Cosa Nostra Editions

2011-08-06T16:19:00.002-05:00

Nothing is unexpected or sworn impossible,
nothing is amazing since Olympian Father Zeus
made night out of high noon, hiding the light
of the blazing sun; and damp fear came upon men.
Since then all things are credible and expected
by men: Let nothing you see amaze you even if
animals take the place of dolphins in their salty
pasture, and love the echoing waves of the sea
more than dry land, while dolphins take to the wooded hills.
...son of Archenax
...child...
...marriage...

2011-04-10T20:27:00.003-05:00

"I believe that the obtuse meaning carries a certain emotion. Such an emotion is never sticky; it is an emotion that simply designates what one loves, what one wants to defend: an emotion, a value, a valuation...we savor, we love...How to openly and actively affirm a value and produce a valuation?"

--Roland Barthes (qtd in "Sensing the Image: Roland Barthes and the Affect of the Visual" by Elena Oxman)

2011-02-21T23:20:00.001-06:00

--Cady Noland

2011-01-17T22:33:00.002-06:00

Heaven

O, who will show me those delights on high?
Echo: I.
Thou Echo, thou art mortal, all men know.
Echo: No.
Wert thou not born among the trees and leaves?
Echo: Leaves.
And are there any leaves that still abide?
Echo: Bide.
What leaves are they? impart the matter wholly.
Echo: Holy.
Are holy leaves the Echo, then, of bliss?
Echo: Yes.
Then tell me, what is that supreme delight?
Echo: Light.
Light to the mind; what shall the will enjoy?
Echo: Joy.
But are there cares and business with the pleasure?
Echo: Leisure.
Light, joy, and leisure; but shall they persever?
Echo: Ever.

--George Herbert

2010-09-07T18:34:00.004-05:00

Arcades of Philadelphia the Past

Only the rich remember the past,
The strawberries once in the Apennines,
Philadelphia that the spiders ate.

There they sit, holding their eyes in their hands.
Queer, in this Vallombrosa of ears,
That they never hear the past. To see,
To hear, to touch, to taste, to smell, that's now,
That's this. Do they touch the thing they see,
Feel the wind of it, smell the dust of it?
They do not touch it. Sounds never rise
Out of what they see. They polish their eyes
In their hands. The lilacs came long after.
But the town and the fragrance were never one,
Though the blue bushes bloomed--and bloom,
Still bloom in the agate eyes, red blue,
Red purple, never quite red itself.
The tongue, the fingers, and the nose
Are comic trash, the ears are dirt,
But the eyes are men in the palm of the hand.

This? A man must be very poor
With a single sense, though he smells clouds,
Or to see the sea on Sunday, or
To touch a woman cadaverous,
Of poorness as an earth, to taste
Dry seconds and insipid thirds,
To hear himself and not to speak.

The strawberries once in the Apennines...
They seem a little painted, now.
The mountains are scratched and used, clear flakes.

--Wallace Stevens

2010-07-08T10:31:00.000-05:00

Interior Flora, Evan Gruzis

2010-06-18T22:17:00.003-05:00

A moment arrives when one can no longer feel anything but anger, an absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts that have no other care than to make a little more sense, to redo or perfect delicate works of signification....Joy, jouissance, to come, have the sense of birth: the sense of the inexhaustible imminence of sense. When it has not passed over into ornamentation or into the repetition of philosophy, "poetry" has never sought to create anything else. The coming and going of imminence.

Jean-Luc Nancy, from The Birth to Presence

2010-06-02T18:26:00.001-05:00

Sarah Morris, Midtown

2010-05-10T18:56:00.000-05:00

--Robert Morris

2010-04-24T12:49:00.005-05:00

Sexy Battleship, Luis Gispert

Can It Be that It Was All So Simple Then

2010-04-12T21:31:00.000-05:00

An interview with Akira Lippit

2010-03-14T19:04:00.000-05:00

--Esko Männikkö

2010-03-05T11:50:00.001-06:00

Robert Cuoghi, Pazuzu

2010-02-19T17:22:00.007-06:00

Poetry's "you-saying," its naming, is a way of "Being-saying" other than that which properly belongs to thought, but still a way of "Being-saying." It is possible that another space opens up from such a naming, or that naming sheds a different light on the space opened up by any saying. To express this, Heidegger uses Holderlin's word: "the holy" (das Heilige). But the other space or the space on which a different light is shed is not "beyond" Being. The experience of the You, the encounter, opens onto nothing other than the experience of Being: of the no-thing of being--which Celan designates, precisely in Holderlin's terms (not Rilke's), as "openness," "emptiness," "freedom...." It follows that the poem, as questioning, is turned toward the open, offered up to it. And the open is itself open, after a fashion, to u-topia, to the place without place of the advent....Poetic art consists of perceiving, not representing....

--Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, from Poetry as Experience

2010-01-12T00:23:00.008-06:00

Adorno...[tropes] the collective in the language of desire, namely, the language of incompletion and impossibility: “language’s chimerical yearning for the impossible becomes an expression of the subject’s insatiable erotic longing, which finds relief from the self in the other.” Language is always the language of desire, the expression of something transcending itself, just like the lover’s impossible wish to dissolve and fuse with the beloved. The power, then, of the collective undercurrent rests on the fact that it speaks the language of impossibility. It calls for a community not yet in place, a community also out of time, for if this community is foundational, it is also only possible by what it founds: the lyric.

This utopian formulation resembles Kant’s subjective universality, particularly in its peculiar and unresolved chronology. Just as in Adorno, the collective undercurrent, which precedes and legitimizes the individual voice turns out dialectically to be also poetry’s effect, we can also read in Kant a similar temporal torsion: the sensus communis is not the indisputable end to which all judgments of taste are destined, but it stands as a question at the beginning of the aesthetic judgment begging the beautiful as its answer. Put differently, it is not that the beautiful assumes a potential universality in order to exist, but on the contrary—yearning for a condition of possibility for universality, Kant invents the beautiful as a site necessitating universal judgment. Art compels and precipitates the notion of the sensus communis. Where politics failed to articulate its own necessity, aesthetics provided the vocabulary; conversely, art is a response to what politics could not even question—hence both anticipating and ensuing politics. This is why for Kant, the necessity of the satisfaction that arises from a beautiful object is neither theoretical (as in the law of causality), nor practical (as in the assumption of a moral law), but rather exemplary as a model to be followed by others. The coexistence of freedom (radical subjectivity) and objectivity (potential universality), which is presupposed by aesthetic judgment functions analogically as a model for a politics of free consensus. Politics is performed in the “as if” of aesthetics.

Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, from "As If: Kant, Adorno, and the Politics of Poetry"

2009-12-26T19:22:00.000-06:00

--Doris Salcedo

2009-12-22T17:09:00.002-06:00

Everywhere in Lacan's system you have this haunting nothingness, which here gives perhaps a pessimistic or ironic sound to his definition of love, "to give what you don't have," but perhaps this is not the only kind of Lacan's thinking here. Although there is so much in Lacan about an originary lack and so on, I just want to insist that I would underline that the impossibility of love should not be interpreted as a lack, as a originary lack, because every lack is to be filled if possible. Love means precisely to fill the emptiness with emptiness, and thus to share it.

-Jean-Luc Nancy, in a roundtable discussion with Ronell & Schirmacher

2009-12-15T18:02:00.007-06:00

Wolfgang Tillmans, Man with Mobile Phone, 2004

2009-11-08T21:25:00.002-06:00

2009-11-02T22:41:00.000-06:00

2009-10-25T15:53:00.002-05:00

Edward Burtynsky, SOCAR Oil Fields #6, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006

2009-10-10T22:20:00.001-05:00

Brazen, Raqs Medisa Collective, 2008

2009-09-19T16:04:00.001-05:00

Chris, by Pieter Hugo

2009-08-30T22:35:00.000-05:00

You're my favorite kind of American, Luis Gispert

2009-08-17T15:38:00.002-05:00

Transformations. Issue No . 17 2009 — Bernard Stiegler and the Question of Technics

2009-08-12T18:37:00.001-05:00

2009-08-05T18:11:00.002-05:00

--Mounir Fatmi, 2007

2009-07-25T20:06:00.000-05:00

The summer 2009 run is underway...

2009-06-30T12:21:00.000-05:00

hart!, by Eileen Myles

2009-06-28T14:01:00.003-05:00

Anthony Madrid at WebConjunctions

Coming Soon:

Lucy Ives's Anamnesis, winner of the Slope prize

2009-06-24T06:37:00.001-05:00

Felix, 2008-09, Fernando Mastrangelo

2009-06-22T21:09:00.001-05:00

2009-05-14T16:59:00.001-05:00

2009-03-18T17:42:00.004-05:00

Like Poe's orangutan, Zarathustra's animals do not belong at home, in homes--they are unheimlich. The "speech" of animals is uncanny because, even if it is only "jabbering," it manages to produce in Zarathustra the semblance of a world, of a full exteriority within which language circulates. Heidegger explains that "after such solitude the world is like a garden, even when it is invoked by mere empty talk, in the sheer play of words and phrases." The discourse of animals thus provokes a deep sense of solitude, an abundance of emptiness. It is in this sense that those animals are uncanny: Zarathustra feels alone in their company. For Heidegger, Zarathustra's exchange with the animals portrays the "loneliest loneliness," an experience of solitude that reveals, for an instant (the shadowless moment of a suspended midday), the animal world....

