D Caboret, P Garrone: Avant-garde and Mission: Tiqqunery (1999) [French/English]
Filed under pamphlet | Tags: · capitalism, kabbalah, nihilism, philosophy, politics, theory
A critical study guide for readers of Tiqqun magazine.
“Addressed in 1999 to a small group of persons, the following text was intended to describe in general the philosophical and religious affiliations that the members of the magazine Tiqqun associated themselves with either explicitly or implicitly.” (from the introduction)
Publisher Friends of LHOOQ, Paris
Second edition, 2002
PDF [French]
PDF [English]
View online (HTML) [English]
Tiqqun: Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999–) [EN, DE]
Filed under book | Tags: · biopolitics, biopower, body, capitalism, consumerism, desire, feminism, labour, love, metaphysics, philosophy, reification, seduction, sexuality, theory
“First published in France in 1999, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl dissects the impossibility of love under Empire. The Young-Girl is consumer society’s total product and model citizen: whatever “type” of Young-Girl she may embody, whether by whim or concerted performance, she can only seduce by consuming. Filled with the language of French women’s magazines, rooted in Proust’s figure of Albertine and the amusing misery of (teenage) romance in Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, and informed by Pierre Klossowski’s notion of “living currency” and libidinal economy, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl diagnoses — and makes visible — a phenomenon that is so ubiquitous as to have become transparent.
In the years since the book’s first publication in French, the worlds of fashion, shopping, seduction plans, makeover projects, and eating disorders have moved beyond the comparatively tame domain of paper magazines into the perpetual accessibility of Internet culture. Here the Young-Girl can seek her own reflection in corporate universals and social media exchanges of “personalities” within the impersonal realm of the marketplace. Tracing consumer society’s colonization of youth and sexuality through the Young-Girl’s “freedom” (in magazine terms) to do whatever she wants with her body, Tiqqun exposes the rapaciously competitive and psychically ruinous landscape of modern love.” (from Semiotexte, the publisher of the 2012 edition)
Announcement and discussion about the translation
Commentary (Rob Horning, 2012)
More commentaries (compiled by 1000 Little Hammers, 2013)
Originally published in French as Premiers matériaux pour une Théorie de la Jeune-Fille in Tiqqun 1, 1999
Revised, republished by Éditions Mille et une nuits, 2001.
Translator unknown
Published on younggirl.jottit.com, Jan 2010
PDF (2010)
HTML (2010)
HTML (2012 edition, trans. Ariana Reines, Preliminaries + Chapters 6 & 7)
German edition (2009)
David McNally: Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · africa, body, capitalism, folklore, literature, neoliberalism, political economy, popular culture, zombies
Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, Monsters of the Market offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of a global market-system. The book thus makes original contributions to political economy, cultural theory, commodification-studies and ‘body-theory’.
Publisher BRILL, 2011
Volume 30 of Historical Materialism Book Series
ISBN 9004201572, 9789004201576
308 pages
review (Mark Worrell, Marx & Philosophy)
Comment (1)