Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power

"At long last: a set of serious, sustained engagements with the complex relationships between anarchism and the politics and practice of sexuality. Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson have gathered together a collection of passionate, provocative papers that incite the reader to recognize the relevance of anarchist ideas to queer and feminist sexual politics.

-- Sasha Roseneil, author of Common Women, Uncommon Practices: the queer feminisms of Greenham, and Professor of Sociology and Social Theory at Birkbeck, University of London

Not so much a book as a nexus, into which flow some bubbling torrents: utopias, poetry and footnotes, post-theory, rationality, sexuality, Palestine, love, sado-masochism, Kropotkin and Nietzsche, lonely women in all-male meetings, riot grrrls, Queer parades, heteronormativity …and fishbowls. – Something to delight everyone, something to annoy everyone, something to make you think.

-- Sharif Gemie, Professor in Modern and Contemporary History, University of Glamorgan

________________________

Anarchism & Sexuality aims to bring the rich and diverse traditions of anarchist thought and practice into contact with contemporary questions about the politics and lived experience of sexuality. Both in style and in content, it is conceived as a book that aims to question, subvert and overflow authoritarian divisions between the personal and political; between sexual desires categorised as heterosexual or homosexual; between seemingly mutually exclusive activism and scholarship; between forms of expression such as poetry and prose; and between disciplinary categories of knowledge. Anarchism & Sexuality seeks to achieve this by suggesting connections between ethics, relationships and power, three themes that run throughout. The key objectives of the book are: to bring fresh anarchist perspectives to debates around sexuality; to make a queer and feminist intervention within the most recent wave of anarchist scholarship; and to make a queerly anarchist contribution to social justice literature, policy and practice. By mingling prose and poetry, theory and autobiography, it constitutes a gathering place to explore the interplay between sexual and social transformation.This book will be of use to those interested in anarchist movements, cultural studies, critical legal theory, gender studies, and queer and sexuality studies.

Contents:

Preface: Sexual Anarchy, Anarchophobia, and Dangerous Desires, Judy Greenway

1. Ethics, Relationships & Power: An Introduction, Jamie Heckert & Richard Cleminson

2. Alexander Berkman: Sexual Dissidence in the First Wave Anarchist Movement and Its Subsequent Narratives, Jenny Alexander

3. Nobody Knows What an Insurgent Body Can Do: Questions for Affective Resistance, Stevphen Shukaitis.

Poetic Interlude I, Helen Moore

4. Postanarchism and the Contrasexual Practices of the Cyborg in Dildotopia or ‘The War on the Phallus’, Lena Eckert

5. On Anarchism: An Interview with Judith Butler, Jamie Heckert.

Poetic Interlude II, Tom Leonard

6. Love and Revolution in Le Guin’s Four Ways to Forgiveness, Laurence Davis

7. Structures of Desire: Postanarchist Kink in the Speculative Fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, Lewis Call

8. Fantasies of an Anarchist Sex Educator, Jamie Heckert.

Poetic Interlude III,J. Fergus Evans & Helen Moore

9. Sexuality Issues in the Czech Anarchist Movement, Marta Kolářová

10. Amateurism and Anarchism in the Creation of Autonomous Queer Spaces, Gavin Brown.

Afterword: On the Phenomenology of Fishbowls, Kristina Nell Weaver"

More Info: 2011, Routledge; Co-edited with Richard Cleminson

On Anarchism: An Interview with Judith Butler

Jamie Heckert

Exploring questions of race, sexuality and the law, this is Judith Butler's first interview discussing her affinities with anarchism. She resists the temptation to draw a clear line between being inside or outside of the state, for or against the law. Rather, she points to the fragility of any given legal code were regime and its possibility subversion or even dissolution in favour of popular sovereignty. Linking Anarchists Against the Wall, Benjamin, Althusser and the Zapatista encuentros with everyday questions of dignity and survival, this interview demonstrates the possibility and value of queering the border between activist and scholar.

More Info: Pre-proof version. For final version, see J. Heckert and R. Cleminson (eds.) Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power. London/New York: Routledge

Anarchist theory and practice in a global age

BOOK PDF
Anarchism
Anarchist theory and practice in a global age
edited by
Jonathan Purkis
and
James Bowen
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave

2004

Carnival against capital: a comparison of Bakhtin,Vaneigem and Bey
GAVIN GRINDON
Department of English and American Studies School of Arts, Histories and Cultures 

University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL

ABSTRACT

Since the mid 1990s, many anarchists and Marxists, drawing on the writings of Hakim Bey, the Situationist International and Mikhail Bakhtin, have increasingly articulated the concept of ‘carnival’ as a valuable form of resistance that merges the political and the aesthetic. This essay looks at these writings and the cases they make, and examines the extent to which they form a coherent body of thought.The central texts under discussion will be Mikhail Bakhtin’s

Rabelais and HisWorld , Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life

and Hakim Bey’s TAZ:The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism

Leonora Carrington, Surrealism, and Initiation 

Symbolic Death and Rebirth in Little Francis and Down Below

Kristoffer Noheden

Abstract

In 1940, the surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was incarcerated ina Spanish mental asylum, having been pronounced “incurably insane.”

