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Cover of Without Alibi

Stanford University Press

Without Alibi

Jacques Derrida

€28.00

This book brings together five essays by Jacques Derrida, which advance his reflections on many issues: lying, perjury, forgiveness, confession, the profession of faith, and, most recently, cruelty, sovereignty, and capital punishment.

Strongly linked by their attention to "performatives" and the "as if," the essays show the necessity of thinking beyond the category of acts that are possible for a subject. Derrida argues forcefully that thought must engage with the im-possible, that is, the order of the unforeseeable event, the absolute future still to come. This acute awareness of the limits of performative programs informs the essays throughout and attunes them closely to events of a world undergoing "globalization."

The first essay, "History of the Lie," reviews some classic and modern definitions of the lie (Augustine, Rousseau, Kant, Koyré, Arendt), while renewing questions about what is called lying, as distinguished from other forms of nontruth. This inventive analysis is followed by "Typewriter Ribbon," which examines at length the famous lie recounted by Rousseau in his Confessions, when he perjured himself by accusing another of his own crime.

Paul de Man's reading of this textual event is at the center of Derrida's patient, at times seriously funny analyses. " Le parjure, Perhaps" engages with a remarkable novel by Henri Thomas that fictionalizes the charge of perjury brought against Paul de Man in the 1950s. Derrida's extraordinary fineness as a reader and thinker of fiction here treats, to profound effect, the "fatal experience of perjury."

The two final essays, "The University Without Condition" and "Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul," address the institutions of the university and of psychoanalysis as sites from which to resist and deconstruct the nontruth or phantasm of sovereignty. For the university, the principle of truth remains at the core of its resistance; for psychoanalysis, there is the obligation to remain true to what may be, Derrida suggests, its specific insight: into psychic cruelty. Resistance to the sovereign cruelty of the death penalty is just one of the stakes indicated by the last essay, which is the text of a keynote address to the "States General of Psychoanalysis" held in Paris, July 2000.

Especially for this volume, Derrida has written "Provocation: Forewords," which reflects on the title Without Alibi while taking up questions about relations between deconstruction and America. This essay-foreword also responds to the event of this book, which Peggy Kamuf in her introduction presents as event of resistance.

Without Alibi joins two other books by Derrida that Kamuf has translated for Stanford University Press: Points . . .: Interviews, 1974-1994 (1994) and Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1998).

recommendations

Cover of Living with Ghosts: A Reader

Pace Gallery

Living with Ghosts: A Reader

Kj Abudu

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.

Cover of In the Delirium of the Simulation: Baudrillard Revisited

becoming press

In the Delirium of the Simulation: Baudrillard Revisited

Achim Szepanski

Non-fiction €15.00

Third edition featuring afterword by Alessandro Sbordoni & several appendices, including a new translation & edit of “Taylor Swift Does Not Exist”. 

This is a monumental and extensive work from someone who is arguably the most well-versed scholar of Baudrillard, Deleuze & Laruelle in the German-speaking world, Achim Szepanski, the original founder of Mille Plateaux, Force Inc Music Works and NON. This book is dedicated to Jean Baudrillard, who would be described by Achim as the most radical and advanced stimmung in Philosophy. Through this comprehensive and devouring analysis of Baudrillard’s work, the author presents a gripping account of their own philosophy; alongside his magnum opus Die Ekstasie der Spekulation, this book, In the Delirium of the Simulation, provides the strongest case for what might be called, in light of his passing, Szepanskism or Szepanskian Economics. 

From Finance, to non-philosophy and radical experimental music, Szepanski is an anomalous and unique theoretician with one hell of a history. 

CONTENTS:

  • Metabox of Terms: Simulation, Code, Hyperreality, Fractal, Seduction and Implosion 
  • Baudrillard's Maximisation Hypothesis: the System and the Other
  • Baudrillard & Marxism: Signs, Production and Money
  • Distinguishing the Consumer System (or Shopping Mall) from the Landfill
  • Baudrillard & the Financial Simulacrum
  • Excursus on Jonathan Beller's World Computer 
  • Hyperreality & Artificial Intelligence
  • Baudrillard & Quantum Theory
  • Afterword: Hyperculture by Alessandro Sbordoni
  • Appendix 1: Taylor Swift Does Not Exist
  • Appendix 2: Baudrillard: After the Orgy
  • Appendix 3: Imagination & Reality: Psychoanalysis vs Baudrillard
Cover of Let Them Rot

Divided Publishing

Let Them Rot

Alenka Zupančič

Philosophy €15.00

What is the relation between family misfortune and desire? Why must we bury the dead? What is to come for those unburied? How to distinguish the endless stream of graphic violence from violence that goes straight to the bone? How does language make up not only the law, but also unwritten laws?

In Let Them Rot Alenka Zupančič takes up the ancient figure of Antigone and finds a blueprint for the politics of desire. Not desire as consumption, enjoying what is offered, but desire’s oblivion to what came before. Such politics says: “No, this world must end and I will be the embodiment of that end.” This is not self-satisfied destruction for destruction’s sake; it is existence with consequences beyond the predictable. Zupančič asks: “Why desire?” And this question of desire, which may be the only question, takes the form of a no that is also an “I".

"Zupančič’s ideas are fresh, as if they hailed from some open air beyond the clutter of current theoretical quarrels. This brilliant account of Sophocles’s Antigone breaks new ground for philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political and feminist theory." — Joan Copjec, Brown University

"Writing my book on Antigone, I thought: “There we go, the subject is closed—let’s go to sleep.” And then along came Zupančič with her take and compelled me to rethink everything I did. In other words—and this is difficult for me to say—she is better than me here." — Slavoj Žižek

Alenka Zupančič is a Slovenian philosopher and social theorist. She is a professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts. She is the author of many books, including What Is Sex? (MIT Press, 2017), The Odd One In: On Comedy(MIT Press, 2008), and Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (Verso, 2000).

Cover of Unconscious/Television

becoming press

Unconscious/Television

Lucas Ferraço Nassif

Philosophy €18.00

This book is called Unconscious/Television; it is a book that is informed by my discontent with aspects of psychoanalysis, in both its clinical and theoretical dimensions, and the way Lacanian psychoanalysts deal with language. Also, this book aims at posing, because of psychoanalysis, philosophical problems—twisting concepts—that will entangle art and the production of thought.

Within the Lacanian framework, practices are too attached to a notion of the unconscious that is structured as language; especially in relation to the Lacanian proposition that followed Sigmund Freud. With structuralism, which highlights and strengthens the division between nature and culture, Jacques Lacan thinks that Freudian concepts, and his positioning of the unconscious as the cause, should be elaborated or reconfigured as language, with language being the structure of the unconscious, representation operating with signifiers within this structure, and the signifier representing the subject to another signifier.

Above all, what I have been concerned with is a certain relationship to the Other—that is the symbolic, alienation in language, the master signifier—and how stuck we are with this neurotic comprehension of the clinical and the theoretical, and how we need psychotic or perverse possibilities in order to invent new things, new lives, new bodies and worlds, new concepts and thoughts. (Note from the introduction)

Cover of Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition

Graywolf Press

Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition

Paul B. Preciado

Essays €22.00

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.

Cover of Politically Red

The MIT Press

Politically Red

Sara Nadal-Melsio, Eduardo Cadava

Philosophy €30.00

How reading and writing are collective acts of political pedagogy, and why the struggle for change must begin at the level of the sentence. 

"Reading is class struggle," writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy.

Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination.

Drawing on what they call a "red common-wealth"—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events.