Lisa Robertson | The Baudelaire Fractal
I’d never had an idea for writing a novel before, though I’ve been curious about the form. I’m a poet who has always loved writing prose. Essay writing and the writing of verse have been overlapping and interchangeable activities, and the shape of the sentence has always been at the core of my writing practice. This Baudelaire idea was very funny to me, and it kept opening up more pathways of inquiry the more time I spent with it.
It was a way to write a bildungsroman in the feminine; it opened questions of authorship, and identity; it gave me an interesting framework for reading all of Baudelaire’s work, it led me to 19th century French painting, and to the urban politics of Haussmannization in Paris. BOMB
Georges Didi-Huberman | The Eye of History
From 1938 to 1955, Bertolt Brecht created montages of images and text, filling his working journal (Arbeitsjournal) and his idiosyncratic atlas of images, War Primer, with war photographs clipped from magazines and adding his own epigrammatic commentary. In this book, Georges Didi-Huberman explores the interaction of politics and aesthetics in these creations, explaining how they became the means for Brecht, a wandering poet in exile, to “take a position” about the Nazi war in Europe. Illustrated with pages from the Arbeitsjournal and War Primer and contextual images including Raoul Hausmann’s poem-posters and Walter Benjamin’s drawings, The Eye of History offers a new view of important but little-known works by Brecht.
Alexandra Kollontai | Red Love
Alexandra Kollontai was a Russian revolutionary who was appointed commissar of social welfare after the October Revolution and later one of the world’s first woman ambassadors. She fought for abortion rights, secularized marriage, and paid maternity leave—and considered “comradely love” to be a political force. This reader, in which artists and thinkers revisit Kollontai’s legacy in light of current feminist struggles, stems from a research project by CuratorLab at Konstfack and Tensta konsthall that accompanied Dora García’s exhibition “Red Love.” It also features the first English translation of the 1977 biographical play Kollontai by Swedish writer Agneta Pleijel.
Lana Turner No. 12 | A Journal of Poetry & Opinion
Poems, Prose Essays by AmyDe’Ath, Olivier Cadiot, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Rae Armantrout, Cole Swenson, David Lau, etc.
Kirill Medvedev | Antifaschismus für alle
Gefeiert als vielversprechendster Dichter seiner Generation, kehrte Kirill Medvedev vor rund 10 Jahren dem Literaturbetrieb den Rücken. Er verweigerte öffentliche Lesungen, gab das Copyright seiner Texte auf und veröffentlichte sie fortan im Internet: »für alle«, um seine »intellektuelle Souveränität wiederherzustellen«. Seine radikale und kompromisslos selbst gelebte Kritik an den Umständen in Russland und dem entfesselten globalen Kapitalismus führte ihn zum politischen Aktivismus von unten. Antifaschismus für alle versammelt nun Texte aus einem Jahrzehnt – erzählende Gedichte, wütend, zärtlich, voller Gewalt und sie gleichzeitig verdammend, sowie Essays über Literatur und Politik. Seine Texte sind somit nicht nur beeindruckende Literatur, sondern auch brennendes Zeugnis des Wunsches nach Veränderung und der Überzeugung, dass diese möglich ist.
Antonin Artaud | Succubations & Incubations. Selected Letters (1945 – 1947)
My dear Marthe,
No, what you tell me in your letter only confirms my certainty that it is no longer Anie Besnard who lives at 45 Quai Bourbon, but a double.
Anie Besnard was assassinated between Paris and Rodez during the night of October 14 to 15, 1944, and her body was buried in a field, just as the remains of Colette Prou, butchered with an axe in a cell adjacent to mine in September 1937, were buried in a garden in the suburbs of Le Havre. There may also be a Colette Prou in Paris at this moment but she is not the one I knew at the Dôme and who was assassinated. —Just as Sonia Mosse was incinerated.
I wish you felt as I do, Marthe Robert, the extent to which life is criminal and sinister.
Aimé Césaire | Resolutely Black: Conversatons with Françoise Vergès
This unique volume takes the form of a series of interviews with Césaire that were conducted by Françoise Vergès in 2004, shortly before his death. Césaire’s responses to Vergès’ questions cover a wide range of topics, including the origins of his political activism, the legacies of slavery and colonialism, the question of reparation for slavery and the problems of marrying literature to politics. The book includes a substantial postface by Vergès in which she situates Césaire’s work in its intellectual and political context.
Danielle Collobert | In The Environs Of A Film
Danielle Collobert was one of the strongest, yet also one of the most subtle—and the most marginalized—poetic voices to emerge from post-WW2 France. In this early work, she explores the world of one who is ‘marked,’ yet she does so through an ‘I’ that makes this experience, and so many others, suddenly intimate, even intrusive. The ‘I’ becomes a ‘we’ that cannot be refused, and yet the sense of isolation—the possibility, which is the inevitability, of isolation—is what actually enables the text and creates its possibilities, which are myriad—and all magnificently rendered through Nathanaël’s translation, which multiplies these possibilities and emphasizes the refusal of isolation that Collobert’s text ultimately enacts. It’s a political statement that works through the most internal channels, and that demands entrance into the reader’s most constitutive zones. Cole Swensen
Roger Gilbert-Lecomte | Coma Crossing
In France, the poetry of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte has long received the major press attention it deserves. Now, thanks to David Ball’s fine translation, English readers can experience its fractured eloquence in full, from wry early sketches and experiments with prose poetry, to the stark, skeletal verse for which he is best known. Gilbert-Lecomte’s adult life was spent gazing, wilfully, into the abyss. In his poetry, the voice that dominates is cold, ancient, and inhuman. It is the hum of the abyss gazing back.
