Poems that blur the boundaries of language and species, inviting us to imagine a new world. The expansive reworking of language in Impastoral flies through the possible voices of outsides and insides--slug, probe, horse carriage, sewer, potted plant, lab rat, vampire, bot fly, giant cow. Language, in Brandan Griffin's poetry, is neither human nor nonhuman, and it undoes that very idea of these distinctions, so beings--slugprobe, pottedhorsesewer, telepathybarcode, mammaltexts--morph and change in between boundaries. Each of these poems is an organism, a collection of living connections, looped interiorities strung together in worlds tunneling through worlds. The poems' composition becomes a decomposition of budding, breeding, and fluctuating. Reading this collection is an experience of becoming deformed and merged into the experiences of other beings; you are sea vent, microprocessor, cell gel, bug, a greenly translucent leaf typed half a sound at a time. Griffin invites us to imagine all possible beings and to hatch into a fresh world. Impastoral won the Omnidawn Open Book contest, selected by Brian Teare.

Bridges the gap between the history and theory of twentieth-century architecture and cultural theories of modernity. In this exploration of the relationship between modernity, dwelling, and architecture, Hilde Heynen attempts to bridge the gap between the discourse of the modern movement and cultural theories of modernity. On one hand, she discusses architecture from the perspective of critical theory, and on the other, she modifies positions within critical theory by linking them with architecture. She assesses architecture as a cultural field that structures daily life and that embodies major contradictions inherent in modernity, arguing that architecture nonetheless has a certain capacity to adopt a critical stance vis-à-vis modernity. Besides presenting a theoretical discussion of the relation between architecture, modernity, and dwelling, the book provides architectural students with an introduction to the discourse of critical theory. The subchapters on Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and the Venice School (Tafuri, Dal Co, Cacciari) can be studied independently for this purpose.

Defective Institutions overturns the basis of institutionalism. Faith in classic institutions—exposed as clamorously inadequate by the failure of governance under neoliberalism--does not result in greater democracy, greater horizontality, or more equitable living. Nor does trust in the standing of decisions, in the authority of antecedent cases, in the coherence, strength, continuity, or solidity of the institutions that frame and render legitimate these decisions and the rules they buttress. To the contrary: the classically-imagined institution and our faith in it lie at the heart of neoliberal unfreedom and racialized violence. Working at the point of contact and conflict between socialist and anarcho-philosophical traditions, Defective Institutions offers an alternative, which is also an alternative to the figures of governance associated with the liberal conception of the state: an aberrant republicanism comprised of defective institutions, run through with the necessity of their abolition. Lezra’s book moves from the primitive scenes of Western political institution—the city; the family; the university; the first person; “race”—through recent work in the philosophy of translation, decolonial studies, abolitionism, Afropessimism and its critiques, psvchoanalysis, and musicology. To offer an original wedding of abolition and institution, Lezra brings together genealogies of contemporary institutionalism (from Durkheim and Hauriou to Searle); post-Marxist accounts of the state (Balibar, Abensour); philosophical and anthropological anarchism (Wolff, Malabou, Graeber, Scott); critical legal theory (analyses of Marbury v. Madison as well as Dobbs v. Jackson); continental and analytic versions and critiques of foundationalism (Heidegger, Lyotard and Butler; Quine, Searle and Fine); and political and sociological abolitionism (Lewis, O’Brien). At a time when some call for strengthening institutions and for defending liberties ostensibly protected by such institutions, and others long for the destruction of institutions that have long been oppressive, Lezra’s book offers today’s Left a new framework for confronting institutions’ necessity and their necessary abolition.