Jan 5 2014

Hostis

A Journal of Incivility

Issue 1: Political Cruelty

Few emotions burn like cruelty. Those motivated by cruelty are neither fair nor impartial. Their actions speak with an intensity that does not desire permission, let alone seek it. While social anarchism sings lullabies of altruism, there are those who play with the hot flames of cruelty. We are drawn to the strength of Franz Fanon’s wretched of the earth, who find their voice only through the force of their actions, the sting of women of color’s feminist rage, which establishes its own economy of violence for those who do not have others committing violence on their behalf, the spirit of Italy’s lapsed movement of autonomy, which fueled radicals who carved out spaces of freedom by going on the attack (“Il Diritto all’Odio” – The Right to Hatred), the assaults of Antonin Artaud’s dizzying “Theatre of Cruelty,” which defames the false virtues of audience through closeness with the underlying physicality of thought, and the necessity of Gilles Deleuze’s ontological cruelty, which returns difference through the pain of change that breaks through the backdrop of indifference.

Call for Submissions

We are looking for submissions that defend cruelty. In addition to scholarly essays, we are looking for any original work suited to the printed page: directions to dérivés or other lived projects, maps, printed code, how-to instructions, photo-essays, détournements, experimental writing, directions to word-games, illustrations, or mixed-media art. To remain consistent with the journal’s point of view, we seek material whose tone is abrasive, mood is cataclysmic, style should is gritty, and voice is impersonal.

Submissions will be selected by an editorial collective. Completed contributors should expect to receive critical feedback in the first stage of review requesting revisions to improve their submission and make it consistent with the other contributions selected for inclusion. While we are not soliciting proposals, we are happy to comment on possible submissions before official review.
We will begin reviewing submissions on February 28th, 2014. Send your submissions to hostis@lbcbooks.com as MS Word, rtf, pdf, jpg, or png files. Include a title, author name, content, and any formatting requests. Expect to complete requested revisions during March-April.

hostis


Jan 5 2014

Reprobus

A Journal of Anti-Language

Aside from their strategic deployment as a means to evade the authorities, anti-languages – slang, argot, cant, code, cipher, signal – serve to fortify bonds between members of the “discourse community” (crew) who operate them. Like all forms of linguistic concealment, their “meaning” is dependent upon direct, face-to-face encounters, relies heavily on shared experience, and requires mutual respect and approval. As Alice Becker-Ho writes, because “[t]he outlaw, the revolutionary, the cabbalist or member of a secret society, indeed heretics of all kinds are of a highly associative if not sociable disposition, [their language] calls for reciprocity – the only possible and therefore the only real equality – whose highest form is still represented by love”.

We’re bored with plain speech and mass communication. We want language to become intimate and dangerous. We want theory to become more lyrical, and poetry to become more austere. We don’t want nuanced theories of value or another “turn” to this or that. We want writing that strengthens relationships between individuals who have found each other. No need to write in order to have ideas confirmed: that is the task of journalism and academia. No need to address enemies: that is the task of representatives. No need to be “understood”: anti-languages are always “exclusive,” by virtue of their need to speak without being captured.

For the first issue, the journal will concern itself with the inside: prisons, camps, psychiatric assessment units, detention centres. If you are, or have been, incarcerated in one of these places, or by some other ISA – family, work, school, relationships, identity, “the prison house of language,” whatever – we want to hear from you. We’ll also publish reviews of works dealing with such subjects.
June 1st 2014 is the due date.

email: reprobus@lbcbooks.com
blog: reprobus.anarchyplanet.org

Apofeoz


Jan 4 2014

LBC Review

In this, our inaugural issue, we present an editorial exploration into the themes and contexts of some of our 2013 publications. What is “we”? Funny that you would ask; the answer is more complex than it seems at first glance. We are the constellation of projects under the umbrella of Little Black Cart, which incubates, creates, produces, and distributes speculative, critical, and engaged anarchist thinking and ideas. We use different names to reflect the different editorial orientations and biases of our work. LBC Books is the name of our parent imprint but we have published books, just this year, under Ardent Press, Repartee, Pistols Drawn, Green Anarchy, IEF (the Institute for Experimental Freedom), and CAL Press.
As a publisher in this family of ideas we measure our own success partly by our own continued interest in our broad project, and on whether these ideas merit discussion and further research. This is a modest goal, perhaps, making it achievable in a way that material success is not. It’s can be enough to see ourselves and our friends as tinkerers in a workshop, perfecting an apparatus that awaits the right power source to set it in motion. We find it matters much less what things are named, what color the paint is, or how fast things move, than conversations about what could be in a thousand different permutations, in the experiential world rather than the theoretical one.
In the past two years, we have published twenty-four new titles and helped produce another dozen or so projects (including a North American production of the bulk of Elephant Editions titles, titles from Pallaksch Press, bound pamphlets like Copout and Desert, The Anvil Review, and more). If the goal was to produce engaged, interesting, anarchist material than it’s conservative to say that we have succeeded. If our goal was to shape the minds of a new generation of antiauthoritarians then our project hasn’t succeeded. This is the work we have ahead of us.
A goal for this Review is to make content available for free that would otherwise be inaccessible (aka cost-greater-than-zero) package. We will summarize the thinking behind each of our primary publications this year and share our broad thoughts about why other items distributed by Little Black Cart deserve reprint and specific acknowledgment.

