Essays
Essays
Pedagogies of Travesti Liberation
Maria Clara Araújo dos Passos examines the interplay of education, identity, and liberation in Brazil's travesti community.
In Pedagogies of Travesti Liberation, Maria Clara Araújo dos Passos critiques traditional pedagogical frameworks that marginalize gender nonconforming narratives and highlights the effects of systemic discrimination on travestis' psychosocial well-being. The book advocates for inclusive educational practices and emphasizes the need for affirmative curricula.
Newly translated from Portuguese, this work contributes towards connecting political struggles globally and navigating the complexities of translation—particularly of the term "travesti"—across various geographical and political contexts, featuring a conversation between Araújo dos Passos and translator Natália Affonso.
Maria Clara Araújo dos Passos (born 1996 in Recife) is a Brazilian Afro-transfeminist educator and sociologist, and an activist for LGBT rights.
This Death is Not One
Jasbir K. Puar, Nasser Abourahme and 1 more
The publication of The Right to Maim by Jasbir K. Puar in 2017 was critical to advancing studies on disability and to further articulating how the body figures in the nexus of capacity and debility across racializing and extractive neoliberal lines. It offered a complex and rigorous anti-capitalist account of disability that is useful to both scholarly work and political and social organizing. However, despite its paramount contribution to scholarship on Palestine, delivered by its scathing analysis of the Israeli biopolitical policy—its right to maim—in how the injured Palestinian body is produced and reproduced, its reception was difficult, and hard to stomach. It cohered a political logic in writing before it was visibly evident on the ground. In the moment and aftermath of the Great March of Return (2018-19), Puar’s offerings became much harder to ignore, as the event crystallized a mass maiming campaign of Palestinian protesters inside the edges of the militarized borders of Gaza.
The occasion of this publication by Bilna’es marks the first translation into Arabic of the chapter “Will Not Let Die”: Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine, alongside the postscript of The Right to Maim. Not simply a reissue of previously published work or a translation, This Death is Not One includes a new preface from Jasbir K. Puar revisiting the right to maim from within this moment of genocide in Gaza that interrogates the new vectors of living and dying under settler-colonialism, and how maiming, in fact, speaks of extermination; an introduction by Nasser Abourahme reflecting on the book’s stakes in the present and its reception in the past, alongside searing analysis of genocide in excess of the law, and what this reveals and forecloses in how we understand the juridical body and militancy in the wake of Zionism; and original drawings by Xaytun Ennasr that inscribe a relation between land and body mapped through cosmological patterns tracing the relation between martyrs, who are referred to as moons, and the moon, a symbol for martyrdom in Palestine.
Jasbir K. Puar is Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Extraordinary Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, and Professor Emerita at Rutgers University where she was faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department for 23 years. Puar is the author of the award-winning books: The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007).
Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher, and is currently assistant professor at Bowdoin College. He’s the author of The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025), which was awarded the 2025 Palestine Book Award.
Xaytun Ennasr is an artist and designer. She works across experimental video games, paintings, prints, ceramics, installations, and text. She often uses science fiction, folklore, and radical softness as affective tools for revolutionary cultural production, specifically Palestinian liberation and sovereignty. Her work often deals with questions of land, cartography, transness, gender, and the living environment.
Drawings by Xaytun Ennasr
Translation to Arabic:
“Living in Genocide” by Jasbir K. Puar, translated by The Archilogue
“Our names, our remains” by Nasser Abourahme, translated by The Archilogue
The Right to Maim, Chapter 4: “Will not let die: Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine ” and the The Right to Maim Postscript by Jasbir K. Puar, translated by Bekriah Mawasi
Your Life Is Not A (Fucking) Story
In this new collected edition of his recent articles, Simon Critchley - one of the most important living philosophers - takes us through his reflections on death, questions of doubt and reason, the legacy of David Bowie, the nature of fear and empathy in a broken society and a critique of narrative identity - among other things. YOUR LIFE IS NOT A STORY explores the contemporary world and its psychological impact on us, offering us a way to see our situation different and resist its tricks and contrivances.
Light Of The Dark: Derrida, Barthes, Celan
Derrida’s essay “Aletheia” discusses the work of Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama. Reading Derrida, Rabaté investigates how, behind the classical concept of truth as a beautiful naked woman, Derrida argues that any photographic image tells the Truth, but a truth obscured as it comes to light: “nothing is more black than the visibility of light.” Staging a critical conversation with Roland Barthes’s theses in Camera Lucida and Paul Celan’s poems from Breathturn to Lightduress, Rabaté argues for a theoretical approach to truth that counters the prevailing truth-discourses of today.
