The Impossible, Patience
This is a series of essays by Alejandro de Acosta that are deep, original, and provocative new anarchist thinking engaged in the problems of the 21st century–which include language, nihilism, Delueze, Thacker, critique, and much much more. It is also a type of conclusion, as A de A. is clearly expressing several types of farewell in these pages… but to what exactly?
If an “anarchist” project were constituted, not to preserve itself and thus the milieu (usually in this order in terms of explicitly stated goals, and in reverse in terms of actual operations), but to seek out those who have quit the milieu, numerous salutary effects might eventually be felt: decreased infl uence of “young masculinity” (team-building homosociality as the default social bond), less disappointment and more curiosity about the stakes of quitting, maybe even encouragement towards such abandonment as a sign of intelligence.
Ardent Press has published this beautiful edition of The Impossible, Patience with doubled letterpress impressions and a distinctively precious design aesthetic as a way to participate in this most fully formed expression of The Beautiful Idea.
Author: Alejandro de Acosta
Paper, $16.00, 7″x7″, 316 pages
The Impossible, Patience from our distribution partner Little Black Cart.
Disruptive Elements
A dense compendium of old and brand-new translations of a dizzying array of names from the individualist anarchist tendency, mostly from early 20th Century France. New translations from Wolfi Landstreicher, Shawn Wilbur, and vincent stone. Anyone who is interested in this tendency, fans of My Own, Enemies of Society, Stirner’s works, etc., will find much to enjoy and fodder for future research in this book.
This collection will take you on an emotional journey from triumph to failure, through the thrill of successful crime and the loss of insurrection. It is an enormous package of texts that will make you wish you lived in France 100 years ago and be thankful that someone did the work to bring that time back to life. This is a book of anarchy and life.
Author: Various
Paper, $6.00, 8″x12″, 292 pages
Disruptive Elements from our distribution partner Little Black Cart.
Canenero
Canenero was a newspaper in Italy started during the time of the Marini Trials, and inspired by the problems of anarchists in that time and place.
This book is a selection of the articles from the paper that are relevant to today in the US anarchist scene. Translated by Wolfi Landstreicher, this newspaper is what inspired Landstreicher to learn and start translating Italian in the first place, and this title includes newly translated pieces, as well as some of the first things he ever translated.
Author: Canenero
Paper, $6.00, 5″x6″, 144 pages
Canenero from our distribution partner Little Black Cart.
Creating Anarchy
Ron Sakolsky is a rare anarchist for a variety of reasons, including his longevity, his intellectual pursuits (especially challenging academia), and his embrace of art and the surrealists.
Creating Anarchy is a collection of his writings (and art pieces by some surrealist friends), reflecting his interests and thinking over the past couple of decades. This new edition includes more recent pieces (including the particularly relevant “My Life in the Academic Gulag”, in which he discusses how and if one can maintain anarchist positions within the academy) and a new introduction.
Paper, $12.00, 6.5″x8″, 242 pages
Creating Anarchy from our distribution partner Little Black Cart.
Novatore
The writings of Renzo Novatore are an emotional cavalcade of egoism, nihilism, and hatred for democratic mediocrity. To life!
Renzo Novatore is the pen-name of Abele Rizieri Ferrari who was born in Arcola, Italy (a village of La Spezia) on May 12, 1890 to a poor peasant family. Unwilling to adapt to scholastic discipline, he only attended a few months of the first grade of grammar school and then left school forever. Though his father forced him to work on the farm, his strong will and thirst for knowledge led him to become a self-taught poet and philosopher. Exploring these matters outside the limits imposed by the educational system, as a youth he read Stirner, Nietzsche, Wilde, Ibsen, Baudelaire, Schopenauer, and many others with a critical mind.
Renzo died on November 22 (1922), at the hands of the cops.
We are very excited to present this collection of all of the known writings of Renzo Novatore, newly translated by Wolfi Landstreicher. It contains the fiery polemics, poetry, and willful play that readers of “Toward the Creative Nothing” are already familiar with.
Paper, $13.00, 6.5″x8″, 300 pages
Novatore from our distribution partner Little Black Cart.
Anarchy 101
Introductions to anarchist ideas, up till now, have suffered from being one-dimensional, too lengthy, or too sectarian. The history, practice, and philosophy of anarchy has suffered for this lack. We haven’t encouraged new generations to approach our ideas other than on mostly sectarian terms.
Anarchy 101 is an edited crowd-sourced introduction to anarchist ideas. The content comes from the website http://anarchy101.org and represents the best responses from dozens of contributors to hundreds of questions about the Beautiful Idea: this thing called anarchy.
Paper, $8.00, 4.5″x6″, 330 pages
Anarchy 101 from our distribution partner Little Black Cart.
Freedom: My Dream
The autobiography of Enrico Arrigoni: an Italian anarchist who lived through the Russian Revolution, and was an anarchist war correspondent during the Spanish Revolution, seeing first hand and reporting on the iniquities of the communists as well as the fascists during that war.
This autobiography was originally published by Arrigoni and the Libertarian Book Club (which he helped start, in New York, and which still continues to this day), and went out of print and has been hard to find. This is an updated version that we are excited to present to anarchist readers who are interested in history, of who just like an exciting life story well told. Arrigoni went by many names (most commonly Frank Brand) in his illegal travels around the world, and escaped from many harrowing situations, including being held in one of the most brutal jails in Spain during the civil war there (his release was effected only through the personal efforts of some people including Emma Goldman).
