Philosophy for Spiders

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.

Kathy Acker's french twist : translating sex in the Blood and guts trilogy

Arriving on the New York literary scene in the late 1970's, Kathy Acker has been hailed as a punk beatnik virtuoso. Her style of writing has been referred to as "equal parts gossip, kinky sex and high theory." Her stylistics have been eagerly digested according to the tenets of postmodern discourse while her protagonists are held up as proof of her generation's rage against "control societies." The transgressive sexuality enacted in her texts, including sexual masochism, sexual violence and self-mutilation, is frequently interpreted as anarchic attempts to circumvent this logic. I purport to show that these tactics do not, in fact, spring from a reactionary politics. Rather, Acker is attempting to convey an abject carnal sexuality that struggles for expression within the name-of-the-father logic that structures conventional language and a lack of alternative feminist propositions. Key Words: Kathy Acker, feminism, literary criticism, French feminism, sexuality, queer theory, linguistics, translation, visuality, third wave, mode or modalities

Kathy Acker's french twist : translating sex in the Blood and guts trilogy

Arriving on the New York literary scene in the late 1970's, Kathy Acker has been hailed as a punk beatnik virtuoso. Her style of writing has been referred to as "equal parts gossip, kinky sex and high theory." Her stylistics have been eagerly digested according to the tenets of postmodern discourse while her protagonists are held up as proof of her generation's rage against "control societies." The transgressive sexuality enacted in her texts, including sexual masochism, sexual violence and self-mutilation, is frequently interpreted as anarchic attempts to circumvent this logic. I purport to show that these tactics do not, in fact, spring from a reactionary politics. Rather, Acker is attempting to convey an abject carnal sexuality that struggles for expression within the name-of-the-father logic that structures conventional language and a lack of alternative feminist propositions. Key Words: Kathy Acker, feminism, literary criticism, French feminism, sexuality, queer theory, linguistics, translation, visuality, third wave, mode or modalities

« Language was being » : à rebours du fantasme de l’être chez Kathy Acker

Dans cet article, je propose une analyse du fantasme ontologique comme objet du désir féminin dans My Mother : Demonology de Kathy Acker. En prenant comme prémisse le statut suspect de l’« être féminin », j’entends montrer comment Acker reprend et réinvestit les tropes des traditions philosophique et psychanalytique pour produire le possible ontologique du sujet féminin. Le phallus est considéré traditionnellement comme le signifiant privilégié de la différence sexuelle. Il détient un privilège épistémique masculin quant à l’« idéalisation originaire » de l’être. La nécessité de produire d’autres modes de subjectivation amène Acker à faire du sexe féminin le lieu de ce fantasme conceptuel. De fait, l’écrivaine parodie la prémisse psychanalytique qui lie la sexualité féminine au déni de son manque, reléguant l’être et l’énonciation du sujet féminin du côté de l’absence. Mettant en oeuvre dans l’écriture un désir qui ne suit pas la logique métonymique et métaphorique phallogocentrique, mais convoquant plutôt un régime de sens qui obéit à la fonction littérale et matérielle du langage, Acker opère une transition de l’ordre symbolique à l’ordre sémiotique. L’être du sujet féminin devient ainsi l’objet d’un désir d’énonciation.

Nothing Until It Is Made Actual; or, Acker versus Growing Up

This essay argues for reading Kathy Acker in terms of what the author calls the “plasticity” of her sentences. These syntactic structures disclose Acker's attempt to expose and negate a bourgeois ideology of adolescence and maturity. The essay pursues this argument through a reading of Acker's novel In Memoriam to Identity, in particular its interest in Rimbaud as both biographical icon and literary precedent. The essay then argues that Acker's concerted literary attack on an ideology of maturity relates to the projects of trans literature at several critical junctures.

Cutting Up Words

This article argues that Kathy Acker articulates an understanding of transness through language. More than a meditation on gender-nonnormative characters in Acker's work, the article dwells on how Acker uses language as a vector through which to imply the residue of a certain understanding of trans. In short, examined here is Acker as a trans philosophical thinker, one whose thinking manifested in how she uses language.

Building the Pirate Body

When Kathy Acker writes about the body, it is frequently subjected to self-abnegation; there is a sense that the cohesion of self and body hangs on complete destruction and rebirth in terms of its material reality. The figure of the Pirate is an avatar through which Acker explores these tensions, particularly as they relate to her experience of femininity and gender, which, in many ways, aligns with experiences of gender dysphoria. In negotiating the ways in which she would like to be desired with the feminist knowledge that influenced her thought, Acker lays out a path in which the dysphoric body that is assigned female at birth may occupy a third space outside the gender binary. This article puts Acker's writing on the Pirate in dialog with Georges Bataille's figure of the Acéphale to explore the system of knowledge that comes from this subject—one whose articulation is in constant regeneration.