Confessions Of A Class Reductionist
In these essays, Ben Burgis criticizes fashionable radical-liberal identity politics and makes the case for universalism about rights and an unabashedly “class-first” approach to socialist political strategy. This may sound to some ears like a call for abandoning marginalized people. On the contrary, he argues, focusing on economic inequality empowers the victims of bigotry and retrograde social practices the resources and material security to stand up for themselves far more effectively than any diversity trainer or “anti-racism” consultant could represent their interests. As we face a rising tide of reactionary authoritarianism, it’s more important than ever to ditch the identitarian pieties of the recent past and think hard about how the Left can actually win.
The Completion
In The Completion, legendary philosopher Franco 'Bifo' Berardi offers his analysis of cognitive automation and artificial intelligence. Of the possible worlds imagined in Silicon Valley and in the media discourse around tech boosterism, none will likely materialise. Instead, the unpredictable will intervene in the future of predictive technology.
In this new edition, in a new venture for Everyday Analysis, Berardi's essay is accompanied by an introduction by Alfie Bown and a series of artworks and illustrations, new and historic- from Borges's labyrinths to the I-ching - offering a reading experience in the spirit of Berardi's work.
Saving Genitality: Toward A Freudian Virtue Ethics
Western societies have dismantled many of the prohibitions that ringfenced errant sexual drives in Freud’s time. The psychoanalytic project describes people caught between two fundamental and contradictory principles: One a relentless sexual drive, the libido; the other our species’ collective need for social order and harmony. Part of this harmony, for true Freudians, is embedded in the binary mutuality of men’s and women’s bodies, which remains indispensable for society to reproduce itself, even in our sexually liberated age. In this essay, Ahmari revisits the idea of ‘genitality’ arguing that perhaps the "heteronormative" orthodox Freudians were right about some things after all.
أحمد [Ahmed] – Writing
[Ahmed] is the quartet of Pat Thomas (piano), Joel Grip (double bass), Antonin Gerbal (drums) and Seymour Wright (alto saxophone). Since 2014, أحمد [Ahmed] have excavated and re-imagined the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, in an ever ongoing search for future music.
[Ahmed] – Writing (EXV01) gathers together the [Ahmed] ‘paper’ texts from the last decade: liner-notes; covers of the releases; and writing by the band members – Antonin and Joel have written two fresh ones for this book, Seymour’s have appeared alongside the records, and some of Pat’s come from a time (long) before [Ahmed]. “Together, the ideas-energy in these things gives a sense of what we have done, do, think together (and apart) in living music, how our different ways come together, and how, together, we learn through be-doing [Ahmed]… These texts are woven together (the etymology of text is from weave) through (and into) a rich fabric of enquiry. A collaborative weaving together of difference(s) to make a whole (thing).” (Seymour Wright)
Contributions by Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright, Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip, Robert Levin, James G. Spady, John Chantler, Edward George, Fred Moten
Edited by [Ahmed]
Series Editors: Stoffel Debuysere, Jef Lambrechts, Will Holder
Initiated by Stoffel Debuysere
Produced and designed by Will Holder [lps’ original design: Maja Larsson]
knot body
Bringing together poetry, essay, and letters to “lovers, friends and in-betweens,” Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch confronts the ways capitalism, fatphobia, ableism, transness, and racializations affect people with chronic pain, illness, and disability. knot body explores what it means to discover the limits of your body, and contends with what those limitations bring up in the world we live in.
knot body was shortlisted for the QWF First Book Prize. Their second collection of poetry, The Good Arabs (Metonymy Press), won the 2022 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal.
