Theory & Criticism

As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. 

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she codirects Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA).

Heather Swanson is assistant professor of anthropology at Aarhus University.

Elaine Gan is art director of AURA and postdoctoral fellow at Aarhus University.

Nils Bubandt is professor of anthropology at Aarhus University, where he codirects AURA.

« Pour faire simple, le féminisme est un mouvement qui vise à mettre fin au sexisme, à l’exploitation et à l’oppression sexistes. » Ainsi débute cette efficace et accessible introduction à la théorie féministe, écrite par l’une de ses figures les plus influentes, la militante noire-américaine bell hooks.

Conçu pour pouvoir être lu par tout le monde, ce livre répond de manière simple et argumentée à la question « qu’est-ce que le féminisme ? », en soulignant l’importance du mouvement féministe aujourd’hui. Ce petit guide, à mettre entre toutes les mains, nous invite à rechercher des alternatives à la culture patriarcale, raciste et homophobe, et à bâtir ainsi un avenir différent.

Traduit de l'anglais par Alex Taillard

In the 1970s, microbiologist Lynn Margulis and atmospheric chemist James Lovelock developed the Gaia theory. Embracing the circular logic of life and engineering systems, the Gaia theory states that Earth is a self-regulating complex system in which life interacts with and eventually becomes its own environment.

Gaia describes a living Earth: a body in the form of a planet. For billions of years, life has created an environment conducive to its continuation, influencing the physical attributes of Earth on a planetary scale. An idea with precedents in natural science and philosophy for millennia, Gaia resonates with the ancient magico-religious understanding that all is one: as above, so below. 

Fusing science, mathematics, philosophy, ecology and mythology, Gaia and Philosophy, with a new introduction by Dorion Sagan, challenges Western anthropocentrism to propose a symbiotic planet. In its striking philosophical conclusion, the revolutionary Gaia paradigm holds important implications not only for understanding life's past but for shaping its future. 

In On the Inconvenience of Other People Lauren Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world. Berlant focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. Drawing on a range of sources, including Last Tango in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Claudia Rankine, Christopher Isherwood, Bhanu Kapil, the Occupy movement, and resistance to anti-Black state violence, Berlant poses inconvenience as an affective relation and considers how we might loosen our attachments in ways that allow us to build new forms of life. Collecting strategies for breaking apart a world in need of disturbing, the book's experiments in thought and writing cement Berlant's status as one of the most inventive and influential thinkers of our time.

Age! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! (Apart from greasing the wheels of capitalist reproduction.) In this queer manifesto, Simon(e) van Saarloos weaves a wealth of militant sex-liberationist, afrofuturist, transfeminist and decolonial imaginaries into their anti-ageist sails, charting a confident course across contemporary society’s generational hang-ups as well as visiting, in some more personal moments, their own.
-Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto starts with what it is not: it is not a socio-economic argument against ageism, celebrating “the elderly” as economically viable. Author Simon(e) van Saarloos is not interested in natural arguments about age, which portray different age groups as valuable because of assumed inherent qualities. Instead, this manifesto starts with an experience of childhood sexual abuse, and moves on to dissect the ways in which constructions of “age” and “youth” function to support and reproduce white supremacist patriarchy. The book includes two reproductions of works by painter Samantha Nye.

Simon(e) van Saarloos is the author of Take ‘em Down (Publication Studio Guelph) and Playing Monogamy (Publication Studio Rotterdam). They were the curator of the 2021 exhibition on Abundance (“We must bring about the end of the world as we know it” – Denise Ferreira da Silva) in Het HEM and are also the host of *The Asterisk Conversations podcast. Van Saarloos is currently a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric department at UC Berkeley.

An anthology of occult resistance: unpredictable and fascinating, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music.

The End Times are here. The Digital Middle Ages approaches, the plague reaps its deadly harvest, climate apocalypse is around the corner, and fanaticism, fascism, and madness are rampant. The idea that we might gain the upper hand over the dark abyss into which the planet is tumbling is a form of magical thinking, laboring under the delusion that we can subdue eternity with relentless bloodlust, brutish exploitation, abuse of power, and violence. Revolutionary Demonology responds to this ritual of control, typical of what esoteric tradition calls the “Dogma of the Right Hand,” by reactivating the occult forces of a Left Hand Path that strives for the entropic disintegration of all creation, so as to make peace with the darkness and nourish the Great Beast that will finally break the seals of Cosmic Love.

