This dissertation examines the anarchic practices implicit to literary texts composed through the cut-up technique. It argues that the aleatory and processual experiments in Gertrude Stein's, William S. Burroughs', Kathy Acker's, and Kenji Siratori's cut-up works appeal to principles of embodiment, affect, and affinity foundational for anarchist practices of direct action, horizontal organization, and voluntary cooperation. Counter to anarchism’s individualist and socialist traditions, which consistently install the humanist subject at the center of radical thought, the form of those cut-up works represents a post-anarchist ethics that assumes the subject’s anarchic and unconditional relation to the figure of the neighbor. In other words, this dissertation argues that cut-up literature’s extreme literary approach and eccentric formal effects exhibit a revolutionary language without a subject — without an "origin" or a "ruler" — in which the other speaks first and foremost. Repositioning the place of the neighbor in relation to the anarchic subject, this other, alien, cut up language radically re-imagines familiar political terms (race, gender, and sexuality) for the hyperconnected, globalized 21st Century.
【 预 览 】
附件列表
Files
Size
Format
View
Night-glory: cut-up literature, anarchism, and the question of the subject