“For me, the power of knot body stems from its courage and unique voice in writing the ache, the ache of chronic pain, the ache of faulty diagnoses and bodily misreadings, and, equally, the ache for honest answers on how to love each other in all our dignity. Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is an artist and philosopher of talent, generosity, and heart.” – David Chariandy, author of Brother (Penguin Random House)
“In this moment, when trans, racialized and disabled bodies are met with violent and polarizing commentary within the public sphere, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch offers us the uninterrupted intimacy of knot body. As self-communional as Kiese Laymon’s Heavy and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, they amplify and queer the epistolary memoir genre. Each letter is emotionally and thematically complete and, too, each letter decidedly speaks to the next. Readers may ruminate on the sharp and sensual inquiry offered by each individual letter, or read cover-to-cover and be present to the gorgeously-engaged, call-and-response quality of knot body as a whole.” – Amber Dawn, author of My Art is Killing Me (Arsenal Pulp Press)
“knot body is such a generous tapestry of tenderness—a collection that brilliantly utilizes the direct address in a way that is not universal, but still beautifully communal. I reached the end of this collection and breathed in a newer, better world.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House)
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a queer Arab poet living in Tio’tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory (Montreal). Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, carte blanche, the Shade Journal, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, and elsewhere. They participated in the Banff Centre’s ‘Centering Ourselves’ BIPOC residency, and they were longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2019. Their second collection of poetry, The Good Arabs, was published by Metonymy Press in 2021.
Afterimage No. 11, Sighting Snow
The independent British film journal Afterimage published thirteen issues between 1970 and 1987. International in scope, it surveyed the many forms of radical cinema during an extraordinary period of film history. Having emerged in the wake of post-1968 cultural and political change, Afterimage charted contemporary developments with special issues on themes such as the avant-garde, Latin American cinema and visionary animation, and also looked back at early film pioneers. It published many of the leading critics of the period and vitally provided a forum for filmmakers’ writings and manifestos.
I presumed possession, my language, my loss
In I presumed possession, my language, my loss, I begin in third person to write about what it means to lose a mother tongue, and about how that loss is never natural but engineered: by state assessments, border conditions, and a free market of articulation. I write about language as transaction—what you gain in the language of power at the cost of becoming inarticulate in the language of origin. I write about the monolingual paradigm as a political demand rather than a natural inheritance, about standardization as a form of border-drawing, and about the grief of hearing the people you love measured as insufficient. The text moves between the personal and the structural, between a grandmother forgetting and a language policy forbidding. It is about what we lose, and about what we have learned to accept as acceptable to lose.
Cecilie Fang is an anti-disciplinary artist and writer from China and Denmark, based in Amsterdam. Generated through writing, her process-oriented work unfolds across performance, publication, material micro-performativity, and installation.
The Minor Gesture
In this wide-ranging and probing 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.
I have been enthralled and held by this book! Erin Manning has given us a new theory of bearing, as well as a new elaboration of gesture, going beyond Balzac’s theory and Agamben’s interpretation of it. She doesn’t lament the loss of gesture but celebrates gesture's minoritization.
- Fred Moten
Sick issue 7
Writing on navigating the workplace as an ambulatory wheelchair user, how sex work can be a means of survival, re-imagining 'Christina's World', the boundaries of our bodies, an interview with Caren Beilin, poetry, artwork, book recommendations, and much more.
Essays, features, poetry, art, interviews & more from Laura Baliman, Caren Beilin, Amy Berkowitz, Leah M. Bowie, Kaitlin D'Avella, Lindsy Davis, Katherine DeCoste, Yining Fang, Emily Freeman, Maria Gray, Bec Mackenzie, Ariana Martinez, Chloe McGreal, Ryann McKinney, Iyla Owens, Emily Pinkerton, Marin Scarlett, Maya-Gawonii Shabazz-Saleh, Anna Stiles, Maeve Sweeney, & J Min Wang.
SICK is an independent, thoughtful magazine exploring illness and disability, founded & edited by Olivia Spring and designed by Kaiya Waerea. Founded in Norwich, UK in 2019, we are currently based in Maine, USA and London, UK. We typically publish one issue per year.
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet investigates how intelligence-human and artificial-manifests under conditions of secrecy, hostility, and concealment.
Departing from Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin's dark forest theory, which frames the universe as a hostile terrain filled with predators where transparent communication is foolish and dangerous, the book portrays the internet as a cosmic war machine, teeming with existential tension, nascent AI cults, and deceptive superintelligences. It maps a digital world in which deception is safety, silence is strategy, and new forms of intelligence emerge through obfuscation.
Against decades of writing that moralizes or diagnoses online life, this book suggests a colder thesis: that intelligence itself is mutating under pressure, learning to hide, mislead, and manipulate. Humans are both predator and prey in this digital ecosystem of information exchange whose purpose reverberates on a cosmic scale, weaving us into inescapable patterns of violence. When we break with the ideals of dialogue and open expression, what forms of intelligence and morality survive in their absence? Intelligence does not reward the loudest voice, but the most secretive presence. The future belongs to the quietest signal.