Unpredictable and fascinating, genuinely bizarre, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music alike with its fevered touch, this “anthology of occult resistance” collects together the communiqués of an arcane group who are already being hailed as the first morbid blossoming of “Italian Weird Theory”: a rogue contingent of theorists, witches, and sorcerers who heretically remix gothic accelerationism with satanic occultism and insurrectional necromancy.

In this compelling rethinking of curatorial practice, renowned museum director, curator, and writer Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung proposes that Pidgin languages and pidginization as a mode of being and doing offer a decolonialized reinvention of communicative practices—a space in which the boundaries between disciplines of knowledge collapse and sociopolitical, economic, ethical, and spiritual concepts and questions are renegotiated.

Written as a series of powerful anecdotes, the book grounds its provocative ideas in personal, cultural, and political histories of challenge and improvisation, and argues, as Ndikung writes, that "pidginized curating is a curating that combines works, ideas, practices, and languages in resistance to canonical conventions, cultural stasis, ossified practices, dead rhythms, and singular forms."

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (born 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon, lives and works in Berlin) is an independent art curator, art critic, author and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin and editor-in-chief of SAVVY Journal for critical texts on contemporary African art. He was associate professor at Muthesius University Kiel, and is currently guest professor in curatorial studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He was curator-at-large for documenta 14, and was a guest curator of the 2018 Dak'Art Biennale in Senegal. As part of the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019.

Invitation au voyage à travers l’œuvre littéraire de Monique Wittig, ce livre nous embarque dans une passionnante exploration de ses textes de fiction, de L’opponax à Virgile, non. Il rend compte de la lutte amoureuse qu’elle livre au langage – matériau brut qu’elle travaille au corps pour faire advenir dans la réalité ce qui n’y a pas (encore) droit de cité. La convocation malicieuse et grave des grands récits du passé, les nombreux emprunts aux auteurs anciens, la pratique de la citation font des Guérillères une formidable épopée féministe, du Corps lesbien un Évangile selon Sappho, du Voyage sans fin le combat drôle et tragique d’une Quichotte féministe et lesbienne.

En soulignant la cohérence des textes et leur fragmentation, Catherine Écarnot met en évidence la passion poétique qui habite ces livres que Wittig concevait comme des « chevaux de Troie » : des machines de guerre destinées à fissurer la réalité pour y inscrire une subjectivité mouvante, échappée du continent noir de la féminité, rétive aux assignations de genre. Uniques et radicalement disruptives, les fictions ainsi créées ouvrent grands les chemins qui relient littérature et lesbianisme.

Publié pour la première fois en 2002, cet ouvrage, le premier consacré en Europe à l’œuvre witigienne, reparaît dans une nouvelle édition remaniée, actualisée et enrichie de nombreuses références aux études publiées depuis sa parution.

Art et production de Boris Arvatov fait partie des classiques oubliés des avant-gardes qui se sont épanouies durant la Révolution russe. Publié à Moscou en 1926, il vient porter le fer dans les débats qui agitent l’école constructiviste : que doit être le statut de l’art après la révolution, ses liens avec les techniques industrielles de reproduction, avec la critique de la vie quotidienne, comment doit-il entrer dans l’usine ? Autant d’interrogations radicales, témoignages d’une séquence politico-sociale bouillonnante. Une nouvelle conception de l’art émerge, qui laissera une empreinte indélibile sur une tradition de critiques matérialistes de la culture, de Walter Benjamin à Peter Bürger, en passant par Fredric Jameson, celle qui posera la question de l’articulation entre pratique artistique et logiques propres à la sphère de la production. Un document exceptionnel enrichi d’illustrations, paraissant en français pour la première fois, une porte prviliégiée sur un moment-clé de la modernité exthétique du XXe siècle. 

Boris Arvatov (1896–1940) est un artiste et critique d’art russe. Il est notamment connu comme théoricien du productivisme, un mouvement d’avant-garde post-révolutionnaire lié au constructivisme. 

