Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)


Return to Contents »


"But who is any longer interested in the possible?": Kathy Acker in Hell Failing Fuck You / Jake Kennedy


Abstract: In "'But who is any longer interested in the possible?': Kathy Acker in Hell Failing Fuck You" I explore and celebrate Acker's use of a tropics of failure (plagiarism, pain, terror, gender-play, bad jokes, dumbness) as an inimitable strategy for achieving counter-cultural art and community. The prose style and "scholarly" apparatus of my article reflect not only my position as a poet/academic but also attempt to model an ethical, non-authoritative, Acker-informed critical language.


I am thinking about the difference between history and myth. Or between expression and vision. The need for narrative and the simultaneous need to escape the prison-house of the story -- to misquote. What is the essay in this situation?
-- Kathy Acker, Bodies

Prologue

<1> It's my hunch that my I, maybe your I and all those other I's that might eventually arrive at the Ackerian text, must inevitably understand how little of an I, you, and we any one I can finally give to match such febrile, horrifying and committed prose. However, my I -- the I that will hardly give up even the most flimsy crutch of ego -- still wants to locate and model an appropriate ethics of reading and a complimentary politics of critical response. How can I give up, or back to, Acker!?

<2> If Acker refuses "originality," if she jettisons "decorum," if she charts the possibilities of impossibility and revels in that which looks like bad citizenry, intentional suffering, and finally a senseless courting of failure, then I propose that the goodbad reader cannot stay too neat, too full, too sure.

<3> As she moves us beyond the art of "expression" and towards the politics of vision, she wonders: what might lie behind the body of proper literary/academic "writing"? Surely Acker's impossible I's discovered much more blood and guts than we'd previously been shown in high-school. I's (I's that feel and look an awful lot like towering, unitary 1's), she demonstrated, are necessarily proofs of either collective fear or the collapse of the grand collective US. Acker's I's' fragmentation of identities do dominate but not cynically so -- there is ever the possibility of impossible posthuman community -- and therefore my I needs to see her writing-life-I (right here!) as the countless, suggestive, powerful fissures in the large glass: they've got broken trajectories, yes, and they hold light. My homage, no doubt full of I-ness (but I hope, in the end, of other-ness, too), wanderingly wonders what failure teaches -- the poetics of malfunction in Acker: how she, with her hilarious and brutalized first persons, found a way to live, write, and die as if only to make the other thrive.

Plot

<4> Abhor and Thivai are the protagonists of Empire of the Senseless. Abhor is part robot and part black.

<5> Thivai is a bastard pirate, he is a man who likes to fuck and he's often mean and violent to Abhor.

<6> The whole novel takes place on the abject sea while the Algerian revolution is going on.

<7> Acker's intertextualism is the inversion of Marcel Duchamp's Ready-made-ism. Where he takes prosaic objects (shovels, hat racks, toilets), signs them, and thus flags their artistic value, she takes artistic value (canonical texts, proper language, beauty), signs them, and thus flags their prosaicness: more than that, how they are made of shit. Reciprocal textual ready-mades. Except Empire is somewhat different from the other novels (Don Quixote, Great Expectations) because Acker is much more suspicious of deconstruction. In an interview she stated: one has to find new myths [1]. Now Abhor is Ahab and Thivai is the carrier of HIV. Empire of the Senseless is not the failure of Moby-Dick but a different kind of dick [2] altogether. "Throughout history most normal people have thought that sailors are immoral and should be burned. Despite the Algerian revolution, this is still true. There have also and are now a few people, human fringes, scraps of dog food hidden in cracks under shoes, who say that sailors' hairs are silver and that sailors have huge dicks. Female. For today some sailors are female" (113). Abhor is the black robo-whale, too, run by Atari and Microsoft game systems that everyone wants to fuck and kill in the capitalist world. She is both Ahab and Moby, but neither as well. Through the metaphor of the mad quester and the grand elusive prize (something more than flesh, more than oil), Empire also plays out the sea-scented dilemma of the politically-committed artist in an age of advanced technological globalization. Acker's intensely multi-vocal narrative enacts a disruption of capitalist identity (the unitary self searching for more and more stuff) and thus a celebration of incoherence: she is the artist in pursuit of the real but she is simultaneously undermining the politics of such writerly desires by proving chaos with chaos [3]. Abhor says: "Since, not even clearly, I wasn't anyone, I was catatonic. Since it didn't matter what I did, it didn't matter to either the dead or to anyone alien, I decided I had to get my hair cut off. Only a criminal could get a limb cut off" (110). Everyone now knows that Ahab had a fake [4] leg but now everyone also knows that Ahab cut off his leg himself making his fake leg a fake fake leg. There was no whale there was only Ahab's phantasmatic phallus which got lost for ten years because his wife and children no longer heeded his authority. "Being maimed is the way a man shows he's a man" (202). A fake leg is a real successful leg in realist novels but a fake fake (a DIY) leg is a failure. It begins to look like Ahab was not an American hero. And it turns out that Ahab had no penis and only wanted attention with the clack clack clack of his wood foot. Now Ahab is a self-made cyborg -- he still has way more power than Kathy Acker who is also Abhor and Thivai. Ahab was afraid to suicide and Kathy Acker was not: she got cancer, he went fishing [5]. The democratic free enterprise of Moby-Dick rests on the role of Ahab's fake leg which must be protected as real for the entire narrative. If it turns out to be fake -- which it is -- then no one will be able to buy or sell anything due to total chaos.

