Mira Mattar (ed.): You Must Make Your Death Public: A Collection of Texts and Media on the Work of Chris Kraus (2015)

24 April 2015, dusan

“Since her first book, I Love Dick, published in 1997, writer and film-maker Chris Kraus has authored a further six books ranging from fiction to art criticism to political commentary, via continental philosophy, feminism, critical and queer theory.

This collection begins to engage with questions Kraus’ work raises: where, if at all, is the line between ‘life’ as private and ‘practice’ as public? How, if one subject is always performing one or other of these, can they be delineated? How does this map onto the relations between other ever blurring not-quite-binaries: artwork and critic, subject and object, masochist and sadist, unknown and known, embodied and disembodied, fiction and criticism?

This book assembles all the talks and media presented at Aliens & Anorexia: A Chris Kraus Symposium, which took place in March 2013 at the Royal College of Art, London.”

With contributions by Travis Jeppesen, Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, Hestia Peppé, Samira Ariadad, Beth Rose Caird, Jesse Dayan, Karolin Meunier, Linda Stupart, Lodovico Pignatti Morano, Trine Riel, Rachal Bradley, David Morris, Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield and Chris Kraus.

Publisher Mute Publishing, London and Berlin, 2015
Anti copyright
ISBN 9781906496647
134 pages

Publisher

PDF
EPUB

Katerina Kolozova: Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (2014)

27 March 2015, dusan

“Following François Laruelle’s nonstandard philosophy and the work of Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Luce Irigaray, and Rosi Braidotti, Katerina Kolozova reclaims the relevance of categories traditionally rendered “unthinkable” by postmodern feminist philosophies, such as “the real,” “the one,” “the limit,” and “finality,” thus critically repositioning poststructuralist feminist philosophy and gender/queer studies.

Poststructuralist (feminist) theory sees the subject as a purely linguistic category, as always already multiple, as always already nonfixed and fluctuating, as limitless discursivity, and as constitutively detached from the instance of the real. This reconceptualization is based on the exclusion of and dichotomous opposition to notions of the real, the one (unity and continuity), and the stable. The non-philosophical reading of postructuralist philosophy engenders new forms of universalisms for global debate and action, expressed in a language the world can understand. It also liberates theory from ideological paralysis, recasting the real as an immediately experienced human condition determined by gender, race, and social and economic circumstance.”

Foreword by François Laruelle
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2014
Insurrections series
ISBN 0231166109, 9780231166102
xvi+184 pages

Review: Maxwell Kennel (Parrhesia, 2015).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF
ARG

Claire Colebrook: Essays on Extinction, 2 vols.: Death of the PostHuman & Sex After Life (2014)

14 March 2015, dusan

Death of the PostHuman undertakes a series of critical encounters with the legacy of what had come to be known as ‘theory,’ and its contemporary supposedly post-human aftermath. There can be no redemptive post-human future in which the myopia and anthropocentrism of the species finds an exit and manages to emerge with ecology and life. At the same time, what has come to be known as the human–despite its normative intensity–can provide neither foundation nor critical lever in the Anthropocene epoch. Death of the PostHuman argues for a twenty-first century deconstruction of ecological and seemingly post-human futures.”

Sex After Life aims to consider the various ways in which the concept of life has provided normative and moralizing ballast for queer, feminist and critical theories. Arguing against a notion of the queer as counter-normative, Sex After Life appeals to the concept of life as a philosophical problem. Life is neither a material ground nor a generative principle, but can nevertheless offer itself for new forms of problem formation that exceed the all too human logics of survival.”

Publisher Open Humanities Press, 2014
Critical Climate Change series
Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License
ISBN 978-1-60785-299-5 (v1), 978-1-60785-300-8 (v2)
243 & 263 pages

Publisher, (2)
OAPEN, (2)

Vol. 1: HTML, PDF, PDF, PDF
Vol. 2: HTML, PDF, PDF, PDF