Book: Jonathan Kemp, The Penetrated Male

Jonathan Kemp's new book The Penetrated Male, published through open-access outfit Punctum Books, takes a discursive tour through key texts of early twentieth century literature to locate and unpack the lurking concept of the penetrated male body filling their pages.

From Daniel Paul Schreber through to James Joyce, The Penetrated Male assembles an argument which pushes against the binary reduction of the penetrated male with the feminine and its consequent threat of its erasure. Kemp draws together the threads of this incomprehensibility and inarticulability, outlining the struggle and the tantalising/terrifying failure of the logic of language to circumscribe the rupture posed by the penetrated male body. What he also finds in this pursuit is "a profoundly productive aspect of discourse, generating ways of opening up the male body":

"The penetrated male body ... is capable of not only exposing the gendered structuration of language, but of destroying the entire structure and using the pieces to build something else entirely: a form of representation more grounded in the shifting realities of flux and sensations, more geared towards registering the intensities of material bodies."

The Penetrated Male is available for free download from the Punctum Books website. You may also want to take some time to browse their catalogue of books, and journals published (not to mention their associated titles), many of which are open-access or print-on-demand if required in hard-copy.

Book: Jean-Paul Martinon, The End of Man

Jean-Paul Martinon teams up with Punctum Books for this eloquent and  personal (or "bio-graphical", as suggested by the author) offering, The End of Man, just published this month. Discursively probing at the black box of "masculinity", Martinon reinscribes the term with corporeal possibilities, refusing to wear the divides of man-woman, male-female, masculine-feminine, virile-effeminate.

 

With nods to Levinas, Derrida, Nancy, and a plenitude of current queer materialist scholars, Martinon weaves between discussions such as those of the mandates of language, the male body's eschatological existence, and contingent relations between gendered bodies. And all the while he choreographs an elegant dance over, between and around the threads of masculine failure.

"But hush, this male body is slowly stirring, turning over, progressively regaining consciousness ... the need for mastery steadily clenching ‘its’ grip. This slow turn reveals his many sides, angular, hairy, robust, smelly, warm, delicate, graceful. An abyss in every crevice, a mass at every turn, this male body can reach neither a plenitude of meaning nor a truly stable referent. His language, like his body, betrays him at every turn: never quite masculine, ever more virile/effeminate, never enough feminine."

The End of Man is available from Punctum Books as an open-access ebook downloadable for free or in print for a small fee. We are also fortunate to have Jean-Paul Martinon's response to Catherine Malabou at our recent BiM event archived on our site (available for streaming on the player to the right or from our recordings page).

 

Book: Saitō Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl

After a somewhat protracted hiatus and recovery period, we are happy to be back in the digital flesh with the newly translated book by Saitō Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl. Published in English this year with the University of Minnesota Press, Saitō's original Japanese text released in 2000 was pivotal in shaping the decade of scholarship to come on otaku culture.

The significance of the book as a genealogy of the eroticised fighting girl theme in East Asian media, and particularly Japanese animation, may now be seen as somewhat dated given the rapid expansion of the convention, the growing tendency towards intertextual and parodic play within (and without) the anime medium and the increasingly experimental blending of genre, type and character. However, Saitō's final analysis of the economy of sexual desire involved in the Japanese otaku-animated character relationship - set against the backdrop of a furiously evolving motif of the beautiful fighting girl and interwoven with his strangely self-revealing analysis of the outsider art of Henry Darger - climaxes in an almost cinematic manner. Identifying a Japanese environment oversaturated with media codes to the detriment of depth and multiplicity of meaning, Saitō non-critically positions otaku sexuality as a powerful adaptive strategy for negotiating the realities of an informationalised world.

"For us who live this fantasy of an informationalized everyday, there is nothing at all surprising about the existence of something like a fiction more real than reality ... When our desire comes into contact with these spaces, it comes naturally to us to boot up the beautiful fighting girls. I am trying to read into this process an unintended inversion of desire. Why is it that we are so captivated by these phallic girls who will never exist in actuality? Are they not a strategy for resisting the informationalization of society, in other words, the flattening fictionalization of the entire world?"

Book: Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex

Within the title to Luciana Parisi's 2004 release, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-Technology and the Mutations of Desire, lies the promise of an intricate complex of (non)human relations which involves, inter alia, the virtual, the molecular and the social. Published as part of the Continuum series, Transversals: New Directions in Philosophy, its appearance upon the scene of critical and cultural theory signals and reflects the turn towards the centrality of the body. With a philosophical inquiry founded as much in the bacterial work of Lynn Margulis as it is in Deleuze and Guattari, her text offers a flexible schematic towards a different, relational conception of bodies, sex, femininity and desire - that is, a mapping of abstract sex.

In an extensive online interview with Matthew Fuller which is both complementary and an extension of the concepts investigated in Abstract Sex, Parisi provides multiple entry points into her text. Amongst them, this snippet:

"Abstract Sex addresses human stratification on three levels. The biophysical, the biocultural and the biodigital amalgamation of layers composing a constellation of bodies within bodies, each grappled within the previous and the next formation - a sort of positive feedback upon each other cutting across specific time scales. ... Abstract Sex points to a singular process of collision of strata undergoing the biodigital reengineering of life that forces us to engage with what we take a body, gender, and thus politics to be. For Abstract Sex to face - rather than remain dismissive of - the collision of strata implies a cut from the running flow of life demanding taking a line of flight towards destratification - a felt experience of change on a nature-culture continuum."