Telling is Listening: Selected Essays 1973-2014
Ursula K. Le Guin, Conner Bouchard-Roberts
An essential collection of essays on language, the imagination, and the art of words by one of the great literary masters of the last century.
This book traces a long sweep (1973-2014) through Ursula K. Le Guin's career; offering both a portrait of the author as a philosopher and a reference text for new generations of wordworkers and bookmakers.
Theory for Moving Houses
You are asking me where I live and it’s making me think all these things about space, where I start and end in space and where space starts and ends in me and when, in space, I am a body and when I’m a book, in space.
So begins Renee Gladman's Theory for Moving Houses, and with these lines we are invited into a liminal space of imagination and investigation, as Gladman guides us through the architectures of her poetics. Foundational here is a sense of fluidity, a slippage of time, a devotion to “non-linear and hyper gestural movement,” a communal spirit. Gladman’s inquiry into her intersecting practices of writing and drawing reveals a deep commitment to uncertainty and “fictional knowing.” Yet again, Gladman upends traditional expectations of prose, as she leads us through landscape of her Ravicka series novels, ultimately surprising us with a novel within nonfiction. The latest volume in Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series, Theory for Moving Houses is not only visionary in its contemplations but also is a virtuosic example of the ways in which language can shape utopian sites of possibility.
Goblinhood: Goblin As A Mode
As formally inventive as readers have come to expect from one of the most daring writers around, and as wild and tricky as its subject matter requires, Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode presents us with a series of essays and poems that playfully, artfully propound JEN CALLEJA'S theory of ‘goblin hood’—a theory that takes in all aspects of pop culture from film, literature and art as well as the author’s personal and original examinations of grief, lust, family histories and the physical fact of living in the world as it is.
Obsessed with green objects, strange pop culture films, and puppets, and haunted by her family memories, Jen Calleja explores in Goblinhood her relationship with her body and self-loathing, desire, sex, food, and grief. She mischievously develops a hybrid thought process that combines essay, autofiction, poetry, and goblin theory.
Goblinhood is a perpetually and variously curious, visceral addition to Calleja’s remarkable oeuvre.
Art Law, and Artists' Rights: for Creators, Authors and Artists
Art Law draws on forty years of practice to empower and encourage creators, authors, and artists to understand, protect, and exercise their rights. It illustrates key aspects of art law by expanding on specific legal cases. Whenever an artist brings a case to court, that case has the potential to clarify and expand the rights of all artists. Each legal decision not only educates the public and the judiciary about the challenges faced by artists but also highlights the importance of applying the law to safeguard their rights.
In examining the role of justice in artistic activities, we must acknowledge that justice is achieved through legislation and individual case rulings. These are the mechanisms that artists can activate. Favorable judicial decisions can have a wide-reaching impact on both artists and society. However, the court remains a passive entity until an artist brings a case to stimulate a decision. Thus, litigation can serve as a form of activism that prompts a ruling. Although it can be difficult and expensive, it is an effective tool that is accessible and potentially beneficial to all. This compendium provides the knowledge necessary for creatives to work freely and securely, understand their rights, and avoid self-censorship and exploitation.
Contributors: Jenna Jordan, Esq., Bara Diokhane, Esq., Timothy Caron, Esq., and Kevia McComb
Things Bigger Than What Can Be Seen
Things Bigger Than What Can Be Seen is a collection of Oraib Toukan’s essays, translated to Arabic for the first time. In close dialogue with Palestinian pedagogue Munir Fasheh on the topic of turbeh (local soil in Arabic), Toukan crafts a haptic perspective on images from what she terms their ‘soil grain’.
Voyage, War, Exile: Three Essays
Written between 1984 and 1995, this new edition collects three essays by Etel Adnan meditating on a life lived in motion: intellectual, geographic, linguistic and artistic perpetual motion. Published in honor of Adnan’s centennial (2025), these essays are a beacon and remain a piercing and profound model for reckoning with and surviving our times of war and exile.
Voyage, War, and Exile collects three essays by Etel Adnan that present a multilayered meditation on the author’s life within and without Beirut. Adnan reflects upon the intricacies of family, place, and language, asking what it means to be an Arab woman and writer in exile at the end of a century in which “Exile became the existential and metaphysical condition for every Arab.” At once deeply personal to the life of the author and yet ubiquitous in inquiry, Voyage, War, Exile pulls us into the shifting landscape of Lebanon and the United States in the 20th Century through a weaving of philosophical reflection and memory. This volume includes artwork by Simone Fattal.
