lists of the year 2023
this year has been the year in which AI and machine translation has been the thing the process and the resultant english language and german texts have captured my attention. the last six months have proven the process and the technology, and of course as a materialist I think of the process as being an exemplary social-technology, which is liberatory to a fault. But anyway why Heissenbuttel? Because the writer was one of the experimental writers in the middle of the late 20th century. An exemplary case of a writer trying the separate a language from its reactionary past, which of course in the 21st century is the future for all writers and language users as we try and survive the destructiveness of the societies we all live in as capital consumes the planet and itself… these texts then are the ones i have reproduced into english and like;
Uber Benjamin Helmut Heissenbuttel
Uber literature Helmet Heissenbuttel
Textbuchs 1–6, 8, 9 and Projket nr1… Helmut Heissenbuttel
What else then… over the years I must have read a thousand or so crime novels, but this year its been quite a restricted set, only a few. crime novels appears to be one of the most open forms of literature today. It does so because it has at the same time developed and maintained one of the few self-contained areas of modern literature. A debased realism. The things that many critics dislike about it, the linguistic laconicism and anonymity, the schematic reduction of psychology, the “inartistic” description, are all part of its generic characteristics. It has its own linguistic tradition, which is only sporadically linked to that of other literature; it also has, which is often overlooked, its own linguistic and stylistic criteria, which are entirely tailored to the requirements of allegorical storytelling. Moreover, the crime novel is something that so many critics of modern literature miss, namely that it is legitimate reading material for everyone. Everyone can find themselves in it. My favorite examples this year are
Sax Rohmer The Mask of Fu Man-Chu
Feramontov, Desmond Cory
and then some more random examples of modernist and other literary science.
Well Kept Ruin Helene Cixous
Manhatttan Helene Cixous
Kidnapped Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
The principles of life on black friday Alexander Kluge
The Annual banquet…. Mathias Enard
Chinatown Thuan
Then the works of Mieko Kanai, which arrived by accident <courtesy of X> and have been a joy to explore this year, I mention two, though anything by her is worth reading…
The Word Book Meiko Kani
Mild Vertigo Mieko Kanai
And finally a few of the selected philosophical and and by mandate the political texts… perhaps by the time I push this out i’ll add some other things to this, most should not need much of an introduction the two Chamayou texts are very good, the Rasmussen is the simplest and least technical introduction to the National Liberalism form tof 21st C fascism…
Hominescence Michel Serres
Humanistic Narratives Michel Serres (translated by the excellent Randolph Burks)
Theory of the Drone Gregoire Chamayou
Then ungovernable society Gregoire Chamayou
The Common Toni Negri
Political Spinoza Riccardo Caporali (part of the Spinoza Studies series from edinburgh)
Late Capitalist Fascism Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen
Everything and Nothing Graham Priest and Markus Gabriel
War and Capital Alliez and Lazzarato
Essays by Walter Benjamin…
Imperium — structures and affect of political bodies — Frederic Lordon
Little SF&F this year, most was overladen with the strange ideologies of the contemporary west, as its always been, banal, corrupt and murderous. Only SF manages to kill more people than the actual world we live in… None of this needs mentioning. On the positive side I did find the idea that intelligent, sentient and sometimes murderous spaceships should have genders is unintentionally funny…
