On Anne Boyer's 'Binding Cartesianism(s)'
At 3:AM, MH reviews Anne Boyer's newest collection of essays, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (UDP, 2018), and writes that the book, "inflicts writing that perfects its own oppositions and rehearses riotous tonalities of no against the mandatory, capitalist yes." From there:
Saying nothing or staying put as foreplays for saying “not this” are the constant practices of refusalists who don’t put a muzzle on their biting no each time they refuse the prepackaged order of the world, and try to overturn it instead. Without eluding their uncomfortable yet not-that-obvious collusion with death, refusals seem to perform at their best when whimsical or, as Boyer notes, taking the form of poetry: “Every poem against the police is also and always a guardian of love for the world.”
Non-human mediators have a long history in philosophy, literature and even more popular mediums such as film – take, for instance, Ildikó Enyedi’s latest cinematic endeavor, On Body and Soul (2017), a gorgeous yet flawed attempt at rendering non-human taxonomies that unfolds (deliberately or not) against its premise of mind-body dualism. Boyer’s essay ‘When the Lambs Rise up Against the Bird of Prey’ works in a similar vein, reminiscent of Deleuze’s description of non-humans as beings living steadily “on the lookout”. Rejecting the innocence that keeps being attached to “lambness”, and replacing it with the shrewd education violence engrafts on living bodies regardless of their degree of consciousness, this piece darkens the boundaries between us and lambs. But this analogy doesn’t work in our favor – on the contrary, it’s the lamb that becomes liberated, extricated as it is from the position of the always losing protagonist in anthropocentric fable.