Bøger udgivet af Punctum Books

Porno-Graphics and Porno-Tactics asks whether, and how, it is possible to re-appropriate pornography and think through it critically and creatively for a project of liberation. In the different contributions which make up this deliberately heterogeneous collection of short, non-canonical essays, such quest proceeds by re-articulating the aporias of desire, intimacy, touch and seduction. It also relates them to claims of visibility, visions of emancipation and its failures, as well as to the politics of violence that we get exposed to through circulating images and affects. This is an attempt to exceed the limits set by and for ourselves in relation to how we connect to our own bodies, to the bodies of our lovers and to the bodies of the theories we live with, sleep with and dream about - in short, to all that we get attached to.The editors and contributors of this collection do not claim the euphoric potentiality of pornography as necessarily subversive and emancipatory, but open up to the possibilities of re-shaping it (in textual, contextual, intertextual, but also affective and embodied forms) through different graphic and tactical/tactile inscriptions. On the one hand, authors reflect on definitions and practices of pornography as a genre adopting specific codes and canons, whether it is concerned with sex acts and the industry of porn or with other predominant forms of representation and the structures of power underlying them. On the other hand, chapters relate to the more affective, libidinal, synaesthetic and inter/subjective dimensions of pornography, and on the capacity of different reappropriations to subvert its limits.TABLE OF CONTENTSIntroduction. Challenging Pornography, Challenged by Pornography: From Monstrous Tactics to Enactments of Poiesis - Eirini Avramopoulou and Irene PeanoInterview with Emilie Jouvet - Eirini Avramopoulou, Irene Peano, Adele TulliOpen Letter on Empowerment and Queer Porn - Kathryn Fischer (a.k.a. "Mad Kate")A Seductive Intrigue of Sexuality? - Sinan GoknurThe Pornographic Everyday - Namita AavritiLook! But Also, Touch!: Theorizing Images of Trans Eroticism Beyond a Politics of Visual Essentialism - Eliza SteinbockPornography for Blind and Visually Impaired People: On Tactility and Monstrosity - Elia CharidiA Note on Pornography and Violence - Mantas Kvedaravicius

Using the Western tradition of metaphysical and political thought as a backdrop, Critique of Sovereignty (a work in 4 volumes) re-examines the concept of sovereignty in order to better understand why our ethical values and technical capacities often seem so divorced from our lived realities. On the one hand, ostensibly self-enclosed entities like the nation-state and the person are rhetorically bolstered as sites of technical agency and/or moral responsibility. On the other hand, these same entities appear fragile - if not purely fictional - in relation to ever ongoing tidal processes such as the migration, diffusion, and conglomeration of bodies, capital, ideas, etc. While some of our institutions might work some of the time, they always seem to work differently than we like to think they do. Accordingly, the forging of more humane institutions might very well entail if not require ways of thinking that strive to undo the self-imagined binds, exceptions, and sureties of thought for the sake of embracing a continuity with all that withers, decays, and falls away.Book I, "Contemporary Theories of Sovereignty," compares the varied interpretations of sovereignty given by a range of 20th-century political theorists (Maritain, Foucault, Derrida, Schmitt, Agamben, Hardt, and Negri) with Jean Bodin's initial outline of the concept, rendered at the outset of modern political thought in the 16th century. The analytic framework of sovereignty encountered in these comparative readings provides an initial point of departure for unfolding a method of critique appropriate to the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty is an ideal starting point for a critique of the deadlocks between thought and reality for a simple reason: it doesn't actually exist. When it serves as a guide to action, sovereignty may be regarded as a particularly captivating fantasy. The closer it appears, the further it recedes, and, too often, the more vigorously it is pursued.Other books to appear later in this series include Book II: The Concept of Sovereignty in the History of Philosophy, Book III: Aristotle's Politics, and Book IV: Consequences of Sovereignty.