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes: "Indeed perhaps there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics." The fear and pain that accompany Zarathustra's entry into the abyss of an animal world arise from the depths of memory, or as Nietzsche phrases it, from the prehistory of man." By engaging the animals, Zarathustra--and by inference, humanity--plummets from the edifice of world (language and memory) into the immemorial open of a time before world. And this time before world, this prehistory of man, returns to humanity as the figure of the animal. Animal being forces humanity to acknowledge the finitude of world: that is, animals tear humanity away from the imagined totality of world. In this way, the Nietzschean and Heideggerian animal meet at a point beyond language, world, and memory--at a point beyond mortality. The point beyond world is marked for Nietzsche by forgetting, for Heidegger by erasure; and for both Nietzsche and Heidegger, the beyond is recalled by the figure of the animal. For Nietzsche, however, the world beyond represents a "robust health," and the possibility of a new beginning, a "new promise," whereas for Heidegger it is a saddened and darkened affair.

Akira Lippit, from Electric Animal

2009-03-18T12:50:00.001-05:00

The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation

Daniel Heller-Roazen

2009-03-04T18:20:00.001-06:00

Chu Yun, Unspeakable Happiness.02-b, Installation, 2003

2009-02-14T12:33:00.003-06:00

You Are Nothing

I Am Jubilant

--David Thorpe (b. 1972)

2009-02-08T18:59:00.001-06:00

It's not that, in the Marxist sense, things really are social relations which have become opaque; they both are and affect social relations, they are a partner in them, and all 'social' relations mix together chains of humans and nonhumans. Latour's exemplary objects--a speed bump, a hotel key with a weight attached to it, a door closer, a camera--are inscribed and programmed by human will and in turn, as nonhuman delegates, require humans to behave in certain ways. The speed bump 'is not made of matter, ultimately; it is full of engineers and chancellors and lawmakers, commingling their wills and their story lines with those of gravel, concrete, paint, and standard calculation.' Matter and persons connect and intermingle in a zone 'where some, though not all, of the characteristics of concrete become policemen, and some, though not all, of the characteristics of policemen become speed bumps.'

John Frow, from "A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole"

2009-01-23T20:55:00.001-06:00

"Void Space of Gardens and Fields" for The Great Pyramid, Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo

2009-01-22T18:43:00.001-06:00

God Forgives Lucifer, Ryan Ford

2009-01-03T14:14:00.002-06:00

Comme des Garçons fall 2008

2008-11-29T21:01:00.006-06:00

The winter 2009 run is underway...

2008-10-23T17:59:00.002-05:00

Brian Howe on Jon Leon's Alexandra

2008-10-17T01:12:00.002-05:00

2008-08-23T13:42:00.001-05:00

Ange Mlinko on Simone dos Anjos's Comedies at the Poetry Foundation blog

2008-07-04T17:07:00.002-05:00

Cosa Nostra's spring 2008 run reviewed at Isola di Rifiuti

2008-06-21T23:26:00.003-05:00

Splash, Ai Weiwei.

2008-06-02T21:09:00.001-05:00

Wardrobe, Anna Barriball

2008-04-23T17:50:00.000-05:00

Overman, Fernando Mastrangelo

2008-04-19T13:53:00.002-05:00

[click to enlarge]

Handset and letter-pressed by M.H. in an edition of 125.

2008-04-18T18:59:00.006-05:00

I could say as much for what we call the "work of art." How do we recognize such a work? Only by the following: That faced with it, we do not stay faced, but we meet, we strike, we are struck, we lose our envelope just as this thing, this work, loses its own--its forms, its mannerisms. We develop within it as it does within us. We enter and exit. We are always in this in-between of it and us. Rather quickly we understand there is about as much of an "it" as there is an "us" (or "me"). There is--There is only reality that neither immanates nor transcends: that's the obstacle--the good-obstacle or the bad-obstacle, but the chock, the chocking obstacle against what is neither within nor without, but an erected barrier: death, birth, love, spoken word. There we strike, we are struck. We do not remain in ourselves, we do not leave ourselves. Just in between: we get a bump, a bruise, a blood clot. Being gets out of there swollen, tumescent, distended. Neither fluid such as water immanent to water, nor leaping such as a dolphin transcending waves. Rather dull, dingy and uncertain like a Medusa between two waters. Admittedly, that Medusa terrifies the philosopher.

