Alenka Zupančič is a Slovenian philosopher and social theorist. She is a professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts. She is the author of many books, including What Is Sex? (MIT Press, 2017), The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008), and Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (Verso, 2000).
Divided Publishing
Let Them Rot
£ 11.99

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Let Them Rot
Alenka Zupančič
£ 11.99
Let Them Rot
Alenka Zupančič
What is the relation between family misfortune and desire? Why must we bury the dead? What is to come for those unburied? How to distinguish the endless stream of graphic violence from violence that goes straight to the bone? How does language make up not only the law, but also unwritten laws?
In Let Them Rot Alenka Zupančič takes up the ancient figure of Antigone and finds a blueprint for the politics of desire. Not desire as consumption, enjoying what is offered, but desire’s oblivion to what came before. Such politics says: “No, this world must end and I will be the embodiment of that end.” This is not self-satisfied destruction for destruction’s sake; it is existence with consequences beyond the predictable. Zupančič asks: “Why desire?” And this question of desire, which may be the only question, takes the form of a no that is also an “I.”
- 978-1-7395161-0-9
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 112 p.
- Paperback
- December 2023
About the author
Endorsements (2)
Zupančič’s ideas are fresh, as if they hailed from some open air beyond the clutter of current theoretical quarrels. This brilliant account of Sophocles’s Antigone breaks new ground for philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political and feminist theory.
Writing my book on Antigone, I thought: ‘There we go, the subject is closed—let’s go to sleep.’ And then along came Zupančič with her take and compelled me to rethink everything I did. In other words—and this is difficult for me to say—she is better than me here.
Bosses
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Bosses
Ghislaine Leung
£ 11.99
Bosses
Ghislaine Leung
Few artists dig deep into themselves like this: an extraordinary insight into the process of producing art.
To make art is to understand how you are, to notice your prejudices and assumptions about value, to acknowledge your hand in an unequal world, and to recognise how you institute yourself – all while letting go of the outcome of work. Bosses replaces strategies of high performance with acts of trust. It is a book about doubt, about maintaining that condition and its untenable faith. About becoming a parent. Where individualism dissolves into dependence, ‘like when you get into a bath that’s the same temperature as your body, or when the summer comes and the wind touches your skin’.
- 978-1-9164250-0-2
- 15 b&w and 2 colour illustrations
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 104 p.
- Paperback
- September 2023
About the author
Ghislaine Leung is a British conceptual artist. Born in Stockholm, Sweden to a father from Hong Kong and a mother from London, she was raised first in Reims, France and then in London, UK. She received a BA in fine art in context at the University of the West of England in 2002 and a master's in aesthetics and art theory at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University in 2009. Between 2004 and 2014 she worked at Tate and LUX, London. Leung’s first book was Partners (Cell Project Space, 2018). She lives in London.
Endorsements (4)
The artist as receiver, giver, inquisitor, communicator. Leung’s writing is emotional and profound, engaging both the very personal and the mundane, the practical and the political. Few artists dig deep into themselves like this: an extraordinary insight into the process of producing art.
Artist as (girl) boss or maverick scab? The labour-gender question doesn’t stay put. Dialectics here grow as wildly and recursively as Ballardian botany. Leung ranges things seen, felt, sensed, thought and made against watertightness as form or as politics. The more gaps, the more space to remake reality.
I would call Bosses auto-factual. Leung accounts for work and life co-authored with facts, conjuring a prosaic and beautiful sociality. Her negations are profound, they hold and express the social apophatically. What is not here almost feels like a choice, and the thing convulses.
Some events you can never correct. One of them is childbirth. If you want to know, here it is.
Press (2)
In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities
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In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities
Joy James
£ 13.99
In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities
Joy James
Joy James’s Revolutionary Love is umph-degree love; or love beyond measure. It is anything love. It is love without reckoning. It is love that dares all things, beyond which others may find the spirit-force to survive; to live to fight another day. Such love is also fighting itself, for the sake of ensuring that others may live.
Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.
Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison.
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
- 978-1-7398431-0-6
- 1 b&w illustration
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 364 p.
- Paperback
- December 2022
About the author
The political theorist Joy James teaches at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Blackwell, 1998), Imprisoned Intellectuals (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), The New Abolitionists (SUNY Press, 2005) and Warfare in the American Homeland (Duke University Press, 2007), James is also author of Resisting State Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Transcending the Talented Tenth (Routledge, 1997), Seeking the Beloved Community (SUNY Press, 2013), New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Erica Garner (Common Notions, 2023), and the forthcoming Contextualizing Angela Davis.

Endorsements (3)
To take the path of Revolutionary Love is to take a risk. It means walking the razor’s edge. This is not a politics of the heart, not a politics of charity. No need for self-love or self-pity—it’s enough to know where you stand, to embody that moment ‘just before hate’ and, with the energy of despair, to ward off the worst.
Rooted in community-activism and the ways in which ‘history is always instructive’, Joy James is clear that she is ‘always thinking about and in the community.’ In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love is a beautiful and effective articulation and representation of those commitments.
Rich, rigorous, poetic, and accessible, this is a book I will return to again and again for guidance and affirmation, a reminder of the interconnectedness of all who resist oppression, of all who despair, of all who live for Revolutionary Love.
Press (13)
Disorganisation & Sex
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Disorganisation & Sex
Jamieson Webster
£ 11.99
Disorganisation & Sex
Jamieson Webster
Never does the patient seem more ill than when they try to order associations into a logical tale. Classical analysis sees this in terms of a repudiation of sexuality: an attempt to avoid speaking from a place of desire. But why should psychoanalysis reduce everything to sex? If sex only ever achieves partial satisfactions, fragments of pleasure, its pursuit creates our subjectivity and our world. Disorganisation & Sex argues that the sexuality of psychoanalysis is not a reductive biologism, but an archaic remainder that cannot be colonised, endlessly disorienting meaning in our everyday lives. It is our proximity to this terrain that undoes our most tedious habits, and opens onto something revelatory.
- 978-1-9164250-9-5
- 1 b&w illustration
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 240 p.
- Paperback
- June 2022
About the author
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011) and Conversion Disorder (Columbia University Press, 2018); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Pantheon, 2013). She contributes regularly to Artforum, Spike Art Magazine, Apology and the New York Review of Books.

Endorsements (4)
This book is a dare. By giving desire back to sex, Webster offers us a blueprint for talking about sex at a time when we’ve forgotten how to do so.
Putting her finger on the difficulty of sexuality, one of our savviest psychoanalytic commentators limns its impossibilities – but also its potential for inventing something new.
Being dragged into the orbit of Webster’s mind is like entering the Magic Mountain: you go in as a visitor, and stay as a patient.
Who knew the hole was what Freud had in mind when he invented psychoanalysis and wouldn’t stop saying ‘sex’. Take a tumble into Wonderland with Dr Webster and decide for yourself what counts as real.