Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures

An extensive and comprehensive polyphonic exploration of the work of The Otolith Group, coming at a pivotal point in their practice.

The work of this London-based artist's collective comprised of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun covers politics of race and diversity and incorporates film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face. 

Presenting all bodies of work contained in the Xenogenesis exhibition, this publication includes many materials and graphics from The Otolith Group's broader practice, including performance, lecture and research material. The outcome of over four years of collaboration, research and conversation, the publication is not a chronological exhibition catalogue or retrospective but a cross-section of their work which includes substantial contributions from the artists themselves, in the form of writing and direct engagement with its production.

The publication also brings together important thinkers, scholars, art historians and writers from disparate fields, who know and have worked with the group, as well as those who are writing from a contemporary perspective. They include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Annie Fletcher, Anselm Franke, Shanay Jhaveri, George E. Lewis, Mahan Moalemi, Fred Moten, Grant Watson, Vivian Ziherl and the late Mark Fisher each of whom reflect on a particular aspect of the Group's practice with supplementary materials such as archival images, documented conversations, early lecture performances as well as other accompanying texts and examinations of their research sites.

The apocalypse as such will not take place, as it is already finished. Today, there is no longer any difference between the end of the world and capitalism itself: from Britney Spears’ Till the World Ends to The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time, from Avenger’s Endgame to Donnie Darko, and all the way down to the internet’s Backrooms, the world never ends but is reproduced again and again according to the semio-logic of capital. 

In contrast with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, Semiotics of the End is a manifesto for the imagination of another relationship with the end. If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as Slavoj Žižek, Fredric Jameson, and Mark Fisher put it, it is only because we have not imagined anything yet. The end is just the beginning.

With an Afterword by Matt Bluemink 

Living With Ghosts explores the ways the unresolved traumas of Africa’s colonial past, and its unfulfilled project of decolonisation, continue to haunt the present global order. The reader further expands on these complex ideas through philosophical, historical, and literary approaches. Reprinted texts by thinkers such as Achille Mbembe, C.L.R. James, and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni explore the historical experiences of the African postcolony and the problematics of decolonisation. Meditations on artists including John Akomfrah and Abraham Oghobase provide engaging entry points to their multi-layered artistic practices. Also featured are images of artworks in the exhibition and an in-depth conversation between Bouchra Khalili and KJ Abudu.

Texts by Achille Mbembe, Jacques Derrida, C.L.R. James, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, KJ Abudu, Emmanuel Iduma, Walter D. Mignolo, Avery F. Gordon, Adjoa Armah, Joshua Segun-Lean. Conversation with Bouchra Khalili and KJ Abudu.

David Graeber's interviews (with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nika Dubrovsky, and Assia Turquier-Zauberman) redefine the contours of what an anarchist morality could be today.

David Graeber's influential thinking was always at odds with the liberal and left-wing mainstream. Drawing on his huge theoretical and practical experience as an ethnologist and anthropologist, activist and anarchist, Graeber and his interlocutors develop a ramified genealogy of anarchist thought and possible perspectives for 21st-century politics.

Diverging from the familiar lines of historical anarchism, and against the background of movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Gilets Jaunes, the aim is to provide new political impulses that go beyond the usual schemata of unavoidableness. The spontaneous and swift-moving polylogue shows Graeber as a spirited, unorthodox thinker and radical activist for whom the group can always achieve more than the individual.

David Graeber (1961-2020) was an American anthropologist, anarchist, political activist, the author of several books, and a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Until 2007 he was assistant and associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, until 2013 a reader for Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and until last a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics.

Qu’est-ce que le genre dans le capitalisme contemporain ? C’est à cette question qu’invite à répondre ce recueil, à partir d’une démarche théorique inspirée du féminisme et du marxisme. Il s’agit de penser, depuis une analyse systématique du rôle joué par le travail domestique et les violences de genre dans notre système économique, un monde au-delà de l’exploitation, et donc du genre et des ses contraintes. Un communisme au présent, qui s’empare de tous ces questionnements, trop souvent ignorés dans l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier. 

Jeanne Neton et Maya Gonzalez participent à la revue anglo-américaine Endnotes, dont le présent volume constitue la première traduction française. Elles se placent dans la lignée du féminisme autonome italien (on songe à Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati ou Mariarosa Dalla Costa) pour proposer une contribution originale et stimulante. 

In Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff theorizes the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Examining both the history of geology as a discipline and ongoing mineral and resource extraction, Yusoff locates forms of imperial geology embedded in Western and Enlightenment thought and highlights how it creates anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Brown environmental and racial injustices. Throughout, she outlines how the disciplines of geology and geography—and their conventions: surveying, identifying, classifying, valuing, and extracting—established and perpetuated colonial practices that ordered the world and people along a racial axis. 

Examining the conceptualization of the inhuman as political, geophysical, and paleontological, Yusoff unearths an apartheid of materiality as distinct geospatial forms. This colonial practice of geology organized and underpinned racialized accounts of space and time in ways that materially made Anthropocene Earth. At the same time, Yusoff turns to Caribbean, Indigenous, and Black thought to chart a parallel geologic epistemology of the "earth-bound" that challenges what and who the humanities have chosen to overlook in its stories of the earth. 

By reconsidering the material epistemologies of the earth as an on-going geotrauma in colonial afterlives, Yusoff demonstrates that race is as much a geological formation as a biological one.

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.”

Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.