The Fucking-up of Huck Finn, Dean Moriarty, and Jim Stark

<8> In the end tHIVai has to teach Abhor to write because she is black and she is a stupid woman. She writes her memoirs in her own blood and we get to read abjection because we know that Kathy Acker died with blood coming out of her mouth as her organs failed in real life. In the same way, Artaud died like this in order to prove his writings were not just spiced with overdose rhetoric but constituted the overdose itself. That is the difference between Kathy Acker and Margaret Atwood [6]: Kathy Acker's books are shit and Peggy's just reek (no more playing, only becoming). Shit would seem to be horrifying in its indifference to ornamentation -- packaging. Even canned shit looks a little too cute. If Acker's Thivais, Janeys, or Pussys exist they do so not to illustrate look-at-me-writing-about-horror but rather this-is-the-horror. And if the book is a pedagogy then it is not teaching you how to write it is teaching you that writing (the real shit) is always done through suicide. In real life. It must be said: her writerly senselessness is the performance of total creative failure. Look at her imaginationless shut-down: she's chucked it all and starts squatting! Abhor herself has to get all fucked and cut up before her memoirs can get going. Please see page 203 ("we sat her down in some shit to learn how to write properly") because (my palavering) this is the best page ever written by anyone in the world [7]. Acker always is worried about the Pygmalionism of being a great woman writer, the tyranny of patriarchy (even Genet/Bataille tapping the blackboard) teaching and here she fries some testicles up for naked lunch. First Abhor has to slice up her thumb for pen-ink as if her thumb is as close as she's going to get to having a third leg. The word "palavering" in the middle of the page is hilarious because Kathy Acker is showing that language is in the lie of the beholder. Now we can see how Kathy Acker's writing becomes a tattoo and that is why everyone is afraid to read it, including me. All is scarified and I suppose part of the shame of encountering a tattooed or scarred body or text is that one cannot ever fully share in the markings. Seeing the Other writing that Otherness on top of Otherness is a weird situation. In real life. Though the worst of us must only see the Eagle on the chest, or the Roses over the heart, as if these tangible ink-stuffs have been appropriated from our own "proper" traditional landscapes. Thus the Acker book always seems in the hands like a little body, something that is all tumored and exquisitely colored so that you are never sure if you are reading at all. The idea of tattooing your face is probably similar to this [8] I suppose if one is going to read they should be aware of extremists, it can't ever be the case that we want to tattoo ourselves everyday. Even sailors sniffle. And so I can't imagine what it would be like to live as Kathy Acker. As if we needed an I like me to say that.

<9> The cyborg's memoirs fail because there is not enough clarity of difference between the muscle (we will call it the biceps) now and the muscle later. If the biceps is dead right now -- if it has tissue that is all fucked up and flapping -- then we will never be able to see exactly how it rebuilds itself into failure. Abhor has strategically torn down her fibers until she is walking around like Mrs. Sags. All of the blood loss leaks out and makes a narrative of TV-dinner proportions and that is why it's so hard to read the words cunt and fuck. Perhaps we can also grant that Acker would like to brutalize Abhor herself for being such a stupid fuck: hanging around in the wrong world and reading too much Sade. De Sade. I see clearly now that Kathy Acker must not love her characters in order to avoid becoming Margaret Atwood or Franz Kafka or Samuel Beckett [9]. Do we not see that Kathy Acker was not telling jokes but writing the jokes on knives: IT'S BETTER TO DIE THAN TO YIELD TO SHIT (204)? Her muscles kept getting torn down and then rebuilt again. Until she was more buff than Captain Blood on 'roids [10]. In this way we must not ever understand Kathy Acker. We can only work-out with free-weights and try to get ripped or bigger. The men will have to kill themselves, or at least stop saying: you've written your name properly, Kathy. That is how you write your name, Bitch. Don't forget [11].

