Divided Publishing

Artificial Gut Feeling

£ 10.99
£ 10.99

Artificial Gut FeelingAnna Zett

£ 10.99

Artificial Gut Feeling

Anna Zett

This being is able to transform movement into speech. It winds itself about inside me like a thick snake and I have to use all my strength to let it spin and do what it does. When I wilfully try to stop it, it begins to whisper words to me and that is even more unpleasant. If I were to associate this gut feeling with an emotion, I would say disgust. But this disgust is not directly linked to your name.

If winning can only occur in a competition between equal opponents, someone who isn’t equal will need to adopt a different strategy and let go of the promise, or the curse, of victory. Anna Zett takes up the challenge in this collection of personal science fiction, registering the traces systems of power leave in the body, in its locomotory, nervous and digestive systems. Zett’s voice appears in several textual guises, addressing authority, resistance, trauma and the physicality of language. Dedicated to the feminist revolution, the post-socialist subject of Artificial Gut Feeling questions logocentric and capitalist beliefs about the economy of meaning. This book gathers together fists, guts and brains to gain a deeper understanding of the non-verbal roots of dialogue.

  • 978-1-9164250-3-3
  • 21.6 x 13.9 cm
  • 96 pp.
  • Paperback
  • 08 October 2019

About the author

Anna Zett (b. 1983, Leipzig) is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Her work combines historical analysis and poetic form with playful embodied practice. In 2014 she released two videos dealing with extinct animals as emblems of colonial capitalism in the West, which were screened widely in the context of contemporary art. In recent years, her research into the cosmology of scientific modernism has focused on post-communist trouble, industrialism and the German heritage of violence. Formally, her artistic emphasis moves towards listening, voice and the human body’s capacity to improvise verbal and non-verbal group communication. Zett has written and directed two experimental radio plays for German public radio and (co-)hosted participatory formats of storytelling, discourse and choreography. Artificial Gut Feeling is her first book. She lives in Berlin.

Photo: Silke Briel

Endorsements (2)

In this science fiction, science provides metaphors for postmodern feminist theory. Zett has clearly researched the science at the foundation of these metaphors, especially electricity and neurotransmitters, and the result is engaging, unique, and insightful.

Eric Aldrich, Full Stop

These are not the writings of a solitary author holed up in their study but of someone who uses text as an elastic tool to negotiate, rehearse (ideas, bodies), and perform with others.

Kim Modig, AQNB

Bourgeois Coldness

£ 13.99
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£ 13.99
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Bourgeois ColdnessHenrike Kohpeißtrans. Grace Nissan

£ 13.99

Bourgeois Coldness

Henrike Kohpeiß

trans. Grace Nissan

Bourgeois coldness refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning – a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces – institutional and affective – stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.

Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.

  • 978-1-7395161-2-3
  • 21.6 x 13.9 cm
  • 280 pp.
  • Paperback
  • September 2025

About the author

Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher in Berlin, working on social and political philosophy, critical theory, affect studies, Black studies and feminist philosophy. She regularly publishes work in academic journals and criticism in magazines. She organises and hosts events in Berlin, such as the conversation series ‘Feelings at the end of the world’ at Volksbühne. Bourgeois Coldness is her first book, and was published in German in 2023 by Campus Verlag.

Photo: Inke Johannsen

About the translator

Grace Nissan is the author of The Utopians (Ugly Duckling Presse) and The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions) and kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books). Their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were presented in the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as in the accompanying publication In the Face Of War (Isolarii). They are the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship to translate the Austrian poet Ann Cotten’s Banned! An Epic Poem into English.

Endorsements (2)

Foregrounding affect, this timely book provides an inestimable philosophical argument for the centrality of Blackness in critical examinations of capitalism’s violence.

Denise Ferreira da Silva

Elegant and erudite in equal measure, this book will stand as a landmark diagnosis of the practices of denial in our time.

Andreas Malm

Press (2)

Eine Kälte, die das Leben gut durchwärmtMartin Hartman Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2711021/11/2023
The Colonial Lives of Bourgeois ColdnessHenrike Kohpeiß and Jonas BensAffect and Colonialism Web Lab21/03/2023

Upcoming (4)

10 November Amsterdam Henrike Kohpeiß launch
06 November London Book launch Bourgeois Coldness, Historical Materialism
04 November London Bourgeois Coldness launch, Housmans Bookshop
02 October Stockholm Henrike Kohpeiß launches Bourgeois Coldness, Nord Books