Modernism Archives - Public Seminar

Sex & Gender

Mothers

An excerpt from Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir by McKenzie Wark

January 15, 2024 • by McKenzie Wark

The thing about becoming a transsexual is that most of us can’t draw on much of a transsexual culture. We have to sort out ways to be by cutting and pasting from the cultural materials that are around us. Which is not what we were supposed to make of those ...

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Between Freud and Einstein

On the homology at the heart of modernist art

June 2, 2015 • by Renato Barilli

With this possibility of a coincidence in mind, we may dare to compare the two fundamental contributions given by Sigmund Freud in the field of the humanities and by Albert Einstein in the almost opposite world of the natural sciences. Let us remember the well-known formula on which Einstein’s relativity ...

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Compose Yourself!

December 28, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

After yet another review in the New York Times Book Review about some book about Scott Fitzgerald, I felt it was time to write something about Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines. I taught some of it this semester past and made at least a couple of Zambreno converts. Zambreno’s Heroines (Semiotexte 2012) ...

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The Nothingness That Speaks French

November 13, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Quentin Meillassoux's The Number and the Siren (published by Urbanomic and Sequence Press, and elegantly translated by Robin Mackay) is quite simply the most beautiful book by a philosopher that I have read for many years. It is a highly original reading of Stéphane Mallarmé's Coup De Dés. If the objective of Meillassoux’s ...