email: editorial@lbcbooks.com
URL: https://lbcbooks.com

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Jan 4 2014

The Master’s Tools

Tactical dynamics are amoral, arational, particular dynamics of conflict, and effectiveness is the accomplishment of objectives within this dynamic of profound uncertainty and resistance. Fusing ideas and action together is always already impossible: analysis generates a space that becomes inert while tactical dynamics are always in flux in all moments, making both strategy and tactics impossible to think in direct and total ways. The most we can do is try to make sense of these dynamics in increasingly effective ways, ways that facilitate the achievement of material objectives.

Imprint: Repartee

Check it out at Little Black Cart

themasterstools_web


Jan 4 2014

Free from Civilization

In clear, impassioned prose, Enrico Manicardi analyzes the evils of our age from their genesis. This or that economic, technological or cultural model is not to blame for our current crisis; the blame lies with economics, technology and culture as such. It is the ideology of fear that makes us afraid. It is the mentality of domination that jeopardizes all of our relationships. In short, the problem is civilization.

Through its oppressive classes, values and processes that pervade everyone’s life, civilization domesticates us, weakens our perceptiveness and distances us from the living world. We must radically change our way of thinking, feeling and behaving before it’s too late–we must dam the flood of devitalization that is washing over us, and return to our wilder natures, both inside and outside ourselves. Manicardi’s appeal is crystal clear: if we are to survive we must begin to search inside ourselves, not to celebrate the distant past as if it were a cult, but to return to ourselves, to grip life with our own two hands, and build upon that earlier ecocentric conscience which once held the place of the egocentric conscience now leading us astray.

Enrico Manicardi was born in 1966 and is a member of La Scintilla, the Society for Libertarian Culture of Modena. A lawyer and founder of the antiauthoritarian media project “Infection,” he has also played guitar and written music for an eponymous band since the 1980s. His lifelong wish has been to live in a free, radically off-kilter, ecologically sound world, one characterized by warm, spontaneous, non-hierarchical relationships rather than those consecrated by the cult of technology. Troubled by the way people have succumbed to a civilization that estranges, domesticates and regulates everything and everyone, he continues to protest against the modern world’s project to enslave us. This book augurs the rise of an increasingly harmonious chorus loud enough to put an end to that project.

Translated by Will Schutt and Alberto Prunetti edited by Alice Parman and with a preface by John Zerzan.

Imprint: Green Anarchy

Check it out at Little Black Cart

freefromciv_web


Dec 6 2013

I Want to be a Suicide Bomber

“Why”ing not in order to get ready-made responses to daily media bombardements, and media intellectualisms, Somnambulist Situationists aim at miraculating a sleepwalker’s strategy to re-consider the Situationist Internationalist’s texts towards an un-negotiable, short-circuiting, non-identitarian, and especially a critically pervert position.

How can we hypnotise the Father, or Hegel,? Or better, how can we maintain a drowsy-Hegel not quite awake yet? What if the father is hypnotised so that he can be made to confess his trauma? Isn’t it timely to radicalise détournament as a way of producing the un-Gestalt of a WHATEVER-IMAGE?

How can we hypnotise the Father or Freud so that psychoanalysis itself is forced to lead the life of a somnambulist? Imagine somnambulist “citizens” who cross the borders for schizo incesting towards a homosexual-effusion… bachelor-machines.

The undecidable is what lies between one’s eyelids.

imprint: Pistols Drawn

Check it out at Little Black Cart

iwtbasb


Dec 6 2013

Attentat – A Journal of Collision

This is a journal intended to explore the collision between anarchist and nihilist ideas. The position itself is more about collision than about words. For too long we have suffered the limitations of words and identities that collapse into insignificance without gaining the corresponding heft of a weapon. This seemed to be a hallmark of big ideas in the 19th and 20th century. But we recognize now that the words aren’t important in the same way anymore.

Attentat explores a history and set of ideas intended to collide with what exists and explode!

Table of Contents

  • Editorial
  • Art of Nothing
  • The Black Banner (Черное Знамия)
  • A Critique of Critique
  • A Howl Against Marx
  • Professional Anarchy and Theoretical Disarmament: On Insurrectionalism
  • Insurrectionary Anarchism as Activism
  • History as Decomposition
  • Attentat: Nihilism as Strategy II

imprint: Pistols Drawn

Buy: Attentat at Little Black Cart

attentat


Jul 1 2013

Defacing the Currency

Bob Black’s first book in sixteen years.

