploring how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host and how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn.

Examining curated collections such as Textz, UbuWeb, and the Electronic Poetry Center, Snelson explores media-specific works by poets and artists, including William Carlos Williams, Tracie Morris, bill bissett, Nam June Paik, and Vicki Bennett. He develops creative tools and contingent methods for reading cultural data, whether found on the internet or in our own collections of TXT, JPG, MP3, and MOV artifacts, presenting case studies to show how these objects have come to find revised meaning in their digital contexts. Along the way, experimental poetic interludes give readers practical entry points into the creative practice of producing new meanings in any given little database.

Inventive and interdisciplinary, The Little Database grapples with the digitized afterlives of cultural objects, showing how the past is continually reconfigured to shape the present. It invites readers to find playful and personal means for unpacking their own data collections, in the process discovering idiosyncratic ways to explore and connect with digital archives.

Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in the history of 20th-century art using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She employs the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the body's disappearance. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Drawing from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, she weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of various artists, writers, and thinkers, ranging from Jean Dubuffet to Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutaï, Joë Bousquet to Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard to Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille to Aby Warburg.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext; it is an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge's example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting from Artaud's material, the most undisciplined of poet-artist-thinkers of the modern era. This results in a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The chosen writing materials, stonepaper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust.

The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and shatters the conservatism of art criticism by inhabiting writing space differently, presenting a physically engaging interaction. This is an essay in the literal sense, an experience where form never contradicts content, urging readers to take the risk of thinking deeply and embracing a new rhythm. A complex and challenging design invites them to choose different reading options, ultimately treating criticism as one would poetry.

Giuliana Prucca [Paris | Berlin] is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE, specialising in contemporary art books that explore the relationships between text and image, body and space.

Graphic design, art direction by Vito Raimondi

The legendary 1975 "Schizo-Culture" conference, conceived by the early Semiotext(e) collective, began as an attempt to introduce the then-unknown radical philosophies of post-'68 France to the American avant-garde. The event featured a series of seminal papers, from Deleuze's first presentation of the concept of the "rhizome" to Foucault's introduction of his History of Sexuality project. The conference was equally important on a political level, and brought together a diverse group of activists, thinkers, patients, and ex-cons in order to address the challenge of penal and psychiatric institutions. The combination proved to be explosive, but amid the fighting and confusion "Schizo-Culture" revealed deep ruptures in left politics, French thought, and American culture.

The "Schizo-Culture" issue of the Semiotext(e) journal came three years later. Designed by a group of artists and filmmakers including Kathryn Bigelow and Denise Green, it documented the chaotic creativity of an emerging downtown New York scene, and offered interviews with artists, theorists, writers, and No Wave and pre-punk musicians together with new texts from Deleuze, Foucault, R. D. Laing, and other conference participants.

This slip-cased edition includes The Book: 1978, a facsimile reproduction of the original Schizo-Culture publication; and The Event: 1975, a previously unpublished and comprehensive record of the conference that set it all off. It assembles many previously unpublished texts, including a detailed selection of interviews reconstructing the events, and features Félix Guattari, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michel Foucault, Sylvère Lotringer, Guy Hocquenghem, Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, Robert Wilson, Joel Kovel, Jack Smith, Jean-François Lyotard, Ti-Grace Atkinson, François Peraldi, and John Cage.

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

L'édition inédite et définitive (établie à partir des tapuscrits originaux en français) du traité fabuleux du philosophe tchéco-brésilien Vilém Flusser (1920-1991), une fiction philosophique et poétique qui, par des chemins détournés, nous confronte à la violence et à l'impasse des sociétés contemporaines.

Un monstre venu des profondeurs de l'océan, un poulpe vampire. Sa violence rappelle les nazis, ses mœurs sont libertaires et libidineuses. C'est une créature infernale, cannibale et brutale, pouvant changer de couleur à volonté, et dotée de trois pénis.
Et c'est notre cousin.

Dans cette fable fantastique, Vampyroteuthis infernalis émerge, non des abysses de l'océan, mais du plus profond de nous-mêmes pour nous tendre un miroir, nous montrer à quel point nous, les hommes, sommes ses proches parents et que nos histoires, nos sociétés, nos modes de vie ne sont, au fond, pas si différents.
Ce texte délibérément provocateur du philosophe tchéco-brésilien Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) n'est ni scientifique, ni objectif : c'est une fiction philosophique et poétique qui, par des chemins détournés, nous confronte à la violence et à l'impasse des sociétés contemporaines.

Flusser avait écrit ce texte en français (outre des versions en allemand et en portugais), et ce livre est la première édition du texte original en français. Il est accompagné des fantastiques dessins de son ami l'artiste et « zoosystémicien » français Louis Bec (1936-2018), co-auteur du livre, traduisant en images pseudo-scientifiques les chimères vampyroteuthiques.

Des essais de Marc Lenot, Élise Rigot et Florent Barrère éclairent la démarche de Flusser et de Bec.

A revolutionary book tracing the collapse of the paradigms that have organized the world for centuries. 

In Dysphoria Mundi, Paul B. Preciado, best known for his 2013 cult classic Testo Junkie, has written a mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry, and autofiction that captures a moment of profound change and possibility. Rooted in the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and taking account of the societal convulsions that have ensued, Preciado tries to make sense of our times from within the swirl of a revolutionary present moment.

The central thesis of this monumental work is that dysphoria, to be understood properly, should not be seen as a mental illness but rather as the condition that defines our times. Dysphoria is an abyss that separates a patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist order hurtling toward its end from a new way of being that, until now, has been seen as unproductive and abnormal but is in fact the way out of our current predicament.

With echoes of visionaries such as William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, Preciado’s theoretical writing is propelled by lyric power while providing us with a critical toolbox full of new concepts that can guide our thinking and our transition, cognitive emancipation, denormalization, disidentification, “electronic heroin,” digital coups, necro-kitsch. Dysphoria Mundi is Preciado’s most accessible and significant work to date, in which he makes sense of a world in ruins around us and maps a joyous, radical way forward.