[spectre] Review of Trans Desire by Zach Blas in E-Misférica

[micha cárdenas]

I am so honored to say that Zach Blas has reviewed my book, and his
review is now available on the E-Misférica website. E-Misférica is the
journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and
their latest issue, 7.2, is on the theme "After Truth".

>From the review:

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze describes the world as
Nietzsche posits it, as “neither true nor real but living” (1962,
184). In this world of the living, life gains value—not truth—by being
evaluated and interpreted. These actions suggest we frame the living
in a particular way to return certain values and sensations. Framing,
in this sense, is an act of creation that is political: to frame is to
create new values, generate new experiments, and produce new
possibilities.

Micha Cárdenas’ Trans Desire frames desire as the basis for a radical
collective politics that is queer, feminist, and anti-capitalist.
Building from a Lacanian notion of desire, Cárdenas reveals desire
itself to be ontologically trans, that is, desire as in-between,
liminal, becoming, and in process. Framing desire as trans allows
Cárdenas to formulate a desire which contests standards, rigidities,
and binaries of all kinds. This desire is a transcendental empiricism,
always extending beyond the known to materially make the world and us
anew. In Trans Desire, Cárdenas offers us nothing less than a
practical theory of desire that creates livable, affirmative worlds
that resist the violence of capitalism and heteronormativity.

Read the rest in E-Misférica:

http://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/en/e-misferica-72/blas


-- 
micha cárdenas
Interim Associate Director of Art and Technology
Culture, Art and Technology Program, Sixth College, UCSD

Co-Author, Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs, Atropos Press, http://is.gd/daO00
Artist/Researcher, UCSD School of Medicine
Artist/Theorist, bang.lab, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://transreal.org

gpg: http://is.gd/ebWx9