Nicholas Thoburn: Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (2014–) [EN, SC]

“No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text.

Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.””

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2016
Cultural Critique Books series
ISBN 9780816621965, 0816621969
xvi+372 pages

Interview with author: Ron Hanson (White Fungus, 2020).
Reviews: Filipe Carreira da Silva (Contemporary Political Theory, 2017), Anthony Iles (Mute, 2018), Samuel A. Moore (Cultural Studies, 2018), Ola Ståhl (Parallax, 2018), Nick Thurston (Comparative Critical Studies, 2019), Martin Paul Eve (American Literature, 2019), Terrine M. Friday (Canadian Journal of Communication, 2019), Simone Murray (Left History, 2019).

Publisher (EN)
Publisher (SC)
WorldCat (EN)

Anti-knjiga: Materijalni tekst i političko izdavaštvo (Serbo-Croatian, 2014, 1 MB, added on 2017-5-2)
Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (English, 2016, HTML; PDF, updated on 2019-7-2)

Yale French Studies 36/37: Structuralism (1966)

An early English-language collection of French structuralist writings.

Essays by André Martinet, Philip E. Lewis, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Harold W. Scheffer, Sheldon Nodelman, Jan Miel, Jacques Lacan, Geoffrey Hartman, Jacques Ehrmann, Michael Riffaterre, and Victoria L. Rippere. Bibliographies compiled by Elizabeth Barber, Allen R. Maxwell, Jacques Lacan, Anthony G. Wilden, and T. Todorov.

Edited by Jacques Ehrmann
Publisher Yale University Press, 1966
272 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (17 MB)

McKenzie Wark: Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (2015)

“In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other.

Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander Bogdanov—Lenin’s rival—as well as the great Proletkult writer and engineer Andrey Platonov.

The Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for the new organizational challenges of our time. From deep within the Californian military-entertainment complex, Wark retrieves Donna Haraway‘s cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian utopia as powerful resources for rethinking and remaking the world that climate change has wrought. Molecular Red proposes an alternative realism, where hope is found in what remains and endures.”

Publisher Verso, London and New York, March 2015
ISBN 1781688273, 9781781688274
xxiv+280 pages

Reviews: Slavoj Žižek (Verso 2015, Wark’s response), John Beck (Radical Philosophy 2015), Mark Rappolt (ArtReview 2015), Maria Chehonadskih (Mute 2015, Wark’s response), Two Grenadiers (2015), Pieter Vermeulen & Tom Chadwick (nY 2016), Jim Harper (LSE Review of Books 2016).
Commentary: Joe Guinan (Renewal 2015), Jernej Kaluža (Radio Student 2019, SL).

Video lecture (Concordia U, Apr 2015)
Publisher
WorldCat

HTML

See also Molecular Red Reader compiled by Wark (PDF).