Dear LGBTQ-HISTORY Subscribers,
We would like to announce a new publication from Duke University Press, which we hope will be of interest.
Philosophy
for Spiders
On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker
McKenzie Wark
https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478014683/philosophy-for-spiders/
Receive a 20% discount online*:
CSLF2021
*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 30th June 2022. Discount only applies to the CAP website.
“In this brilliant reading of one of the late twentieth century’s most interesting writers, language ‘messes with flesh’ while ‘logic messes with language,’ transmuting Kathy
Acker’s sign-worlds into philosophy. I love the fearless way in which McKenzie Wark thinks. I also love the calm voice with which she walks herself (and us) through difficult spaces in theory and memory. Exploring how gender structures writing in ways related
to, but ultimately different from, the norms that structure heterosexuality,
Philosophy for Spiders radically expands the field of trans girl lit.”—Sianne
Ngai, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form
“McKenzie Wark’s highly personal sex memoir evolves the growing ‘My Kathy’ genre in trans directions. This impassioned, reasonable, and subjective tribute makes more room for
Kathy to live on as the future’s own creations.”—Sarah Schulman, author of
Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993
It’s time to recognize Kathy Acker as one of the great postwar American writers. Over the decades readers have found a punk Acker, a feminist Acker, a queer Acker, a kink Acker,
and an avant-garde Acker. In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark adds
a trans Acker. Wark recounts her memories of Acker (with whom she had a passionate affair) and gives a comprehensive reading of her published and archived works. Wark finds not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender
but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy’s purview. As Wark shows, Acker’s engagement with topics such as masturbation, sadism, body-building, and
penetrative sex are central to her distinct phenomenology of the body that theorizes the body’s relation to others, the city, and technology.
McKenzie Wark is Professor of Media and Culture at Eugene Lang College at The
New School and author of several books, including Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century,
Reverse Cowgirl, and
Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Her correspondence with Kathy
Acker was published as I’m Very Into You.
With all best wishes,
Combined Academic Publishers
Duke University Press | September 2021 | 216pp | 9781478014683 | PB | £16.99*
*Price subject to change.