<10> It is not that men are bad it is just that they can never fail. So I am struggling to be a friend to something that is held underwater by my own grip. I can only fail into intensity while Janey, and Kathy, and Abhor, and Plath, and Tsvetaeva, and Woolf go off failing a little bit like kitten victims, straight on into more failure. It is not a failure to have your breasts removed but it is a failure to keep the breasts on the kitchen table. That is what the Law says. So -- "A great writer cannot afford to be sentimental" -- (206) if you write about your tits they are not going to stop their descent into the abject material of hell and come back to your chest cavities glowing like cereal bowls. But I don't know this. Only that Kathy's mom killed herself and spent a lot of family money before-hand. My own father wanted to kill himself but stopped because his upbringing (Canadian/male) wouldn't let him. These are the histories of failure: they play out in the sweaty ass [12] or stinky crotch of language, or "The male half of me'll rape the female half of me, which, I know, isn't very nice, but what can you do in a society which doesn't recognize human needs?" (176). It's just like you want to say "Women are crazy" and never recognize the architectural hegemony, i.e. cigars, skyscrapers, pencils, hotdogs, and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

<11> Surely it must be forbidden to fail. No one is allowed to fail either at the test or at the "real thing." "Just as the USA now desperately needed new economic markets for its coke (the mild variety) and McDonald's, so the America CIA needed new drug-test victims" (144). We are the victims of success. We are not allowed to plagiarize because that is failing to prove that we can sit straight and look at our own paper. But then we are allowed to plagiarize because old texts can be made new texts and sold for more money and then no one knows how to kill capitalism anymore because it becomes neoliberal Fluxus. When the police come to the house, however, and they still do, they want to know why Kathy Acker is still failing to stop writing about girls getting fucked by their fathers. "I think the issue of incest is very important -- we're finding out more and more that the Freudian model just isn't true. That it isn't true that most daughters desire their fathers, but that most fathers desire their daughters. A lot of visions about power, and about the relation of the will to sexuality, are going to have to be thought through and renegotiated" (Acker with Deaton, 275). It does not matter that she is drawing diagrams of free-market as penis and commodities as young cunts. We have voided the third-world, too. Then the links between race and sex and economy become heavy-handed and she cannot but fail to get cancer. That is: shit, piss, vomit, nail clippings, and anal-crack smudge dirt. This probably can get written but perhaps these novels are forbidden warnings. Better than nothing. In the same way, the fuck in Acker is failure as well. It doesn't do much except do everything. The fuck mediates -- what do I know about fucking! -- between sexual identities (coherences) constituting a place of ambiguity, confusion, excess, non-success. And one wants to get turned-on by Acker and that is the poetics of failure: not a limp moby dick but a desire to no longer desire pain of the other.

<12> Yet there is guts here, too. Acker fails in sentimentality. The desire for writing about love, about the real fleshy pre-post-structural post-post-structural whatever body, about romance, about rightin'/writin' of wrongs that leads to friendship in which you can just fuck everybody like its 1977 California but 1977 California everywhere. "Friendship is always a political act, for it unites citizens into a polis, a (political) community" (97). I wish, obviously, that I could have been Kathy Acker's best friend for fucking. It seems to me I would have saved the world with my semen. That is the failure of me, as a man (no acceptance of otherness). But for Acker, "Thivai was gone. I wondered what it was to have a friend. A friend who didn't go away. It seemed to me that human identity had to begin with and in friendship" (110). And that is the fucking weird thing in Acker's stuff, a kind of decimation of community as much as glimpsing of some place in a screwed-up city in which freaks get to come together and live like 3-D tattoos. No longer a distinction between body and color, base and image. Not much separation, lots of collaboration, death of copyright but birth of here-have-some-extra-food. "But what if times are really hard? So hard that the very existence of writing, which bestows humanity, is in danger? The loss, not of art, but of community, the loss of history and of writing as the ground of history -- that loss in this world is a kind of death" (Copyright, 94). What was the true romance of America? It is the global-economic convergence of sugar and death meant to bomb-out all friendship. Only sports is allowed because those friendships are seasonal and help sell more sucrose to the suburbs and more crack to the ghettoes (vice versa?).

