Tiqqun: Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999–) [EN, DE]

“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)

Jane Pavitt: Fear and Fashion in the Cold War (2008)

From Barbarella’s bikini to vinyl radiation suits to high-tech jewelry, the Cold War’s impact on fashion was unmistakable.

Atomic anxieties, the space race, technological developments, and the first forays into “super-reality” led to innovations in materials, the cybernetic visions of the 1960s, and a range of surprising responses from artists, filmmakers, scientists, and designers. With a stunning selection of images, including photographs by fashion luminaries such as John French, Fear and Fashion in the Cold War explores how the image of the body was shaped by Cold War concerns between 1945 and 1970. In this engaging book, Jane Pavitt incorporates military, political, and scientific research in an engrossing discussion of how countercultural theories and experiences in the later 1960s shaped an alternative view of the “Cold War Body.”

Publisher V&A, London, 2008
ISBN 1851775447, 9781851775446
128 pages
via Royal College of Art

google books

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Gérard Genette: Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987/1997)

“Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs and publishers’ jacket copy are part of a book’s private and public history. In this first English translation of Paratexts, Gérard Genette shows how the special pragmatic status of paratextual declaration requires a carefully calibrated analysis of their illocutionary force. With clarity, precision and an extraordinary range of reference, Paratexts constitutes an encyclopedic survey of the customs and institutions as revealed in the borderlands of the text. Genette presents a global view of these liminal mediations and the logic of their relation to the reading public by studying each element as a literary function. Richard Macksey’s foreword describes how the poetics of paratexts interact with more general questions of literature as a cultural institution, and situates Genette’s work in contemporary literary theory.”

Originally published in French as Seuils, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1987

Translated by Jane E. Lewin
Foreword by Richard Macksey
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1997
Literature, Culture, Theory series, 20
ISBN 0521424062, 9780521424066
456 pages

Review: Chris Koenig-Woodyard (erudit, 1999).

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