Qu’est-ce que le genre dans le capitalisme contemporain ? C’est à cette question qu’invite à répondre ce recueil, à partir d’une démarche théorique inspirée du féminisme et du marxisme. Il s’agit de penser, depuis une analyse systématique du rôle joué par le travail domestique et les violences de genre dans notre système économique, un monde au-delà de l’exploitation, et donc du genre et des ses contraintes. Un communisme au présent, qui s’empare de tous ces questionnements, trop souvent ignorés dans l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier. 

Jeanne Neton et Maya Gonzalez participent à la revue anglo-américaine Endnotes, dont le présent volume constitue la première traduction française. Elles se placent dans la lignée du féminisme autonome italien (on songe à Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati ou Mariarosa Dalla Costa) pour proposer une contribution originale et stimulante. 

Parmi les livres les plus appréciés de bell hooks, À propos d’amour est un texte singulier. Avec sa perspicacité habituelle et ses talents de vulgarisatrice, l’autrice afroféministe s’y attaque à une thématique rarement abordée de front en théorie politique. Définissant l’amour comme un acte et non comme un sentiment, bell hooks démonte tous les obstacles que la culture patriarcale oppose à des relations d’amour saines, et envisage un art d’aimer qui ne se résume pas au frisson de l’attraction ou à la simple tendresse. Recourant à la philosophie morale comme à la psychologie, elle s’en prend au cynisme narquois qui entoure les discussions au sujet de l’amour, et s’attache à redonner toute sa noblesse à la possibilité de l’amour, dans une perspective féministe.

GLORIA JEAN WATKINS, connue sous son nom de plume BELL HOOKS, née en 1952, est une intellectuelle, féministe, et militante étasunienne. Elle a publié plus de trente livres et de nombreux articles, et est apparue dans plusieurs films documentaires. Traduits dans de nombreuses langues, ses ouvrages sont considérés parmi les plus importants sur la question aux Etats-Unis et suscitent un réel engouement en France depuis quelques années. Les éditions divergences ont déjà traduit et publié deux de ses ouvrages Tout le monde peut être féministe et La volonté de changer.

Comment reprendre corps ? Comment nous rapporter au corps, cet objet éminemment historique, domestiqué, violenté, pathologisé ? Silvia Federici répond : écoutons le langage du corps, sa fragilité et ses imperfections, afin de retrouver, par-delà ses frontières, la continuité magique qui nous relie aux autres êtres vivants qui peuplent la terre. Mais surtout, identifions la plaie : les rapports sociaux de genre, de classe et de race. Dans cet ouvrage accessible et personnel, en discussion avec les mouvements féministes contemporains, Silvia Federici entreprend d’extirper nos corps des pouvoirs et des dispositifs technologiques qui les aliènent et les transforment. Politiques de l’identité, chirurgie de transformation des corps, nouvelles technologies reproductives, ce livre examine avec lucidité ces questions brûlantes qui traversent le champ féministe.

Traduit de l'anglais par Léa Nicolas-Teboul

Humanity has always excluded Others on the basis of race and gender. What happens to people who choose to flee, following in the footsteps of those who resisted enslavement?

This audacious manifesto draws on the legacies of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and others to consider the ways in which Black women have been excluded from, struggled to achieve and opted to reject the category of ‘human’. Sociologist Akwugo Emejulu argues that it is only through embracing the status of the ‘fugitive’ that Black women can determine their own liberation. Fugitive Feminism is a call for the collective process of speculative dialogue and a bold new model for action.

Drawing on her own stories and those of others, especially Black and brown feminists and queer thinkers, Sara Ahmed combines depth of thought with honesty and intimacy. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook unpicks the lies our culture tells us and provides a form of solidarity and companionship that can be returned to over a lifetime.

We have to keep saying it because they keep doing it.

Do colleagues roll their eyes in a meeting when you use words like sexism or racism? Do you refuse to laugh at jokes that aren't funny? Have you been called divisive for pointing out a division? Then you are a feminist killjoy, and this handbook is for you.

The term killjoy has been used to dismiss feminism by claiming that it causes misery. But by naming ourselves feminist killjoys, we recover a feminist history, turning it into a source of strength as well as an inspiration.