<13> But everything is not totally fucked because there is fun. This does not mean that fun is had in spite of people in Other countries living on boiled grass and/or memorizing land-mine-free pathways to school but rather pleasure gets located in the places in which capitalism and imperialism and nationalism get fucked over by art. There is a lot of theory about how hard it is to be subversive but all you have to do is blow shit up and be a Pussy pirate or a Robin Hood -- that is to say, all you got to do is fail. "I argued: if my mother begins to have an illicit affair with a handsome, intelligent, and nasty man, she'll know what it is to be happy then she'll know that I need happiness and so I should be allowed to be a pirate" ("Seeing Gender," 78). And this is perhaps why the sounds of Kathy Acker are always the sounds of being a teen, that is the closest we capitalists ever get to being real terrorists: writing at something parental and looming. The Ackerian works are full of teenage-right causing, and responding to, terror [13]. Quixote and Empire anticipate the 9/11 bombings: New York is the grand failure, it becomes the rat-infested real and Acker wants to fuck it up and love it too. She never stops failing to get acne. But even a teen pirate is hemmed in and can't do much more than ape Errol Flynn, despite the clock flashing it's POST-MODERNITY. Kathy Acker, especially since it was disappearing tit by tit, wanted to see her body. And so she asked the nurse/surgeon/President of the United States of Death: "What if language need not be mimetic? I looking for the body, my body, which exists outside its patriarchal definitions. Of course, that is not possible. But who is any longer interested in the possible?" ("Seeing Gender," 84). The fun of failing is finally more than a poetics, it's a bio-graphy. It is not possible to fail so effectively that you stop racism, sexism, ageism, humanism. It is not possible to fail so powerfully that you make your words into individual units of explosive orgasmic pleasure. It is not possible to fail so thoroughly that you find the one and only be-between, interstitial, multi-everything, rhizomatic body without organs. But, it's so much fun -- that is, it hurts so deeply and causes so much chaos and so much suffering to the self; it feels so real in its bloody failure -- who really fucking cares?

Longing for Better Things Because Despair Stinks

<14> I have become interested in languages which I cannot make up, which I cannot create or even create in: I have become interested in languages which I can only come upon (as I disappear), a pirate upon buried treasure. The dreamer, the dreaming, the dream. Certainly, a frequent cause of disgust was the pig's [14] specific habits: its ability to digest its own and human faeces as well as other 'garbage'; its resistance to full domestication; it's need to protect its tender skin from sunburn by wallowing in mud and piss. The law in question, the one that legitimates and occasions a choice of possibilities, is simply stated: anyone can be an artist and anything the art institution shows is art. All writing is pig shit. Every writer is a sell-out. The law increasingly seems to be regarding art (the body) as the actualization, not quite of chaos, but as the organic incorporation of chaos and death into life, as the violent overcoming of the society-chaos dualism. From the standpoint of consistency, matters of expression must be considered not only in relation to their aptitude to form motifs and counterpoints but also in relation to the inhibitors and releasers that act on them, and the mechanisms of innateness or learning, heredity or acquisition, that modulate them. Unitary urbanism is opposed to the fixation of people at certain points of a city. It is the foundation for a civilization of leisure and play. One should note that in the shackles of the current economic system, technology has been used to further multiply the pseudo-games of passivity and social disintegration (television) while the new forms of playful participation also rendered possible by the same technology are regulated by all sorts of police: amateur radio operators, for example, are reduced to technological boy scouts. Three men are talking. These're the men who cause war. One man has on a Renaissance hat or else has genetically-flawed hair. His right eye is larger than his left so he's smirking, as his shoulders curve inwards. Except for the hat, he's naked. The person facing him is short and has deformed that is loopy fingers. All these people are deformed and recognizable. [] is fixed simultaneously and paradoxically as seductive and eroticized enigma ('not to be found,' 'open for everybody,' 'impossible to write about' yet eliciting a 'sweet taste' in the body of the writer, 'inexplicable' yet continually explained ). Only when a society has achieved a certain economic surplus over material necessity, releasing a minority of its members from the demands of productive labor into the privilege of becoming full-time politicians, academics, cultural producers and so on, can philosophy in its fullest sense flower into being. Now thought can begin to fantasize that it is independent of material reality. A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is in the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements but not with as much strength, though it is deficient only in power of maintaining equilibrium. Writing simply has no connection to reality. I keep trying to kill myself like my mother who killed herself. I kept working on the 'Large Glass' for eight years, but despite that, I didn't want it to be an expression of an inner life. There is no more right-wing versus working class: there is only appearance and disappearance, those people who appear in the media and those people who have disappeared from the possibility of any sort of home. In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare [15], in the use of fictions, of language. The Empires disappeared suddenly, as though in an instantaneous catastrophe. I wasn't sent to Oxford or anywhere, so what I do to write is to cut crosses into the insides of my wrists. Irony is not an American mode.

