Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida

Published: 05/15/2017

In 1980, Jacques Derrida published La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà. At the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the English translation, Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida revisits this seminal work in Derrida’s oeuvre. Derrida himself described The Post Card in his preface as “the remainders of a destroyed correspondence,” stretching from 1977 to 1979. A cryptic text,[…]

Language Parasites: Of Phorontology

Published: 05/04/2017

Who speaks when you speak? Who writes when you write? Is it “you”—is it the “I” that you think you are? Or are we the chance inheritors of an invasive, exterior parasite—a parasite that calls itself “Being” or “Language?” If our sense of self is best defined on the basis of an exterior, parasitical force[…]

The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits

Published: 12/08/2017

What strange transactions take place in the mobile spaces between loci? How does the flow of forces between fixed points enliven texts, suggest new connections, and map out the dizzying motion of myriad interactions? The essays in this volume were first presented at the 2014 New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland where a meeting[…]

Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare

Imprint: Dead Letter Office

Published: 03/02/2017

Kill Boxes addresses the legacy of US-sponsored torture, indefinite detention, and drone warfare by deciphering the shocks of recognition that humanistic and artistic responses to violence bring to consciousness if readers and viewers have eyes to face them. Beginning with an analysis of the ways in which the hooded man from Abu Ghraib became iconic,[…]

Centaurs, Rioting in Thessaly

Published: 01/09/2018

This book treads new paths through the labyrinths of our human thought. It meanders through the darkness to encounter the monsters at the heart of the maze: Minotaurs, Centaurs, Automata, Makers, Humans. One part of our human thought emerges from classical Ionia and Greek civilisation more generally. We obsessively return to that thought, tread again[…]

Murder Ballads

Published: 06/27/2016

England, 1798. You buy a book of poems. An anonymous volume. You carry it home in your jacket pocket, set it on a table in your sitting room while you munch a midday meal of meat and bread. . . . In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were engaged in a top secret experiment. This was[…]

To Be, or Not to Be: Paraphrased

Imprint: Uitgeverij

Published: 06/17/2016

To Be, or Not to Be: Paraphrased is an expanding deconstruction of Hamlet’s famous existential question, achieved by putting the line through paraphrasing software 50 times. With each permutation, the quotation grows longer and its meaning is distorted, causing the question to question its own existence by acting as a faulty self-replicator, a nonsensical self-affirmation that[…]

As If: Essays in As You Like It

Imprint: Dead Letter Office

Published: 12/29/2016

Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a play without a theme. Instead, it repeatedly poses one question in a variety of forms: What if the world were other than it is? As You Like It is a set of experiments in which its characters conditionally change an aspect of their world and see what comes[…]