queer theory | trans studies | literature
Philosophy for Spiders On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker
MCKENZIE WARK
y h p e o s th o l i on f h p ers y o r d or cke i e p th y a nzie s for low kathmckwe ark September 216 pages paper, 978-1-4780-1468-3 $21.95tr/£16.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1375-4 $94.95/£76.00
“In this brilliant reading of one of the late twentieth century’s most interesting writers, language ‘messes with flesh’ while ‘logic messes with language,’ transmuting Kathy Acker’s sign-worlds into philosophy. I love the fearless way in which McKenzie Wark thinks. I also love the calm voice with which she walks herself (and us) through difficult spaces in theory and memory. Exploring how gender structures writing in ways related to, but ultimately different from, the norms that structure heterosexu ality, Philosophy for Spiders radically expands the field of trans girl lit.”—SIANNE NGAI, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form “McKenzie Wark’s highly personal sex memoir evolves the growing ‘My Kathy’ genre in trans directions. This impassioned, reasonable, and subjective tribute makes more room for Kathy to live on as the future’s own creations.”—SARAH SCHULMAN, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of act up New York, 1987–1993
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.
McKenzie Wark is Professor of Media and Culture at Eugene Lang College at The New School and author of several books, including Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century, Reverse Cowgirl, and Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Her correspondence with Kathy Acker was published as I’m Very Into You.
From Part I: The City of Memory
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Picture it in an overhead shot: the critic, back turned to you, face turned to the writer, the writer looks over the critic’s shoulder at you, with a cold eye that could mean anything at all. I wanted a way to write about Kathy that was switchy, but—now that we’re on intimate terms, let’s be candid—the critical theory here is bottom theory. Writing as the trace of the want to let go, to be the one who is othered.
