The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness

Published: 11/04/2017

Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to “cute” in the sense of “attractive, pretty, charming” to 1834. More recently, Sianne Ngai has offered a critical overview of the cuteness of the twentieth-century avant-garde within the context[…]

The Republic of Cthulhu: Lovecraft, the Weird Tale, and Conspiracy Theory

Published: 11/07/2016

If parapolitics, a branch of radical criminology that studies the interactions between public entities and clandestine agencies, is to develop as an academic discipline, then it must develop a coherent theory of aesthetics in order to successfully perform its primary function: to render perceptible extra-judicial phenomena that have hitherto resisted formal classification. Wilson offers the work[…]

Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street

Published: 04/25/2016

It always seems useful to situate a discourse in the wider context of one’s ongoing research. This new book begins where the previous one, Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence, ended. I wrote it in 2010 and my friends Baraona Pohl and César Reyes had the kindness to publish it in 2012. That book started with the hypothesis that architecture is inherently violent because of the way it dissects space and because of the resulting spatial organization of bodies. Architecture is a social discipline, and therefore this violence always ends up as an instrument of politics, whether it’s done consciously or not.

Thoughtrave: An Interdimensional Conversation with Lady Gaga

Published: 04/07/2016

Thoughtrave is the immediate and most detailed archive of Lady Gaga’s emotional, intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual evolution, a reclaiming of her art (and humanity) from within the center of her celebrity during one of the most difficult transitions of her career: Summer 2013­–Fall 2014. I don’t like being used to make money. I feel sad[…]

CMOK to YOu To

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Published: 09/15/2016

CMOK to YOu To presents the 2015 email correspondence of the Serbian-born poet, art critic and playwright Nina Živančević and Canadian cultural theorist Marc James Léger. In December of 2014 Léger invited Živančević to contribute a text to the second volume of the book he was editing, The Idea of the Avant Garde – And[…]

The Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche and the Network-Centric Condition

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Published: 09/12/2016

Can Nietzsche be considered a thinker of media and mediation, as the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler declared in his influential book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter? Nietzsche was a truly transdisciplinary thinker, one who never fit into his own nineteenth-century surroundings and who recognized himself as a “herald and precursor” of the future, of our globally-reticulated[…]

Extraterritorialities in Occupied Worlds

Published: 02/16/2016

The concept of extraterritoriality designates certain relationships between space, law, and representation. This collection of essays explores contemporary manifestations of extraterritoriality and the diverse ways in which the concept has been put to use in various disciplines. Some of the essays were written especially for this volume; others are brought here together for the first[…]

Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics

Published: 12/10/2015

READ Lester Spence on how he conceptualized this book as a sort of critical response to Cornel West’s Race Matters and David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and why he chose punctum books as his publisher, HERE. Over the past several years scholars, activists, and analysts have begun to examine the growing divide between[…]