trans. Grace Nissan
Foregrounding affect, this timely book provides an inestimable philosophical argument for the centrality of Blackness in critical examinations of capitalism’s violence.
Elegant and erudite in equal measure, this book will stand as a landmark diagnosis of the practices of denial in our time.
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.
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.
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.
| 12 March | Brussels | Henrike Kohpeiß at rile* books |
| 13 March | Paris | Henrike Kohpeiß at After 8 Books |
At once evocative and subtly incisive Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time.
A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life.
Why they said, “Your real name is Anon,” I'll never know . . . But now that I have a name, I know I must write . . . I’m scared, but feel it is time to be really bad.
Republished for the first time since its 1979 release, in a new revised edition, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. With her theme of a child disappeared – and all that that phrase carries with it – Howe captures the chaos of reality in her salient mix of poetry and prose. Readers will find it hard to believe that this book, which gives fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, was written in the last century.
Illustrated by Colleen McCallion
Fanny Howe was born on 15 October 1940 in Buffalo, New York. She was professor emerita in literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of more than fifty books of poetry and prose. Howe taught literature and writing throughout her life and mentored a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical thinking. She died on 8 July 2025 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Howe prefers the clarity of misunderstanding to the blur of certainty.
Poet of unsettled dreams.
Reading her fiction feels something like facing a patch of wilderness—startling, beautiful, yet terrifyingly mysterious.
