Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 08/02/2015
In a 1917 letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin writes, “Theory is like a surging sea.” This small book takes more than its title from that line—it takes that line as a point of departure in Erich Auerbach’s sense, an Ansatzpunkt, as a compositional principle so that what follows can be read in its entirety[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 12/04/2014
Queer Insists is a memorial essay, a work of mourning, written for the queer theorist and performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013) shortly after his untimely death in December 2013. In a series of fragments, not unlike Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary, Michael O’Rourke shares memories of Muñoz, the stories and reflections of his friends in[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 12/28/2014
In I Open Fire, translated from Polish into English, David Pol presents an ontology of war in the form of the lyric poem. “Do you hear what I’m shooting at you?” In I Open Fire, all relation is warfare. Minefields compromise movement. Intention aims. Touch burns. Sex explodes bodies. Time ticks in bomb countdowns. Sound[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 02/08/2015
[Given, If, Then] attempts to conceive a possibility of reading, through a set of readings: reading being understood as the relation to an Other that occurs prior to any semantic or formal identification, and, therefore, prior to any attempt at assimilating, or appropriating, what is being read to the one who reads. As such, it[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 03/15/2015
Atopological Trilogy creates new concepts for Deleuze-Guattarian thought without any heed for sectarian, sermonising, or dutiful readings of the philosophers. In Part I of the trilogy, “Becoming-Sexual of the Sexual,” Aracagök demonstrates the ways in which quantum theory and the concept of “complementarity” inform Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, especially in relation to “becoming” in general and “becoming-woman”[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office, Punctum Records
Published: 06/30/2014
Companion CD available for $15.00 HERE: Minóy on Limited Edition Cassette (*SOLD OUT) Minóy is a rescue operation with several life rafts. Minóy-the-book provides an introduction and overview to the important noise music artist Minóy — the pseudonym of American electronic art musician and sound artist Stanley Keith Bowsza (1951-2010). Minóy’s audio compositions, often conjuring[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 01/26/2015
Read a review of Escargotesque in Digital America HERE. “Experience” is a concept paradoxically deployed to accentuate the aconceptual. Although thinking, knowing, reflecting, and analyzing are kinds of experiences, invocations of “experience” typically direct our attention to what is immediate, embodied, unrepresented, unthought, even unthinkable. And yet, whether by learning experience, traumatic experience, life experience,[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 04/01/2014
The Communism of Thought takes as its point of departure a passage in a letter from Dionys Mascolo to Gilles Deleuze: “I have called this communism of thought in the past. And I placed it under the auspices of Hölderlin, who may have only fled thought because he was unable to live it: ‘The life[…]