Rainer J Hanshe

Humanimality is a confrontation, a hybrid monster of a book that interrogates humanity's troubled relation with its animality, and so its relation to animals, the earth and, ultimately, the cosmos.​In driving not only many species to extinction, but also endangering its very own existence, as well as imperiling the life of the planet, homo sapiens seem to be the most foolhardy species to have evolved since the dawn of time. Will the species drive itself to extinction, or will life itself, for evolution has not ceased, bring about the demise of that species through natural selection in order to preserve the planet? If other species have come and gone since the formation of life on earth, the persisting of homo sapiens is considerably dubious.​Philosophy, religion, and science spiral through this book like chemicals to cross, charge, and finally detonate in an astonishing denouement.​Humanimality is a bastard child, a book with nothing but the logic of physics to map the ecstasy of life.

Heir of symbolism, father of surrealism, extraordinary verbal inventor, L on-Paul Fargue reveals himself to be a visionary in his prose poems. He calls High Solitude a "diorama of states of the soul."​In this work, originally published in 1941, Fargue revives both the night of prehistoric times and that of the end of the world. And, between the two, this fantastic universe also: the Paris that he so loved and of which he was the unforgettable Pi ton. Paris, whose secret geography he traces, in the company of the ghosts of those who were dear to him. The Paris of white nights, stations, and cafes.​But every road, every street, leads to this high, unique place: solitude. "I work at my solitude, searching to guide it in the sea of insomnia where the long line of the dead has thrown us..."

As the digitization of every aspect of existence grows more pervasive and absolute, from the monitoring of thought to the tracking even of genitals, the central nervous system of the human body has been completely rewired. In the mapping of space-time, the species has moved into a state of total possession, of the enslavement of its drives, imagination, and will. Through this virtualization of life, the society of the spectacle has reached a point of unparalleled monstrosity, with the simulacrum usurping reality itself. The species is divided between the digitalists who see the technologization of the human as its natural evolutionary development, and those who stand against them.​At this epochal crux, an enigmatic faction of anonymous figures engages in coordinated global poetic acts of destruction and creation, ludic and radical capers, dismantling machines of control and surveillance. The society of the spectacle is thereby short-circuited, scrambled, cut-up via skirmishes, d tournements, and other subversive acts of havoc wreaking, interruption, and sabotage. Can these dice throws overturn all the mediums of control and enslavement? As time grows more and more constricted, the serendipities and transfigurations of human life suffer swift evisceration. In the midst of this, the anonymous clowns of revolt seek to resurrect the moments and marvels when great forces open up the boundless and the limitless, creating combustion engines of play so as to generate new hemispheres of possibility.​Written as a burst of epigrammatic sequences, like Molotov cocktails arriving from elsewhere, Dionysos Speed is a series of erupting geysers, comets flashing thru space and dispersing new forces. Akin to a Heraclitean fire machine, this book is an act meant to give birth once again to dissonant desire through the powers of the dice throw, a machine forged to release by way of its ludic freedom the vital forces of the cosmos.

Tervetuloa Pohjoismaiden suurimpaan verkkokirjakauppaan! Adlibris kannattaa sananvapautta, ja haluamme edistää kirjallisuuden ja tiedon saatavuutta.

Originally published in Algiers in 1943, Joseph Kessel's Army of Shadows is one of the first books to have been written about the French Resistance. Now available in paperback, Contra Mundum Press is proud to present the first new translation in over 70 years, and the first edition since Jean-Pierre Melville's iconic 1969 film.