The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Responsibility

What do the invention of anaesthetics in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Nazis’ use of cocaine, and the development of Prozac have in common? The answer is that they’re all products of the same logic that defines our contemporary era: ‘the age of anaesthesia’. Laurent de Sutter shows how large aspects of our lives are now characterised by the management of our emotions through drugs, ranging from the everyday use of sleeping pills to hard narcotics. Chemistry has become so much a part of us that we can’t even see how much it has changed us.

In this era, being a subject doesn’t simply mean being subjected to powers that decide our lives: it means that our very emotions have been outsourced to chemical stimulation. Yet we don’t understand why the drugs that we take are unable to free us from fatigue and depression, and from the absence of desire that now characterizes our psychopolitical condition.  We have forgotten what it means to be excited because our only excitement has become drug-induced.  We have to abandon the narcotic stimulation that we’ve come to rely on and find a way back to the collective excitement that is narcocapitalism’s greatest fear.

Is violent self-defense ethical? In the history of colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, there has long been a dividing line between bodies “worthy of defending” and those who who have been disarmed and rendered defenseless. That those subject to the most violence-the enslaved, the colonized, the oppressed-have been forcibly made defenseless raises, for any movement of liberation, a question: Can violence be used in the interests of self-defense?

Philosopher Elsa Dorlin looks across the global history of the left to trace the politics, philosophy, and ethics of self-defense. With a historical gaze that captures slave revolts, British suffragists’ training in jujitsu, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the Black Panther Party, queer neighborhood patrols, and Black Lives Matter, Dorlin discovers a “martial ethics of the self”: a practice in which violent self-defense is the only means for the oppressed to ensure survival and to build a livable future.

Translated from the French by Kieran Aarons.

On queering censorship in the Aichi Triennale 2019.

Performance Research pg 84-91, On Diffraction, Volume 25, No 5, July/August 2020.

The concluding volume to Moten’s landmark trilogy consent not to be a single being.

The second volume of the landmark trilogy consent not to be a single being.

Draws on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition to support, inspire and extend contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique.

Investigates critical approaches to performance, ultimately aiming to stimulate new discussion between theorists and practitioners.

Part 2 of a serialised story.

Explores Ann Lee as the subject par excellence of contemporary neoliberal capitalism.

Looks at two pieces which  use the ‘scene’ of wreckage to pursue coherence.

Includes: Pride (poem), Alter treego (poem), Fat Kid Manifesto (poem, extract from Fat Kid Running), Daring the City to Fall into it (poems + a short story), No guilt in Pleasure (zine)