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[…]

Static Palace

Published: 12/01/2022

In the face of unimaginably violent systems, our most vulnerable bodies — sick, disabled, unable to rise from bed — offer the resistance of imperative vulnerability. What can we learn from the body that cannot help but fail? How can porosity perform treachery within entrenched opressions? What kind of reading and relationship to text can[…]

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[…]

Sweet Spots: Writing the Connective Tissue of Relation

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Published: 12/30/2021

Sweet Spots thinks transversally across language and body, and between text and tissue. This assemblage of essays collectively proposes that words—that is, language that lands as written text—are more-than-human material. And, these materials, composed of forces and flows and tendencies, are capable of generating text-flesh that grows into a thinking in the making. The practice[…]

Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Actual Occasion

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Published: 07/08/2021

Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Actual Occasion is the third in a series of three novellas emerging from a writing practice that taps the cusp of consciousness between dreaming and waking. An Actual Occasion revisits the viral transitioning of the becoming rat-woman from Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: A Novelty (vol. 1 in[…]

Trickbox of Memory: Essays on Power and Disorderly Pasts

Published: 12/08/2020

Reach into this trickbox of memory and rummage around: you may find a tiny spaceship, or perhaps a signpost, a parade, a raised fist, an entire museum. The essays in Trickbox of Memory: Essays on Power and Disorderly Pasts draw on literary criticism, post-qualitative inquiry, new materialisms, and political activism to dismember and reanimate the[…]

Speculations II

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Published: 07/30/2020

From the Editorial Introduction: If the first volume of Speculations was enough of an explicit wager, a willing blind leap in the terra incognita of the publishing world, then this volume forces us to stop and evaluate the reasons for the journal’s protracted existence. This is all the more important when we consider how the[…]

Speculations I

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Published: 07/30/2020

From the Editorial Introduction: Since I am convinced that nobody reads editorials I will keep my remarks brief. Putting together the inaugural issue of Speculations has been an unusual experience. It has depended on the collusion of fellow speculative types, the help of many anonymous reviewers, the endless patience of designer Thomas Gokey, and more[…]