Welcome to this episode of our rile* books podcast series featuring a conversation between Tessel Veneboer and Mckenzie Wark about her new book 'Philosophy for Spiders, on the Low Theory of Kathy Acker' published september 2021 by duke university press.

Tessel is a phd researcher at the university of ghent, her research ‘The queer potential of fragmentation: sexuality and identity in Kathy Acker’s work’ couldn’t be a better frame to talk to our guest, scholar and writer, Mckenzie Wark. Mckenzie is Professor of Media and Culture at Eugene Lang College at The New School and author of several books, including Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century, Reverse Cowgirl, and Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Her correspondence with Kathy Acker was published as I’m Very Into You. 

Quoting her: “The book contains elements of memoir and criticism, but is neither.” Instead, offering a comprehensive reading of Kathy Aker’s published and archived works, Mckenzie finds in Acker not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender, but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy’s purview. 

There are feminist Ackers, punk ackers, queer ackers, kink ackers, avant-gard ackers. In the conversation, they talk about Mckenzie’s proposal to add a Trans Acker to this web as well. Furthermore they talk about the intentions of the book, the why of the low theory, trans-lit, and what Sarah Schulmann calls the growing my-Kathy genre.

The episode features sound from Useless Movement (dub version), a track by Terre Taemlitz and Laurence Rassel, as well as readings by Mckenzie from the book. You can get a copy of the book at www.rile.space, or at our Brussels based store from the end of september on.