MOONBIT is a hybrid work comprised of experimental poetry and a critical theory of the poetics and politics of computer code. It offers an extended intellectual and creative engagement with the affordances of computer software through multiple readings and re-writings of a singular text, the source code of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer or the "AGC." MOONBIT re-marks and remixes the code that made space travel possible. Half of this book is erasure poetry that uses the AGC code as the source text, building on the premise that code can speak beyond its functional purpose.When we think about the 1960s U.S. space program and obscure scientific computer code, we might not first think about the Watts riots, Shakespeare, Winnie the Pooh, T.S. Eliot, or scatological jokes. Yet these cultural references and influences along with many more are scattered throughout the body of the code that powered the compact digital computer that successfully guided astronauts to the Moon and back and in July of 1969. MOONBIT unravels and rewrites the many embedded cultural references that were braided together within the language resources of mid-century computer code.MOONBIT also provides a gentle, non-expert introduction to the text of the AGC code, to digital poetics, and to critical code studies. Outlining a capacious interpretive practice, MOONBIT takes up all manner of imaginative decodings and recodings of this code. It introduces some of the major existing approaches to the study of code and culture while provide multiple readings of the source code along with an explanation and theorization of the way in which the code works, as both a computational and a cultural text.JAMES E. DOBSON teaches at Dartmouth College. He is the author of "Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology" (Illinois, 2019) and "Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies" (Palgrave, 2017), as well as essays and book chapters on intellectual history, American literature, and computational methods.RENA J. MOSTEIRIN is the author of "Nick Trail's Thumb" (Kore Press, 2008), selected for the Kore Press Short Fiction Chapbook Award by Lydia Davis. Her work has been featured in the anthologies "code {poems}" (Barcelona: Impremta Badia, 2012), "The Waiting Room Reader II" (Fort Lee: Cavankerry Press/UPNE, 2013), and a wide variety of places in print and online including New York Magazine, The Puritan, Poetry Crush, Ozone Park, and elsewhere. Mosteirin is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine.

"There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory," writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories - especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what a person is and how her history should be read. At the same time, other modes of explanation have been offered by popular and mass culture. In these domains, sexual desire is not deemed the core story of life; it is mixed up with romance, a particular version of the story of love.In this small theoretical novella-cum-dictionary entry, Lauren Berlant engages love and desire in separate entries. In the first entry, Desire mainly describes the feeling one person has for something else: it is organized by psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and tells briefly the history of their importance in critical theory and practice. The second entry, on Love, begins with an excursion into fantasy, moving away from the parent-child structure so central to psychoanalysis and looking instead at the centrality of context, environment, and history. The entry on Love describes some workings of romance across personal life and commodity culture, the place where subjects start to think about fantasy on behalf of their actual lives.Whether viewed psychoanalytically, institutionally, or ideologically, love is deemed always an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no love. Desire/Love takes us on a tour of all of the things that sentence might mean.

In the early twentieth century, Uchiyama Gudō, Seno'o Girō, Lin Qiuwu, and others advocated a Buddhism that was radical in two respects. Firstly, they adopted a more or less naturalist stance with respect to Buddhist doctrine and related matters, rejecting karma or other supernatural beliefs. And secondly, they held political and economic views that were radically anti-hegemonic, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary. Taking the idea of such a "radical Buddhism" seriously, A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism asks whether it is possible to develop a philosophy that is simultaneously naturalist, anti-capitalist, Buddhist, and consistent. Rather than a study of radical Buddhism, then, this book is an attempt to radicalize it.The foundations of this "radicalized radical Buddhism" are provided by a realist interpretation of Yogācāra, elucidated and elaborated with some help from thinkers in the broader Tiantai/Tendai tradition and American philosophers Donald Davidson and W.V.O. Quine. A key implication of this foundation is that only this world and only this life are real, from which it follows that if Buddhism aims to alleviate suffering, it has to do so in this world and in this life. Twentieth-century radical Buddhists (as well as some engaged Buddhists) came to a similar conclusion, often expressed in their aim to realize "a Buddha land in this world."Building on this foundation, but also on Mahāyāna moral philosophy, this book argues for an ethics and social philosophy based on a definition of evil as that what is or should be expected to cause death or suffering. On that ground, capitalism should be rejected indeed, but utopianism must be treated with caution as well, which raises questions about what it means - from a radicalized radical Buddhist perspective - to aim for a Buddha land in this world. Lajos Brons is a Dutch philosopher and social scientist living in Japan. After receiving a PhD from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands for a dissertation on an aspect of the history and philosophy of the social sciences, he gradually moved further and further into philosophical territory. Currently, Lajos is teaching logic, ethics, and philosophy at a university in Tokyo. His research interests are divided over two broad areas in philosophy: one is in the overlap of (meta-)ethics and social/political philosophy; the other is in the intersection of philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. Research in the former focuses on the relations between death, suffering, and compassion. Research in the latter concerns the relations between language, thought, and reality, and is heavily influenced by the philosophies of Donald Davidson and W.V.O. Quine, and by Buddhist philosophy. More information about publications and research interests, as well as Lajos's blog can be found at www.lajosbrons.net