Jean-Luc Nancy, from "Imm/Trans"

2008-04-11T19:00:00.001-05:00

2008-04-10T20:05:00.000-05:00

Becoming everybody/everything is to world, to make a world. By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract. It is by conjugating, by continuing with other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clandestine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible....Perception will confront its own limit; it will be in the midst of things, throughout its own proximity, as the presence of one hacceity in other, the prehension of one by the other or the passage from one to the other: Look only at the movements.

--D&G

2008-03-31T23:36:00.006-05:00

Art is the most genuine and profound will to semblance, namely, to the scintillation of what transfigures, in which the supreme lawfulness of Dasien becomes visible. In contrast, truth is any given fixed apparition that allows life to rest firmly on a particular perspective and to preserve itself. As such fixation, "truth" is an immobilizing of life, and hence its inhibition and dissolution.

Heidegger, from "The New Interpretation of Sensuousness" in Nietzsche I

2008-03-19T14:59:00.001-05:00

Bethany Wright will read in Seattle on 5/7/08 in the Subtext Reading Series at the Good Shepherd Center. She will also appear in Portland on 6/19/08 at the Mizpah Church through the Unwin-Dunraven Literary Ecclesia.

2008-03-16T18:45:00.001-05:00

Jon Leon will be reading this Friday March 21 at 6pm with Ben Mazer. Ada Books will host. Providence Rhode Island.

2008-03-08T19:43:00.004-06:00

The other side of thought, the place where metaphysics shatters the surfaces of metaphor, appears in the animal's visage--a countenance that, for Giorgio Agamben, "always seems to be on the verge of uttering words." On the verge of words, the animal emits instead a stream of cries, affects, spirits, and magnetic fluids. What flows from the animal touches language without entering it, dissolving memory, like the unconscious, into a timeless present. The animal is magnetic because it draws the world-building subject toward an impossible convergence with the limits of world, toward a metaphysics of metaphor. The magnetic animal erases the limits of the metaphor, effecting an economy of the figure that is metamorphic rather than metaphoric. It forces a transformation of the figure. For Deleuze and Guattari, all "becomings" are animal becomings: "Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become. The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not."

The magnetic property of the animetaphor does not simply sway language but actively transforms it, assailing logos with the catachrestic force of affect. Defined as the capacity to effect concrete changes in the material world through an immaterial or phantastic medium, magnetic power, like that of dreams, transforms the traditional rapport between action and reaction. With magnetism, reactions, in the sense of affective responses, can be said to cause actions. In the animal, the magnetic capacity appears both destructive and generative. Montaigne, for example, claims that "[t]ortoises and ostriches hatch their eggs just by looking at them, a sign that their sight has some ejaculative value." Montaigne's psycho-sexual economy is not too far from the idea of mesmerism and its place in psychoanalysis. Through hypnosis, the animal trace infiltrates thought, instituting a pathic communicability that, as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen argues, evolves into transference. From metaphor to metamorphosis, transference to transformation and back again, the animetaphor conducts a magnetic trade into and out of language. What is transferred magnetically, moreover, speaks to and from the originary animal topology, the animal den, ethos.

--Akira Lippit, from "Magnetic Animal: Derrida, Wildlife, Animetaphor"

2008-02-25T11:30:00.005-06:00

One of the problems raised by globalization is the fact that by definition it has no locationor site, making its metaphoric representation difficult. Movements of capital, labor, and information do not conform to national boundaries, languages, or cultural traditions, and thus assume the shape of whatever interest is being served at that moment. What models might we use to access the shape-shifting and rhizomatic qualities of global forces? One early attempt to frame the problem is Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling” which he describes as the affective registration of social experiences “still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating...” (132). Although Williams is speaking of national formations (Britain specifically), his concept applies to the way that within a global context, art and literature “are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming” (133). Williams’ formulation has been adapted by a number of recent social theorists to the globalization debate as a way of locating social processes evident not in material reality but in affective and emotional states that live, as he says, “at the edge of semantic availability....”

--Michael Davidson, from "Reading Around the Cosmo"

2008-02-24T20:10:00.001-06:00

Formatting for the spring releases has begun...