This is not because Bob has stopped writing, or even that the audience for his work has disappeared. Quite the opposite. It’s been sixteen years since Anarchy After Leftism because it has taken that long for the anarchist space to catch up to him. This 350+ page collection of formerly and freshly published articles also includes a lengthy denouncement of Noam Chomsky as (not) anarchist intellectual, and engagements with democracy, technology,anarchism, and the law. Bob Black is an obsessed, intelligent, and hostile thinker whose writings are, if not the most, then among the most clear contemporary anarchist thinking. His passionate denunciations against the Left are a compelling call to arms. He names names, understands decades of political context, and has the desire to build a rational case for new and experienced readers. That he does it well, especially the naming of names, is why he is despised. Those who despise him confuse the man with the idea, but the idea is unassailable. On the one hand there is anarchism, a leftist, historical-above-all-else, ideology. On the other is anarchy, a life lived autonomously and cooperatively.

—from the introduction by Aragorn!

defacingthecurrency

Publisher: LBC Books
Date: February 2013
348 pages, Digest
$12

Purchase at Little Black Cart


Jan 10 2013

Stirner’s Critics

translated by Wolfi Landstreicher

With an introduction by Jason McQuinn.

Max Stirner’s 1844 masterwork, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (The Unique and Its Property), is one of the most subversive, radical and extreme texts in all of history. It can also be described as one of the most misread, misinterpreted and misunderstood books in the history of modern Western thought. This should not be unexpected. Subversive, radical and extreme texts will always obtain hostile receptions from those targeted by their critiques, whether the critiques are accurate and justified or not.

The book is rather simply – though very cleverly – written with very little use of technical terminology. And Stirner goes out of his way in an attempt to use common language wherever possible, though he often does so very creatively and idiosyncratically. It is also a fairly demanding text for anyone (including nearly every contemporary reader) who is unfamiliar with the cultural background within which it was conceived, written and published. It is possible for it to be read and appreciated without knowledge of this background, however the prospect of adequate understanding – not only of the central points but also their extensive implications – definitely recedes the less a reader is familiar with topics like nominalism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, analytical and dialectical logic, and critiques of religion, ontology, epistemology, ideology and language that were current in Stirner’s day.

From the moment Stirner’s text first appeared, it directly and fundamentally challenged every religion, philosophy and ideology. It didn’t just politely challenge every existing historical religion, philosophy and ideology, which would already have been enough to have made its author many enemies. It also blatantly and scathingly challenged every existing contemporary religion, philosophy and ideology of the day. This, unsurprisingly, made its author persona non grata for all theologians, philosophers and ideologists busily working to perfect or put into practice their grand ideas and theories.

Thus the stage was set for over a century and a half of (most often successful, because most often unopposed) mystification of Stirner’s intentions by his many critics from 1844 through the present. Even the great majority of self-proclaimed proponents of Stirner’s work too often tended to add to the mystification through their own misunderstandings and unself-critical oversimplifications.

from the introduction

stirnerscritics

Publisher: LBC Books
Buy: January 2013
148 pages, Digest
$12

Purchase at Little Black Cart


Jan 7 2013

Whitherburo

Applied Metaphysics

This is a critique of America and what remained of its resistance Occupy.

It comes to pass, at last: this great Leviathan that has swallowed the whole world, now commences its death agony. The mechanical man likened unto the perfected State, with unweeping eyes and unfeeling heart, rusts from its own internal emptiness. The clockwork society breaks down. And the returning ghost towns, like a forgotten malediction, return to gaze mournfully at the passing of the glory of the world. The suburbs, this great gilded prison, agonize as they are left to return to nature, to slowly decay in their false-seeming gentility. Like unto like, America “is the nothingness that reduces itself to nothingness”, in the words of Hegel. Such are the heart-rending times the Americans inhabit.

That America and its way of life are ending, there is not the slightest doubt. But for what reason,
and in what manner, and what can possibly come next? What happens in the gap between two worlds, when the new is only dimly glimpsed like a far shore in the night, and the old is disappearing so fast there seems to be no solid ground remaining? Questions of first things and of last things necessarily arise. This is the position of our generation. This is our position, along with our generation—at the very end of America, and the very beginning of something new. So we are as Ancients, we, fingering our threadbare fragments of memory collected from this dying civilization. Is it gone, then, this whole shape of a world? We welcome its passing. Is this the future rushing towards us? We must ready ourselves. We are the only ones who have really started, because we are the only ones who have started to think.

whitherburo_landscape

Publisher: LBC Books
Buy: December 2012
148 pages, Digest
$5

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