"Examines the chronology of the Church's acquisition of wealth, and particularly of landed property, as well as the distribution of its income, in the period between the conversion of Constantine and the eighth century"-- Provided by publisher.

The concept of extraterritoriality designates certain relationships between space, law, and representation. This collection of essays explores contemporary manifestations of extraterritoriality and the diverse ways in which the concept has been put to use in various disciplines. The inquiry into extraterritoriality found in these essays is an invitation to navigate the margins of the legal-juridical and the political, but also the edges of forms of representation and poetics.Within its accepted legal and political contexts, the concept of extraterritoriality has traditionally been applied to people and to spaces. In the first case, extraterritorial arrangements could either exclude or exempt an individual or a group of people from the territorial jurisdiction in which they were physically located; in the second, such arrangements could exempt or exclude a space from the territorial jurisdiction by which it was surrounded. The special status accorded to people and spaces had political, economic, and juridical implications, ranging from immunity and various privileges to extreme disadvantages. In both cases, a person or a space physically included within a certain territory was removed from the usual system of laws and subjected to another. It is this notion of being held at a legal distance around which the concept of extraterritoriality may be understood as revolving.This volume is a part of Amir and Sela's Exterritory Project, an ongoing art project that wishes to encourage both the theoretical and practical exploration of ideas concerning extraterritoriality in an interdisciplinary context. The project aims not only to draw on existing definitions of extraterritoriality but seeks also to charge it with new meanings, searching for ways in which the notion of extraterritoriality could produce a critique of discriminating power structures and re-articulate new practical, conceptual, and poetical possibilities.TABLE OF CONTENTS //Maayan Amir and Ruti Sela, "Introduction: Extraterritorialities in Occupied Worlds"Part I: Extraterritorial Ethics / Emmanuel Levinas, "The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other" - Robert Bernasconi, "Extraterritoriality: Outside the Subject, Outside the State" - Zygmunt Bauman: "The World Inhospitable to Levinas" - Steven Galt Crowell: "Authentic Thinking and Phenomenological Method"Part II: Extraterritorial Geographies / Giorgio Agamben, "Beyond Human Rights" - Anselm Franke, Eyal Weizman and Ines Weizman, "Islands: The Geography of Extraterritoriality" - Stuart Elden, "Outside Territory" - Angus Cameron, "Where Has All the (Xeno)money Gone?" - Victoria Bernal, "Extraterritoriality, Diaspora, and the Space of Cyberspace"Part III: Extraterritorial Crimes / Mireille Hildebrandt, "Extraterritorial Jurisdiction to Enforce in Cyberspace? Bodin, Schmitt, Grotius in Cyberspace" - Julien Seroussi, "The Rise of Legal Cosmopolitism: Denationalization and Territorialization of Law" - Cedric Ryngaert, "Extraterritorial Action in the Global Interest: The Promise of Unilateralism" - Ed Morgan, "Franz Kafka: Extraterritorial Criminal Law/ The Aesthetics of International Law"Part IV: Extraterritorial Poetics/ Martin Jay, "The Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer" - Matthew Hart & Tania Lown-Hecht, "The Extraterritorial Poetics of W. G. Sebald" - Homi Bhabha, "The World and the Home" - Gerhard Richter, "Homeless Images: Kracauer's Extraterritoriality, Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other" - Caryl Emerson, "The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and the Internalization of Language"Part V: Extraterritorial Objects / Theodor W. Adorno, "Valéry Proust Museum" - Graham Harman, "Subspatial and Subtemporal"

Place of publication from publisher's Web site.