Hatred of Translation thinks through translation with an emphasis on its disaggregation. These pieces address, sometimes obliquely, often with effrontery, the works of René Char, Hervé Guibert, Hilda Hilst, Danielle Collobert, Frankétienne, Mizoguchi Kenji, Ingeborg Bachmann, Kobayashi Masaki, and Marguerite Duras. Resolutely resistant to anything resembling a theory of a thing, these pieces provoke a persistent commitment to thinking in the place of theorizing. Where the French pensée means both of aphoristic thought and of the pansy, Hatred of Translation seeks a garden in the midst of body such as it is occupied by language.

Nathanaël is the author of more than a score of books written in English or in French, including Pasolini's Our (2018), Feder (2016); L'heure limicole (2016) and Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal (2012). The French-language notebooks (2007-2010), gathered together in N'existe (2017), were recast in English as The Middle Notebookes (2015), which received the inaugural Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. The 2009 essay of correspondence, Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book) was first published in French as L'absence au lieu (2007). Nathanaël's work has been translated into Basque, Greek, Slovene, and Spanish (Mexico), with book-length publications in Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazil). The recipient of the Prix Alain-Grandbois for ...s'arrête? Je (2008), Nathanaël has translated works by Catherine Mavrikakis, Frédérique Guétat-Liviani, and Hilda Hilst (the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo). Nathanaël's translation of Murder by Danielle Collobert was a finalist for a Best Translated Book Award in 2014. Her translation of The Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert was recognized by fellowships from the PEN American

At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror.

Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. Cyclonopedia is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth's tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun.

'The Middle East is a sentient entity - it is alive!' concludes renegade Iranian archeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the 'lubricant' of historical and political narratives. A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along. Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil ...

"Pour Le Corps lesbien j’étais face à la nécessité d’écrire un livre entièrement lesbien dans sa thématique, son vocabulaire et sa texture, un livre lesbien du début à la fin, de la première à la quatrième de couverture. Je me trouvais par conséquent devant une double béance : celle de la page blanche que doivent affronter tous les écrivains lorsqu’ils commencent un livre, et une autre de nature différente : il n’existait aucun livre de ce genre. Jamais je n’ai relevé un défi aussi radical. Pouvais-je tenter cela ? En étais-je seulement capable ? Et quel serait alors ce livre ? J’ai gardé le manuscrit six mois dans un tiroir avant de le donner à mon éditeur."—Monique Wittig

What comes after end-of-world narratives: visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.

There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end—of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. In this book, drawing on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed—Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist—as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives. He argues that it's as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as it is to defeat the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance.

How might we decolonize the future, and cultivate an emancipated chronopolitics in relation to an undetermined not-yet? If we are to avoid climate emergency's cooptation by technofixes, and the defuturing of multitudes by xenophobic eco-fascism, Demos argues, we must cultivate visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.

In this original work of aesthetic theory, James Voorhies argues that we live in the shadow of old ways of thinking about art that emphasize the immediate visual experience of an autonomous art object. But theory must change as artistic and curatorial production has changed. It should encompass the full range of activities through which we encounter art and exhibitions, in which reading and thinking are central to the aesthetic experience. Voorhies advances the theoretical framework of a "postsensual aesthetics," which does not mean we are beyond a sensual engagement with objects, but rather embraces the cognitive connections with ideas that unite art and knowledge production. Cognitive engagements with art often begin with publications conceived as integral to exhibitions, conveying the knowledge and research artists and curators produce, and continuing in time and space beyond traditional curatorial frames. The idea, and not just visual immediacy, is now art's defining moment.  

Voorhies reframes aesthetic criteria to account for the liminal, cognitive spaces inside and outside of the exhibition. Surveying a wide range of artists, curators, exhibitions, and related publications, he repositions the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, and draws inspiration from Rosalind Krauss and Fredric Jameson, to describe a contemporary "logic of the curatorial." He demonstrates how, even as we increasingly expect to learn from contemporary art, we must avoid an instrumentalist and reductive view of art as a mere source of information. As Voorhies shows through an analysis of two major global exhibitions, dOCUMENTA (13) (artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev) and Documenta11 (artistic director Okwui Enwezor), and of Ute Meta Bauer's curatorial work at the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, it is imperative for artistic research to retain its unique role in the production of knowledge.

