Avid Readers 5

Sinister Anonymity in the Sexual and Linguistic Fields

edited by Jack Henrie Fisher and Alan Smart

Avid Readers 5 considers, through a compressed sequence of reproduced literature, the fuzzy impasses and technical openings of sexual identity and non-identity in the ancient and modern worlds.

Following a roughly contiguous line of thought about gender and anonymity in revolutionary contexts, the publication “concludes” in the utopian horizon of a nonbinary communism of the incommensurable (per José Esteban Muñoz).

Encounter along the way: feats of typing in Maoist China, the girlfriend experience of contemporary labor, the signifier of jouissance, and tender sex in hollow caves.

And we are also very pleased to announce, in this edition, a never-before published translation, by Erin Maria Madarieta, of José Carlos Mariátegui’s text “The National and the Exotic.”

Avid Readers is a series of reprintings that doubles as a script for the performance of a collective reading. Avid Readers reproduces not only words but also the typographic form that words have taken in print history. We read these pages aloud together not as a ritual but as the lucid collective enunciation of the texts assembled.

Texts excerpted from Karl Marx, Judith Butler, Anne Carson, J.P. Nettl, Frédéric Lordon, Jacques Lacan, Paul Preciado, Homer, Barbara Cassin, José Carlos Mariátegui (translated from Spanish by Erin Maria Madarieta), Thomas S. Mullaney, and José Esteban Muñoz.