Clinical Encounters in Sexuality makes an intervention into the fields of clinical psychoanalysis and sexuality studies, in an effort to think about a range of issues relating to sexuality from a clinical psychoanalytic perspective. This book concentrates on a number of concepts, namely identity, desire, pleasure, perversion, ethics and discourse. The editors, Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson, have chosen queer theory, a sub-field of sexuality studies, as an interlocutor for the clinical contributors, because it is at the forefront of theoretical considerations of sexuality, as well as being both reliant upon and suspicious of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and discourse. The book brings together a number of psychoanalytic schools of thought and clinical approaches, which are sometimes at odds with one another and thus tend not to engage in dialogue about divisive theoretical concepts and matters of clinical technique. Traditions represented here include: Freudian, Kleinian, Independent, Lacanian, Jungian, and Relational. The volume also stages, for the first time, a sustained clinical psychoanalytic engagement with queer theory. By virtue of its editorial design, this book aims to foster a self-reflective attitude in clinical readers about sexuality which historically has tended toward reification. The central questions we present to readers to think about are: What are the discourses of sexuality underpinning psychoanalysis, and how do they impact on clinical practice?In what ways does sexuality get played out for, and between, the psychoanalytic practitioner and the patient?How do social, cultural and historical attitudes towards sexuality impact on the transference and countertransference, consciously and unconsciously?Why is sexuality so prone to reification?Divided into three sections, Clinical Encounters in Sexuality begins with six chapters on important themes in queer theory: identity, desire, perversion, pleasure, discourse and ethics. Section two includes fourteen responses to the chapters in section one by practising psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists from a number of traditions. They work with adults and/or children and adolescents. Section three features seven short commentaries on the nature of the encounters enacted by the book, by leading thinkers whose own clinical practice and/or theoretical work engages directly with both discourses: psychoanalytic and queer. The book is edited by two psychoanalytic practitioners - one Kleinian, one Freudian-Lacanian - who also have research expertise in sexuality studies. All pieces are new and have been commissioned.

Victor J. Vitanza (author of Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing) continues to rethink the problem of sexual violence in cinema and how rape is often represented in "chaste" ways, in the form of a Chaste Cinematics. Vitanza continues to discuss Chaste Cinematics as participating in transdisciplinary-rhetorical traditions that establish the very foundations (groundings, points of stasis) for nation states and cultures. In this offering, however, the initial grounding for the discussions is "base materialism" (George Bataille): divine filth, the sacred and profane. It is this post-philosophical base materialism that destabilizes binaries, fixedness, and brings forth excluded thirds. Vitanza asks: why is it that a repressed third, or a third figure, returns, most strangely as a "product" of rape and torture? He works with Jean-Paul Sartre and Page duBois's suggestion that the "product" is a new "species."Always attempting unorthodox ways of approaching social problems, Vitanza organizes his table of contents as a DVD menu of "Extras" (supplements). This menu includes Alternate Endings and Easter Eggs as well as an Excursus, which invokes readers to take up the political exigency of the DVD-Book. Vitanza's first "Extra" studies a trio of films that need to be reconsidered, given what they offer as insights into Chaste Cinematics: Amadeus (a mad god), Henry Fool (a foolish god), and Multiple Maniacs (a divine god who is raped and eats excrement). The second examines Helke Sander's documentary Liberators Take Liberties, which re-thinks the rapes of German women by the Russians and Allies during the Battle of Berlin. The third rethinks Margie Strosser's video-film Rape Stories that calls for revenge. In the Alternate Endings, Vitanza rethinks the problem of reversibility in G. Noé's Irréversible. In the Easter Eggs, he considers Dominique Laporte's "the Irreparable," as the object of loss and Giorgio Agamben's "the Irreparable," as hope in what is without remedy. The result is not another film-studies book, but a new genre, a new set of rhetorics, for new ways of thinking about cinematics, perhaps postcinematics. Victor J. Vitanza is Professor of English and Rhetorics and is the founding Director of the Ph.D. program in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design in the College of Architecture, Art, and Humanities, at Clemson University. He is also Professor of Rhetoric and Philosophy, as well as the holder of the Jean-François Lyotard Chair in the Media and Communication Division at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. He is the Editor of PRE/TEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory. His books include Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing: Chaste Rape (Palgrave, 2011), Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric (SUNY, 1997), Writing Histories of Rhetoric (Southern Illinois, 1993); and PRE/TEXT: A Retrospective (Pittsburgh, 1993).