Acker in the Underworld: One Last Way To Get Your Ass Home

<15> She has a dead body and she still is living inside it. Her books are being written by a dead hand that has a live pen. A man has come down into hell and he smells like outside. She looks at him but he says he can't look at her because he has to be a hero and rescue her back from hell so that later he can use her body to write poems. She takes her pen and she writes on his face. On his face she has written: I want to fail -- fuck off. He says it doesn't matter you're going to follow me anyway. He leaves but she stays behind. It is kind of a cesspool of demons and hell. There are no lights or anything. If she puts up wallpaper and buys new furniture and lamps then it looks like she has defeated patriarchy through shopping. Alternatively, if she continues writing with her dead body in the dark then we cannot understand it or finally ever read what she has written. She is such a failure and from now on will always be there, underneath.


Notes

[1] Less reactive take-downs of tradition, urged Acker, and more questing for the constructing of anti-oppressive tales: "So I got very interested in narrative. I started reading a lot of myths" (Acker with Lotringer, 17-8). Acker's shift from deconstructive poetics to one of reformative myths marks her conscious transition to a form of writing that obliterates the art/politics binary and reinserts an engaged writing practice. In Acker's reconstructive "fight against fathers," however, she typically employs what she calls a schizophrenic voicing and thus avoids the monologic-monolithic bourgeois mode. [^]

[2] "It's not good enough to have a fake dick" (127). This myth swims beyond. [^]

[3] Gilles Deleuze champions just this kind of chaotic self in his discussion of "identities of certainty" versus "identities of process". He writes, "People always think of a majoritarian future (when I am grown up, when I have power). Whereas the problem is that of a minoritarian-becoming, not pretending, not playing or imitating the child, the madman, the woman, the animal, the stammerer or the foreigner, but becoming all these, in order to invent new forces or new weapons" (Deleuze & Parent, 5). [^]

[4] "Abhor was just like Ahab. She was as rotten and unfeeling as a fake leg because nothing (not even womanhood), was natural in her" (192-93). [^]

[5] Optimism and desperation appear in equal and ultimately hilarious measure with respect to the mythic profit-minded fisher-/quester-man. There he is, out on the sea. Alternatively, I read the cancer of Acker as the terrible metastatic result of writing courageously into disease and loss and failure. Refusing to don waders, pick up a harpoon, and pretend that life goes on and on forever, she actively sought and seeks out the carcinogenic and the disavowed -- what I think of as the truth of the word. I am a romantic precisely because for every wanderer above the mist there are those burrowing solo under the mountain or doing oblique bubble-work in the basement of the sea. The Acker-artist here is suicided by society and we are taught -- we must accept! -- that if you want her visions you gotta get low low down and suffer like her too. [^]

[6] "Good God. She uses bourgeois narrative structure!" (Acker with Deaton, 275). [^]

[7] The smashing together of the atoms of blood, race, body, pens, work, patriarchy and history is the in-a-single-page snapshot of the raw real of the Ackerian collage. Doing so much, so frighteningly, in so little space, and with such propulsion, I'd like to think that any critical hyperbole is a tip-of-the-hat homage to her writerly destruction of "good" writing. [^]

[8] Acker's tattooed body still exists, at least the black & white, ripped body of a number of Grove Press dust-jackets. "Yeah. Someone wrote on me, which is pretty incredible. It's all the process of making. I invented someone to help me make my body" (Lotringer, 21). That inked-up, collaborative body can't help but replicate the book -- but the image of the "tattooed face," for me, can't help but replicate the Ackerian book. The extra-step-beyond-acceptable-cultural-beauty/expression is the political Ackerian utterance -- the proof of that which, as yet, can't yet be fully looked at or entirely read. [^]

[9] I see K.A. reversing the celebrated Beckettian aphorism to: Imagine dead imagination. [^]

