agon

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid Genre. In the tragi-comic—and worse—chaos of our times—suppose our writing began to appear as letters caught in barcodes. Phrases and bits of words breaking off en route to scanners designed for registering information but not the disturbance of meaning. It is literally with this provocative vision that Judith Goldmans AGON begins. Fragments—words with ing or ite or ppeals detached—mark the violence and folly of our weaponized and otherwise benighted cultures. At times a necessary lyricism wells up without betraying the truth of Cumulative transfers By the agreed upon price / the Tempest has of late stripped the petals away. Theres even more to this many-genred book—one to be lived with in the urgency of its poetry its philosophical and socio-political inquiry—font of brilliance that sustains vitally agonistic conversation across perilous divides.—Joan Retallack The Commodification of Everything. That was the pivot point of materialist discourse not even five years ago. But now its time to crack open the piths of the most fundamental doings of our species. After the sweeping tide of ethnonational victories currently sweeping the globe The Weaponization of Everything is not merely the speak of The Now but the do of all its subjects whether collusive or rebellious. Judith Goldmans AGON is borne amidst this new reality. Few works of experimental literature aim so high as to flush out the full range affectual coordinates as to reveal their ages Agon as a controlling demigod of our own making that is to raise up the Agons agon.—Rodrigo Toscano Judith Goldmans AGON confronts the ubiquitous naturalization inherent in the weaponization of race gender global warming poetics language utterance politics torture immigration and whatever else is changeable under the guise of aggression masquerading as mental freedom. ...the intensification of weapons already in place and ...observed nearly everywhere AGON deftly solders ideas of defensive assimilation (weapons already in place) to our conscious and unconscious activities of daily living. One can only bow down in shock and awe to AGONs scorched earth dissemination of open-ended spaces to think while thinking is still hopefully under what we presume is our jurisdiction.—Kim Rosenfield A cross-genre work that intercuts and assembles three textual threads AGON inventories ubiquitous contemporary exempla of weaponization: in the culture propagated by neoliberalism all social forms—ordinary necessary relations transactions and communications—have been turned into fodder for social aggression. AGON audits the disavowed violence of abstractive technologies in their material effects while also tracing the subtle anatomy of violence in its more proper spheres. Is poetry one of these? Writing alongside Amiri Barakas invective Black Art AGON builds a dossier on the aggressivity peculiar to literary speech thinking this issue in relation to the volatile politics around poetry in America at this moment.