In this groundbreaking work, Paul Gilroy proposes that the modern black experience can not be defined solely as African, American, Carribean or British alone, but can only be understand as a Black Atlantic culture that transcends ethnicity or nationality. This culture is thorough modern and, often, overlooked but can deeply enriches our understanding of what it means to be modern.

This condition comes out of historical transoceanic experience, established first with the slave trade but later seen in the development of a transatlantic culture. And Gilroy takes us on a tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the ‘double consciousness’ of W. E. B. Du Bois to the ‘double vision’ of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison. As a consequence, Black Atlantic charts the formation of a nationalism, if not a nation, within this shared, disasporic culture.

McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York's thriving queer rave scene, showing how raving to techno is an art and technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept, but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them.

Contents
1. Rave as Practice 
2. Xeno-euphoria 
3. Ketamine Femmunism 
4. Enlustment 
5. Resonant Abstraction 
6. Excessive Machine 

"How to write a book about raving as a practice that practices rave? From k-nights spent on Brooklyn's and Berlin's junkspace dance floors, McKenzie Wark abstracts a life practice of ressociation in a dance of autoconceptualization and allotheorization. In crossing toward the stranger's gift of 'letting go of ourselves as private property, ' Raving is nothing less than Wark's femmunist manifesto, her tractatus on techno's blackness, her treatise for a twenty-first-century trans ethics."—Kodwo Eshun

Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman’s Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity—a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape.

Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community.

By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of “the queer,” the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education’s response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan’s “ab-sens” and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, Almodóvar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory’s engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing.

Craig Owens (1950-1990) a bouleversé la théorie de l’art en une décennie d’intense travail. À la fin des années 1970, aux États-Unis, il s’engage dans l’aventure intellectuelle postmoderne, en quête d’alternatives à un discours moderniste cramponné aux problèmes formels. Owens se penche sur des pratiques artistiques conçues à la croisée des médiums, comme celles de Robert Smithson ou de Trisha Brown. Lecteur des philosophes poststructuralistes, il soutient que les oeuvres se composent de signes ouverts à l’interprétation. Owens place ainsi les spectateur·ices au premier plan, tout en apportant une inscription théorique inédite aux performances de Laurie Anderson et aux oeuvres postconceptuelles de Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine ou Martha Rosler. Attentif au genre des artistes et inspiré par des réflexions sur le pouvoir du regard masculin, Owens écrit ensuite sur le féminisme et la domination. Ses essais prennent une tonalité sociale et politique. Ils touchent aussi à des questions ouvertes par les études postcoloniales. Autant de recherches interrompues par le sida, dont Owens meurt en 1990. 

Ce recueil, établi, introduit et traduit par Gaëtan Thomas, permet de suivre les expérimentations d’une oeuvre portée par une réflexivité exceptionnelle.

Gaëtan Thomas est historien (médialab Sciences Po, Paris). Il a établi le recueil Pictures: S’approprier la photographie, New York 1979-2014 (Le Point du Jour, 2016) qui rassemble des textes de Douglas Crimp.

A provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles' Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture.

"Zupančič writes with rare lucidity and patience for exposition, helped along by a talent for turning peculiar phrases or seemingly senseless jokes into full-blown insights. Her ideas are fresh, as if they hailed from some open air beyond the clutter of current theoretical quarrels. This brilliant account of Antigone breaks new ground for philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political and feminist theory."—Joan Copjec, Brown University

There is probably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and creative response than Sophocles' A ntigone. What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? To what kind of always contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond?  

The violence in Antigone is the opposite of "graphic" as we have come to know it in movies and in the media; rather, it is sharp and piercing, it goes straight to the bone. It is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. From this question of violence, the author turns to questions of funerary rites and of the relation of Antigone's singularizing claims to her universal appeal. What, Zupančič asks, does this particular (Oedipal) family's misfortune, of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, share with the general condition of humanity? This forces us to confront the seemingly self-evident question: "What is incest?"  

Let Them Rot is Alenka Zupančič's absorbing guided tour of the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues arising from the Theban trilogy. Her original and surprising account illuminates the play's ongoing relevance and invites a wide readership to become captivated by its themes.  

Alenka Zupančič is Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her books include What IS Sex?, The Odd One In: On Comedy, and Ethics of the Real.