CMOK to YOu To presents the 2015 email correspondence of the Serbian-born poet, art critic and playwright Nina Zivančevic and Canadian cultural theorist Marc James Léger. In December of 2014 Léger invited Zivančevic to contribute a text to the second volume of the book he was editing, The Idea of the Avant Garde - And What It Means Today. Taken with each other's idiosyncrasies, their correspondence gradually shifted from amiable professional exchanges and the eventual failure to organize a scholarly event to that of collaborating on some kind of writing project. Several titles were attempted for the eventual book - Marshmallow Muse: The Exact and Irreverent Letters of MJL and NZ, The Orange Jelly Bean, or, I Already Am Eating from the Trash Can All the Time: The Name of This Trash Can Is Ideology, The Secreted Correspondence of Mme Chatelet and Voltaire, and I'm Taken: The E-Pistolary Poetry of Kit le Minx and Cad - but none of these proved to be more telling than CMOK, the Serbian word for kiss, which sums up the authors' quest for "harmony" in an altogether imperfect world and literary medium.In this book, names of real people were changed in order to protect those who might otherwise be offended by the unguarded and absurdist commentary of its authors. Despite this fact, it is the fragility and elasticity of the writers' superegos that is tested as they vacillate from personal registers to intellectual strata. At once a cis-avant-gardist's exploration of anti-art and a poet's claim to some weak form of autonomy, CMOK delights in both the pleasures of casual email and the sublime realizations of Jacques Lacan's theory of sexuation. CMOK is a hybrid genre and a quest into the real of virtuality that defies the literary standards. Its authors, who never met, answer one another's basic needs and questions, separated as they are by time zones and the ocean, but not culturally or spiritually.

Over the past ten years, Organs Everywhere (OE) has promoted conversations that approach architectural design from the edges of the discipline - testing its boundaries, technologies, methods and (e)valuation systems, and keeping them unstable. It has valued transdisciplinary, speculative and irreverent explorations over strict publishing formats and academic purity, promoting a profanatory and open-ended ethos.Each issue has strung together disparate organs and limbs, activating precarious couplings and associations, and testing new metabolisms and assemblages. And so does the first volume of OE Case Files continue its commitment to the making and unmaking of monsters, both by anthologising past contributions into fresh configurations and designs, and by combining them with entirely new articles and voices. Here, philosophers, designers, experimental architects, artists, science fiction writers, activists, and poets shift, expand and re-imagine notions of space, time, inhabitation, technology, knowledge, use, value and experience. A patchwork of essays, stories, design experiments, buildings, art installations, drawings, prose poems, photographs and speculative projects collide in the book, infecting simple disciplinary orthodoxies with doubt and potentials, uncertainty and hope - indecisive photons and softness; metatactility and haunted houses; neurodiversity and protocells; prosthetics, grease and darkness; post-human scenographies, software and GPS anklets; anthropocenic devices, paprika and synthetic biology.