Janine Armin

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  print Apr/May 2011

  Where Art Belongs

  In a recent issue of the London Review of Books, Eliot Weinberger used Michel Foucault’s essay “What Is an Author?” to account for George W. Bush’s absence from his own autobiography, a text that enacts Foucault’s idea of “a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.” While the former president’s book exemplifies the dissolution of the author function, Weinberger’s analysis cautioned autobiographers and writers alike. Writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus is searingly aware of the discourse in which she functions, and transforms it into something redolent of Simone Weil’s poeticism

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  culture June/July/Aug 2008

  CONFLICT OF INTEREST

  In 1982, smack in the middle of cold-war angst, Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer interviewed architect and philosopher Paul Virilio about nuclear war and technology. Their densely layered dialogue was published the following year as Pure War, which introduced Virilio’s thinking to the United States. Last year, the pair met to reevaluate their earlier arguments, and the reissue of Pure War includes this new conversation and a fresh introduction.

  At present, its almost impossible to deny Lotringer and Virilio’s twenty-five-year-old observation: that war’s survival is dependent on its

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  culture June/July/Aug 2007

  No Vacancy

  Adding to his mind-altering oeuvre, which already includes poems, a novel, and works of criticism on subjects like Andy Warhol, Jackie O, and gay men’s penchant for opera, Wayne Koestenbaum delivers a coup d’état with Hotel Theory, a palimpsest of postmodern detritus presented in two parallel texts. On the left side of the page, “Hotel Theory,” Koestenbaum’s phenomenological study of hotels, provides the mental framework for the reader to act as a Bachelardian cosmonaut in the Lana Turner and Liberace dime novel “Hotel Women” on the right. Hotel Theory showcases Koestenbaum’s inflections via