Platform Capitalism

The many mass protests that have taken place since 2011 have been characterised by an unmistakable need to challenge, overthrow and destroy the prevailing political representations without proposing new ones. The protests are not concerned with replacing the current government or leader with others, and thus getting a better version of what we already have. Instead, they refuse all leaders, including the most critical opposition leaders: these protests are about dismantling the need for leaders. More and more people are coming to the view that it is not possible to manage the many crises within the framework of the political institutions we have today. 

The new protests are political acts that are neither class struggle nor the establishment of an opposition to those in power. Rasmussen argues that we should understand these protests as the emergence of a new kind of revolutionary action that is as much an anthropological as a political transformation: it is an attempt to break free from all the traditional notions of how the social context that we call society and the nation-state is organised.

This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupancic contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life. She also shows how the libidinal economy of disavowal is a key element of capitalist economy.

The concept of fetishistic disavowal already exposes the objectified side of the mechanism of the disavowal, which follows the general formula: I know well, but all the same, the object-fetish allows me to disregard this knowledge. Zupancic adds another twist by showing how, in the prevailing structure of disavowal today, the mere act of declaring that we know becomes itself an object-fetish by which we intercept the reality of that very knowledge. This perverse deployment of knowledge deprives it of any reality.

This structure of disavowal can be found not only in the more extreme and dramatic cases of conspiracy theories and re-emerging magical thinking, but even more so in the supposedly sober continuation of business as usual, combined with the call to adapt to the new reality. To disrupt this social embedding of disavowal, it is not enough to change the way we think: things need to change, and hence the way they think for us.

Many contemporary philosophers – including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben – ascribe an ethical or political value to anarchy, but none ever called themselves an “anarchist.” It is as if anarchism were unmentionable and had to be concealed, even though its critique of domination and of government is poached by the philosophers.

Stop Thief! calls out the plundering of anarchism by philosophy. It’s a call that is all the more resonant today as the planetary demand for an alternative political realm raises a deafening cry. It also alerts us to a new philosophical awakening. Catherine Malabou proposes to answer the cry by re-elaborating a concept of anarchy articulated around a notion of the “non-governable” far beyond an inciting of disobedience or common critiques of capitalism. Anarchism is the only way out, the only pathway that allows us to question the legitimacy of political domination and thereby wfree up the confidence that we need if we are to survive.

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge.

Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore.  But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore?

This book argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered.

Love & Lightning: A Collection of Queer and Feminist Manifestos is a thematically ordered, inconclusive collection of queer, feminist and queer-feminist manifestos. Girls Like Us Magazine and author Sarah van Binsbergen have composed a publication showcasing the different forms a manifesto might have, from classical, activist formats to more poetic, associative texts. The manifestos highlighted in this book cross borders, forms and disciplines, refuse binary logics, transcend our concepts of time and space and surpass the neoliberal logic.

Love & Lightning does not claim to be a complete anthology, but it rather aims to show the myriad of ways manifestos can be composed, and what their legacy until this day is. It presents manifestos from 1851 until now, divided into eleven chapters, introduced in their socio-historical and geographical contexts, with many from Asia, Africa, Latin-America. Not only does this publication give new insight in the style of the manifesto, it aims to emancipate the reader to propose their own revolution, whether big or small.

Manifestos include: Ain’t I a Woman by Soujourner Truth; Work Will Not Save Us: An Asian American Crip Manifesto; Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey; The Manukan Declaration of the Indigenous Women’s Biodiversity Network; W.I.T.C.H. Manifesto; Fag Hags Fight Back!!!; Manifesto for Maintenance Art by Mierle Laderman-Ukeles; Dyke Manifesto from the Lesbian Avengers; Killjoy Manifesto by Sara Ahmed; Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation by Laboria Cuboniks; The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto from Sandy Stone; Refugia! Manifesto for Becoming Autonomous Zones by subRosa; Countersexual Manifesto from Paul B. Preciado; and many, many more.

‘Five Devours’ is a short essay in five parts about need and food as a part of speech, about speech’s relationship to nourishment and hunger; the currency between eating and speaking, expending and consuming.

12 pages
150 x 200mm
risograph printed 
edition of 150

Among a Sea of Influences documents a series of workshops and conversations hosted by Wendy’s Subway and organized by English-Arabic bilingual magazine Makzhin editor Mirene Arsanios on questions of formative literary influences. Three female Arab writers were invited to choose and discuss ten books that shaped their understanding of poetry and translation. Notwithstanding the difficulty of the task, Marwa Helal, Mona Kareem, and Iman Mersal played along, selecting—among a sea of influences—authors and/or translators whose works were key to their own practice, and to their embodied understanding of what it means to write in Arabic from a female perspective. Asking what kind of writings are/were available to them, and which books or translations unseated their understanding of the world, Helal, Kareem, and Mersal discuss writing within the diaspora and across borders, radical publishing and translation networks, cultural and linguistic translation, vernacular language as resistance, and more. 

Among a Sea of Influences is co-published by Fully Booked, Makhzin, and Wendy’s Subway on the occasion of Makhzin’s residency at Wendy’s Subway from February 1 to May 31, 2017.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister—a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling.

In this classic essay, Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have a steady income and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.

With a Foreword by Mary Gordon