Louis Armand, Jane Lewty, Andrew Mitchell (eds.): Pornotopias: Image, Desire, Apocalypse (2008)

Bodily existence is an existence lived in constant fascination with a world beyond one’s reach. Embodiment, desire, metaphor. To exist on the verge of nonexistence. In the headlong pursuit of the real, of the other. Of the base materiality of the world, of religious hypothesis, of absolute relativity. Every utopia is a pornography, a recrudescence and pathological disillusionment, a lure into the vortex–paradoxical annulment of pure reason, compulsion, repetition, consumption.

A fact of bodily existence is to know that the body is our most complex and multi-faceted machine in a world of incessant technological progress. The body is a marvel of engineering; it is the outward face of primal nature; it is a disgusting vessel in which to house the soul; it is a primitive device, fragile and disposable. Bodies are re-produced, experimented upon to the limits of their tolerance, dissected and debated to every last cell, mended, prosthetically enhanced, moralised, abused and adored. The interface with the world we live in means that the body is always laid open to scrutiny without ever simply constituting some thing within our grasp: it is the site where violence and metaphysics interchange, technicity and catatonia, the sublime and the grotesque.

The body cannot be neutral or indifferent. Its design is such that it must respond to both exterior challenge and interior impulse. Our means of survival, the sex act, galvanizes the body into a unique state of existence, which, though transient, becomes the essence of being; the concentration of an idea, the heightening of sense, the ultimate dissolution.

How to write this purposeful transformation? How to write this instantaneous, ephemeral shattering of perception? This is the task of pornography. Our project will present the body in its most extreme of forms and behaviour, all of which demonstrate the human attempt to satisfy, and solve, the oft-inchoate needs of our psychology and physicality. We seek papers which deal with pornography as condition, symptom, addiction, spectacle, product, simulacrum. Above all as a fundamentalism embedded in the very structures of representation, knowledge, non-knowledge and the unpresentable.

Contributors include Georges Bataille, Johannes Birringer, Karmen MacKendrick, Benjamin H. Bratton, Lara Portela, Louis Armand, Stewart Home, Jane Lewty, Thierry Tillier, Ruark Lewis, Malwina Zaremba, Darren Tofts, Bonita Rhoads, Stuart Kendall, Ian Haig, Jena Jolissaint, Pierre Daguin, Vadim Erent, Florian Cramer, Beth Lazroe, Andar Nunes.

Publisher Faculty of Philosophy of the Charles University, Prague, December 2008
Litteraria Pragensia Books series
ISBN 9708073082918
272 pages

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Painful But Fabulous: The Lives & Art of Genesis P-Orridge (2002)

Genesis P-Oridge, the legendary musician and artist from Manchester, opens his files to show the world never before seen texts, photos, artwork and magic. P-Orridge, whose Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV set the stage for modern industrial, punk and alternative music, comes clean on many of the issues surrounding his life, work and mystique. From the 1960s, when his art group the COUM Transmission set England on its ear, to his long career in music to the creation of his religion-as-a-joke-as-a-religion, Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth, this book covers it all.

With Foreword by Douglas Rushkoff
With an Introduction by Carl Abrahamsson
Publisher Soft Skull Shortwave, a division of Soft Skull Press, New York, 2002
ISBN 1887128883, 9781887128889
200 pages

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Jean Baudrillard: Seduction (1979-) [ES, EN, CZ, PL]

“Seduction, in French thinker Baudrillard’s apocalyptic discourse, is a power of attraction and fascination capable of subverting mechanical, orgasm-centered sexuality and reality in general. Two chief obstacles to unleashing the potentially liberating forces of seduction are the women’s movement and psychoanalysis, charges the author of America and Forget Foucault. While recognizing that seduction has a negative side–turning the seduced person away from his/her true thoughts and impulses–Baudrillard is intrigued by the seductive processes at work in the vertigo induced by games, in magic and the lottery, in the transvestite’s “total gestural, sensual and ritual” behavior. He decodes pornography as “an orgy of realism,” a hyperreality of signs. In his analysis, seduction has itself been corrupted in a world of manufactured desires and ready-made satisfactions. With seductive irony, Baudrillard storms the fragile phallic fortress of patriarchy in this heady, sometimes obscure meditation.”

Originally published in French as De la seduction by Editions Galilee, 1979
Translated to English by Brian Singer
Publisher New World Perspectives, 1991
CultureTexts series
ISBN 092039325X
182 pages
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PDF (Spanish, trans. Elena Benarroch, 1981)
PDF (English, trans. Brian Singer, 1991)
PDF (Czech, trans. Alena Dvořáčková, 1996)
PDF (Polish, trans. Janusz Margański, 2005, updated on 2016-10-28)