Entrare nell’opera [Entering the work] | Processes and Performative Attitudes in Arte Povera
Artists: Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero e Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Eliseo Mattiacci, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, Gilberto Zorio
Grégoire Chamayou | La société ingouvernable
Partout, ça se rebiffait. Les années 1970, a-t-on dit à droite et à gauche, du côté de Samuel Huntington comme de Michel Foucault, ont été ébranlées par une gigantesque « crise de gouvernabilité ».
Aux États-Unis, le phénomène inquiétait au plus haut point un monde des affaires confronté simultanément à des indisciplines ouvrières massives, à une prétendue « révolution managériale », à des mobilisations écologistes inédites, à l’essor de nouvelles régulations sociales et environnementales, et – racine de tous les maux – à une « crise de la démocratie » qui, rendant l’État ingouvernable, menaçait de tout emporter.
C’est à cette occasion que furent élaborés, amorçant un contre-mouvement dont nous ne sommes pas sortis, de nouveaux arts de gouverner dont ce livre retrace, par le récit des conflits qui furent à leurs sources, l’histoire philosophique.
On y apprendra comment fut menée la guerre aux syndicats, imposé le « primat de la valeur actionnariale », conçu un contre-activisme d’entreprise ainsi qu’un management stratégique des « parties prenantes », imaginés, enfin, divers procédés invasifs de « détrônement de la politique ».
Contrairement aux idées reçues, le néolibéralisme n’est pas animé d’une « phobie d’État » unilatérale. Les stratégies déployées pour conjurer cette crise convergent bien plutôt vers un libéralisme autoritaire où la libéralisation de la société suppose une verticalisation du pouvoir. Un « État fort » pour une « économie libre ».
ALIENIST #7
FIVE ANTI-MANIFESTS / THE STINK OF AN AUTOPSY REPORT / THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEPATHISED / ONE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH / THE HOST FEASTS UPON ITS “PARASITES” / A NEW DECADE OF ALIENISM / AUTOMATIC AUTONOMIA / VELVET AUTONOMY, AUTOMATIC ANNIVERSARIES / SOME REFLECTIONS ON POLITICAL AUTOMATION / ENTROPOLOGY / THE YAK & THE RAM / FROM GREEN ACCELERATIONISM (G/ACC) TO APPROPRIATE ACCELERATIONISM (APP/ACC) / ALIENIST AUTONOMEDIA / CAPITAL-[[ANTI]]CHRIST / SLENDER MAN & KNIFING AS HORROR-COMMUNICATION / REPLICATIVE DEATH ORDER / DE NUIT DEBOUT AUX GILETS JAUNES / EVERY REVOLUTION IS A THROW OF DICE / THE SACRED DEBT / MARTIAN / RIDE THE CYBERTRUCK / HYPE COLLAPSE / FLASH FLOOD / RETURN SELF NEW
Elena Vogman | Dance Values
Eisenstein’s adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital (1927–1928) is a phantom in a double sense: although never realized, it has nonetheless haunted the imagination of many filmmakers, historians, and writers to the present day, most recently with Alexander Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital. Furthermore, its first public ‘materialization’ – a ten-page fragment of the director’s work diaries – was marked by what remained absent: Eisenstein’s images and working materials.
Dance of Values aims to conjure the phantom of Capital once again – only this time on the basis of the full scope of Capital’s archival body. This “visual instruction in the dialectical method,” as Eisenstein himself called it, comprises over 500 pages of notes, drawings, press clippings, expression diagrams, plans for articles, negatives from October, theoretical reflections and extensive quotations. Dance of Values explores the internal formal necessity underlying Eisenstein’s choices in Capital, arguing that its visual complexity as well as its epistemic efficacy reside precisely within the state of its material: the dance of heterogeneous themes and disparate fragments, a non-linear, provisory, and non-articulated flow.
Paul B. Preciado| An Apartment On Uranus
Uranus is the coldest planet in the solar system, a frozen giant named after a Greek deity. It is also the inspiration for Uranism, a concept coined by the writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1864 to define the ‘third sex’ and the rights of those who ‘love differently’. Following in Ulrichs’s footsteps, Paul B. Preciado dreams of an apartment on Uranus where he can live, free of the modern power taxonomies of race, gender, class or disability. In this bold and transgressive book, Preciado recounts his transformation from Beatriz into Paul B., and examines other processes of political, cultural and sexual transition, reflecting on socio-political issues including the rise of neo-fascism in Europe, the criminalization of migrants, the harassment of trans children, the technological appropriation of the uterus, and the role artists and museums might play in the writing of a new social contract. A stepchild of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Preciado argues, with courage and conviction, for a planetary revolution of all living beings against the norm.
Nathalie Quintane | Les enfants vont bien
Pour dire la violence faite aux réfugiés, Nathalie Quintane crée un dispositif littéraire efficace et émouvant qui confronte la parole politique aux mots de ceux qui travaillent dans l’accueil des migrants.
BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)) 