The Ruins of Solitude

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

While we conventionally define solitude as the absence of relation, The Ruins of Solitude takes up solitude as a rubric of legible subjectivity that regulates what it means to interact with and make meaning within a material world. Working to imagine an alternative to solitude, the book considers how this mode of embodiment intersects with[…]

Taunting the Useful

FORTHCOMING Summer 2023

In an epoch driven by hyper-consumption and marvelously destructive futility, and in the context of a hegemonic utilitarianism where one goes to university to work rather than to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” the concept of the useful is perhaps one most in need of interrogation. Taunting the Useful seeks to unsettle notions of[…]

all except you

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Published: 04/27/2023

“I cover Steinberg with adjectives, which are like vibrations—multiple, rapid—that this lively oeuvre arouses in me.” Roland Barthes’s consideration of the drawings of New York artist Saul Steinberg — originally an artist book posthumously published in France in 1983 — is historically important as one of the last remaining books in Barthes’s oeuvre to be[…]

Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI

Published: 03/02/2023

Before the company OpenAI publicly released their ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022, Robert Leib had been a tester in OpenAI’s beta playground for GPT-3, a powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine — a chatbot, or artificial intelligence. Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI is a series of dialogues between Leib, a continental philosopher, and GPT-3’s hive mind[…]

dis/cord: Thinking Sound through Agential Realism

Published: 03/24/2022

dis/cord is an experiment in reading sound. Embarking from Karen Barad’s early work on agential realism, it diffracts quantum physics through sound art, finding the sympathetic resonances that allow them to speak together. dis/cord believes in the materialism of sound, and strives not to understand it, but to become entangled with it. It asserts that[…]

The Angels Won’t Help You

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Published: 12/22/2022

The Angels Won’t Help You is a book about the uniqueness and primacy of help, particularly in relation to care, love, and caritas. It relies heavily on psychoanalytic and philosophical accounts of help and care and finds that help requires the establishment of a real relationship between persons, where help is given and received in[…]

Letters on the Autonomy Project

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Published: 06/02/2022

In the face of rising authoritarianism and on the heels of urgent struggle, autonomy calls to us. How might we excavate the theory and history of autonomous politics to arrive at new possibilities for radical democracy and the radical imaginary? How can we rethink the ways in which artistic autonomy is theorized and practiced beyond[…]

The Romanian Sentiment of Being

Published: 03/17/2022

The link between language and thought formed a major new exploration of twentieth-century philosophy. Languages nuance our ideas and perceptions. Though from various angles, Heidegger, Derrida, Wittgenstein forged new ways of understanding the relationship between our views of the external world and our culturally and linguistically pre-determined modes of expression. Another giant in this field[…]