Down Below , an account of the incident first published in the surrealist journal VVV in 1944, acted as an important part in her recovery from mental illness. In it, she works through her experience in the light of her reading of Pierre Mabille’s (1908–1952) book Mirror of the Marvelous (1940).

This work let Carrington interpret the intricate correspondences she perceived during herillness through the imagery of alchemy, and allowed her to find a similarity between herexperience and the trials depicted in many myths, thus infusing her harrowing experiences with symbolic meaning.

This article discusses the significance of Mabille and his work forCarrington’s sense of regained health. This is further emphasised through a comparison ofthe motif of symbolic death in Down Below

with its depiction in Carrington’s earlier, partly autobiographical, novella “Little Francis” (1937–38). The depiction of a loss of self in this work prefigures the ordeals in Down Below, but it is only in the latter text that Carrington also effects a form of rebirth. The article proposes that the enactment of a symbolic rebirth means that

Down Below can be considered a form of initiation into the surrealist marvellous, and that Carrington’s experiences both parallel and prefigure surrealism’s concerns with esotericism, myth, and initiation, during and after the Second World War.

Keywords

Pierre Mabille; alchemy; myth; André Breton; esotericism; psychosis

Bauduin, T.M. 2014. Surrealism and the Occult. Occultism and Esotericism in the Work and Movement of André Breton. Amsterdam University Press/Chicago University Press.
2014

T. Bauduin, PhD -...
This book offers a new perspective on a long-debated issue: the role of the occult in surrealism, in particular under the leadership of French writer André Breton. Based on thorough source analysis, this study details how our understanding of occultism and esotericism, as well as of their function in Bretonian surrealism, changed significantly over time from the early 1920s to the late 1950s.

'Ithell Colquhoun, Surrealism and the Occult', 
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9 (Summer 2011)

Papers of Surrealism, 2011

Victoria Ferentinou


The work of the British artist Ithell Colquhoun has been comparatively overlooked. Only in the last few years have a few publications appeared. This paper adds to these studies by reviewing Colquhoun's negotiation of surrealism and the occult and by exploring the impact that this twofold affiliation had upon her oeuvre. It lays particular emphasis on Colquhoun's revisionist tactics and her use of the occult as a site for personal enlightenment and reaffirmation as a woman artist. The discussion centres on Colquhoun's interest in androgyny, a hermetic motif also employed by the surrealists. The paper addresses Colquhoun's esoteric and feminist appropriation of the concept, delineates her trajectory as an artist and sheds light on the development of her mystical vision.

Issue: 9
Page Numbers: 1-24
Publication Date: 2011

Publication Name: Papers of Surrealism 

Take Two Emerald Tablets in the Morning_Surrealism and the Alchemical Transubstantiation of the World_Alchemical Traditions_MARVELL.pdf

Leon Marvell

In nineteen-fourty-eight an interviewer asked André Breton whether he still had any 
faith in the ‘initiatic tradition’. Breton replied:

What role do I ascribe to the initiatory tradition? [A]n increasingly important one. observe 
[...] that the best things said in France since the liberation (a latent liberation if ever there
 was one) aim at the long overdue elucidation of the bond that makes the modern
 conceptions of poetry, revolution and love part of the occult process.

"Embodying the Androgyne: Psychoanalysis & Alchemical Desire in Max Ernst’s Men Shall Know Nothing of This (1923)", in Black Mirror, vol. 1: Embodiment, ed. Judith Noble et. al., London, 2016, pp. 176–194.


Daniel Zamani

This essay offers a new analysis of Max Ernst's 1923 composition "Men Shall Know Nothing of This". As the first emblematic example for the Surrealists' fusion of alchemy and psychoanalysis, the work played a seminal role in the gradual shift from Paris Dada to the rise of the Surrealist avant-garde. Informed by Ernst's early studies of Psychology and History of Art at the University of Bonn, the work marked Ernst as a key player on France's artistic scene and firmly placed an engagement with psychoanalysis at the forefront of the Surrealists' artistic and political agenda. Previous approaches to the painting have nevertheless traced its cosmological symbolism to one specific prototype: Freud's 1911 study on the so-called Schreber case, in which he analysed Schreber's neurotic obsession with the solar principle as an unconscious fixation on the father-image, supposedly indicative of an 'inverted Oedipal complex'. My paper argues against this dominant reading of Ernst's composition as a 'pictoral transcript' of Freud's case-study, first postulated by Geoffrey Hinton in 1975 and never seriously challenged in recent research on the artist. I aim to demonstrate that Ernst's psychoanalytically informed painting has to be considered instead as a sophisticated blend of several iconographic sources, resulting in the highly abstracted image of the alchemical androgyne as symbol of perfect oneness and harmony. Ernst's emphasis on the merging of microcosm and macrocosm, the male and the female, the human and the divine ultimately embraced the idea of alchemical symbolism as an unconscious expression of what C.G. Jung later termed the animus/anima archetypes. The use of an alchemical metaphor, which resonated with ideas of metamorphosis and gradual transformation into ever higher states of psychic perfection, was thus a particularly potent symbol for Surrealism's artistic and political aspirations, clearly signaling a new direction for the French avant-garde of the early 1920s.

Dada and Surrealism:
 A Very Short Introduction
David Hopkins