Praise for Etel Adnan
The work of Etel Adnan—poet, painter, philosopher—is an interrogation of the human experience and a study in worldly engagement…Sorting through decades of memory, loss, and linguistic turns, we drift with her in a sea of thought and expansive meditation. —K.B. Thors, The Lambda Literary Review
Her poetry has the capacity to assemble and discern the ‘sides’ of the self as well as the literature and literary personalities which frame the self of her writing. —Matt Turner, Hyperallergic
Adnan’s receptivity is evident in her fine-tuned attention to detail, at the microscopic and cosmic level alike. Her lens shifts in scale and orientation, defamiliarizing the surroundings we thought we knew and re-introducing us to nature.—Noa Micaela Fields, Medium
Paying Attention: Essays on Art and Culture
From award-winning novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman, Paying Attention is the first collection of essays devoted to her incisive, provocative, and singular reflections on art and culture.
Paying Attention gathers more than fifty of the best and varied examples of Lynne Tillman’s writings in reference to art and culture published over the course of forty years. In essays that operate outside typical categories or genres, Tillman reflects on forms including film, painting, photography, poetry, and fiction, as well as notions of fame, originality, embodied viewing and thinking, collective activity, aging, illness, American identity, cultural politics, modernity, strangeness, and time. Such is the stuff that relates art to life, and life to art.
Collected mainly from museum and gallery catalogues, artists’ books and monographs, her column in Frieze, and magazines including Aperture and Artforum, these meditations on artists and writers, in the broadest sense of these labels, collide as a portrait of our cultural moment. Tillman’s inventive use of language and lateral thought, her ability to evoke conditions of the larger world in often just two thousand words on a specific artwork or individual, make her one of the most significant critics of our time. As she acknowledges, in a piece on the artist Robert Gober, “In writing on art, words reach for other words, phrases, idioms, and through them more images and ideas leap out.” In her introduction, Elizabeth Schambelan notes that a hallmark of Tillman’s writing alongside artists is an “elegant rendering of complexity,” and in approaching Tillman’s body of work and thought, Schambelan herself imbricates the art, voice, and language of criticism.
Goblinhood - en mode gobelin !
Enfin la traduction en français du best-seller de Jen Calleja, qui sera présente pour une lecture croisée. Repassez vos capes et astiquez vos chaînettes.
La figure du gobelin est espiègle, marginale, répugnante et fascinante et le mode gobelin peut être envisagé comme un mode de vie à part entière.
Jen Calleja, depuis son obsession pour les objets verts et les marionettes, ses souvenirs familiaux, son rapport au corps et au dégoût de soi, au chagrin, au sexe et au deuil, propose avec malice une pensée hybride entre essai, auto-fiction, poésie et théorie de la gobelinité.
En chacunx de nous, suggère-t-elle, sommeille un gobelin qu’il est temps de libérer.
Among a Sea of Influences
Mirene Arsanios, Rachel Valinsky
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.
The Joy of Electronic Music
This book is for people who love electronic music, people who probably have a synthesizer or two at home. It’s for people who tell themselves that they should find some time for their passion, who blame themselves for not making enough music. This book is for them.
For decades, I thought that I could be a music producer. But over the years, I have discovered that my contribution to the electronic scene wasn’t exactly the music itself. Although I was lucky enough to produce a few successful tracks in Lithuania, back in the ‘90s, my actual achievement turned out to be raising interest in electronic music, for other young people. I’m still surprised when someone remembers my old tracks, but I’m very proud when someone tells me that listening to me speak on the radio about Berlin techno changed their dreams back in the day. Later, in the 2000s, I was part of the early SoundCloud team. The code we wrote has touched hundreds of millions people around the world. No track or song I would have ever produced would have had such an effect. There is a reason that Brian Eno says the evolution of music is moved by technology as much as it is by artists. The people who created Logic and Ableton, those who code SoundCloud and Spotify, design Korg and Roland synths, they influence the course of music on a massive scale. The development of music technology is the work of many people and I’m happy to call myself one of that gang.
This book is a natural extension of those ideas. It’s not based on scientific or journalistic research, but it’s not a biography, either. I imagine this book sitting on a studio desk, or in a gig bag. In the process, I hope that some young music creators will find answers here, and inspirations, to the questions they’ve been wrestling with for a long time.