[10] The body-builder Acker, the tattooed Acker, and the cancered Acker make Joyce's triad of silence, exile, cunning look antique. As she works out with the body she begins to see that in order to get bigger you must make the muscles totally fail. [^]

[11] "Capitol made a doll who looked exactly like herself. If you pressed a button on one of the doll's cunt lips the doll said, 'I am a good girl and do exactly as I am told to do'" (Dead Doll, n.p.). [^]

[12] "All that lingers at the edges of the unsaid" (Bodies, 3). [^]

[13] C. Jodey Castricano, rightly, calls this post-modern terror the new Gothic. She cites Jameson: " 'when the individual [gothic] 'victim' -- male or female -- is substituted for the collectivity itself, the U.S. public, which now lives out the anxieties of its economic privileges and its sheltered 'exceptionalism' in a pseudo-political version of the gothic -- under the threats of stereotypical madmen and 'terrorists' (mostly Arabs or Iranians for some reason)'" (212). [^]

[14] At the root of capitalism, Acker suggests (contrary to Marx), is the oppression of women, the male exchange of daughters for pigs. Such a practice, which takes Levi-Strauss's kinship discoveries to a horrific conclusion, resonates uneasily with the Mayan preference for beauty over money -- and, in fact, erases the distinction between beauty and money by making them exchangeable values: Daughters, somehow, equal pigs. [^]

[15] Passages like these are not only youth threatening but also dangerous for adults. On the first 80 pages of the book most full page drawings depict male and female sex organs. Such drawings are found on pages 8, 16, 18, 24, 28, 30, 34, 38, 60, 62, 64, 80, 82, 201. [^]


Works Cited and Plagiarized

Acker, Kathy. "Algeria: A Series of Invocations Because Nothing Else Works." Hannibal Lecter, My Father. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.

---. Blood and Guts in High School. New York: Grove, 1978.

---. Bodies of Work: Essays by Kathy Acker. London: Serpent's Tail, 1997.

---. "Dead Doll Humility." Journal of Postmodern Culture 1.1 (1990): online.

---. "Devoured by Myths: An Interview with Sylvère Lotringer." Hannibal Lecter, My Father. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.

---. Don Quixote. New York: Grove, 1986.

---. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove, 1988.

---. Eurydice in the Underworld. London: Arcadia Books, 1997.

---. "Interview with Rebecca Deaton." Textual Practice Vol. 6, no. 2 (1992) 271-282.

---. Literal Madness: Three Novels. New York: Grove, 1988.

---. "Realism and the Cause for Future Revolution." Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984. 31-41.

---. "Seeing Gender." Critical Quarterly Vol. 37, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 78-86.

Bataille, Georges. "The Solar Anus." Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed., trans. and intro. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 5-9.

Brennan, Karen. "The Geography of Enunciation: Hysterical Pastiche in Kathy Acker's Fiction." boundary 2 21, 2 (1994): 243-268.

Castricano, C. Jodey. "If a Building is a Sentence So is a Body." American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Eds. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1998. 202-214.

Cixous, Hélène. Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

Da Vinci, Leonardo. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Sel. and ed. Irma A. Richter. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

Debord, Guy, Asger Jorn, and Gil J. Wolman. "Unitary Urbanism and the End of the 1950s." On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1957-1972. Ed. Elisabeth Sussman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1990. 143-147.

de Duve, Thierry. Kant After Duchamp. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1998.

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parent. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Vol. 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

---. A Thousand Plateaus: Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. and fwd. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. California: Stanford UP, 1993.

Eagleton, Terry. Marx and Freedom. London: Phoenix, 1997.

Hejinian, Lyn. "The Rejection of Closure." The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 40-58.

Hulley, Kathleen. "Transgressing Genre: Kathy Acker's Intertext." Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 171-190.

Jones, Amelia. Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Marcus, Greil. "Guy Debord's Memoires: A Situationist Primer." On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1957-1972. Ed. Elisabeth Sussman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1990. 124-131.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Bantam, 1986.

Owens, Craig. "Analysis Logical and Ideological." Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. 268-283.

Redding, Arthur B. "Bruises, Roses: Masochism and the Writing of Kathy Acker." Contemporary Literature XXXV, 2 (1994): 280-304.

Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.

Stoekl, Allan. "Introduction to Visions of Excess." Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. By Georges Bataille. Ed., trans. and intro. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. ix-xxv.


ISSN: 1547-4348. All material contained within this site is copyrighted by the identified author. If no author is identified in relation to content, that content is © Reconstruction, 2002-2016.