The book is in two main sections, the first about his life and travels and adventures, the second about Spain – being reprints of his articles sent to the u.s. from many of the fronts of the war.
Arrigoni’s character comes through every page, with humility, humor, a love of life, and a dedication to egoism, a kind of anarchy that was less popular in his day than it is even today.
Paper, $12.00, 5.5″x8″, 330 pages
Freedom: My Dream from our distribution partner Little Black Cart.
Queer Ultraviolence
An Anthology of Bash Back!
Through collections of essays, communiqués, narratives, images, and interviews, this anthology hopes to account for what Bash Back! was and what happened to it. We have included a number of actions, theories, and other essays that were not explicitly or implicitly related to Bash Back! as a name. In this context, if we do not recognize the actions of related tendencies and publications, then we fail to tell the complete history of Bash Back! as a network and as a tendency.
The term queer in this book is used both loosely and inclusively. We view queer as the blurring of sexual and gender identities. Queer is the refusal of fixed identities. It is a war on all identity. In line with the Bash Back! tendency, for the uses of this anthology queer is trans because the gender binary is inherently oppressive. More often than not, our use of the term queer is interchangeable with our use of trans, though that is not necessarily true of the way in which trans-whatever is used. We acknowledge that society ensures Queer is an oppressed identity. Anti-Queer oppression is the systematic violence encountered by people who fall outside of traditional sexual or gender categories. This terminology might be confusing, but it is likely that the content within this anthology will clear the air. Admittedly, it might create more confusion among our straight counterparts. With revolution complete and the black flag burned, the category of queer must too be destroyed.
Bash Back! was not just a group or organization, but a militant tendency on the part of queer individuals. While Bash Back! was occasionally public and campy, bashing back was more of an everyday evolutionary occurrence than any sort of activist entity. Most of what can be attributed to the Bash Back! period never made it onto the internet or into newspapers. Bashing back meant bar fights, outrunning lynch mobs, glamdalization, attacking the homes of heterosexist murderers, outright chaos, alleged lootings, theory discussions, self-defense tips, social gatherings, beat downs, the acquisition of large quantities of pepper spray, and attempts at sexual liberation. It was a temporary counter culture amongst friend groups and peers that called for nothing short of direct confrontation with the (mostly) straight, (mostly) white and always normative society: the ultimate queer propaganda by queer deed.
Til the Clock Stops
crime opacity insurrection
This is the second of our pocketbook series (Species Being is the first) that highlights new (and some old) translations from the French. This is also the second version of this book.
The texts you are about to read have been collected here in order to tell a story for those of us living in this moment. It is not a story of a new politics nor of a single authorial group, but rather of a position, a position that has spread beyond its origins, and which is being elaborated here and there, there where we dream it most violently, here where we feel ourselves so deperately alone.
It is our intention that, read together, they will coalesce for you with ease and clarity.
-From the Introduction
What citizens are abandoned to in the guise of “existence” is no longer anything but a life or death effort to make themselves compatible with Empire. But for the others, for us, each gesture, each desire, each affect encounters in some way the necessity of annihilating Empre and its citizens.
On this criminal path, we take our time. What we are talking about here is nothing less than the constitution of war machines.
Paper, $10.00, 4.5″x6.5″, 171 pages
Order Til the Clocks Stop from our distribution partner Little Black Cart.
Table of Contents
- Introduction to the Second Edition
- And the War has Only Just Begun
- Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Jeune-Fille
- Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications
- A Fine Hell
- Living-and-Fighting
- Building a Permanent Movement
- “A critical metaphysics could be born as a science of apparatuses”
- How is it to Be Done?
Enemies of Society
An Anthology of Individualist & Egoist Thought
This book tells the story of the most neglected tendency in anarchist thought; egoism. The story of anarchism is usually told as a story of great bearded men who had beautiful ideas and a series of beautiful failures, culminating in the most beautiful failure of them all in the Spanish Civil War. A noble history of failed ideas and practice.
Egoism, and individualist anarchism, suffers a different kind of fate. It is not a great history and glorious failure but an obscure series of stories of winning. Victory defined by the only terms that matter, those who lived life to their fullest and whose struggle against the existing order defined them. This struggle was not one of abstractions, of Big Ideas, but of people attempting to claim an authentic stake in their own life.
Inspired by the writings of Stirner’s “The Ego and His Own” the assertion these people make it not of the composition of a better world (for everyone) but of how the machinations of society, especially one of abstractions and Big Ideas, have shaped the individual members of that society. How everything that we know and believe has been shaped by structure and intent into a conformed, denatured shadow of what we could be.
Individualists anarchists have always argued that anarchism should not be a version of heaven on earth but a “plurality of possibilities”. This has relegated their activity to the actions that people make in their lives rather than participating in political bodies and formations that shape, and participate in, society. Egoists have gone to war with this world, robbed banks, practiced free love, and won everything except those things worth nothing: history, politics, & acceptance by society.
People like you have been denounced as “enemies of society”. No doubt you would indignantly deny being such and claim that you are trying to save society from the vampire of the State. You delude yourselves. Insofar as “society” means an organized collectivity having one basic norm of behavior that must be accepted by all (and that includes your libertarian communist utopia) and insofar as the norm is a product of the average, the crowd, the mediocre, then anarchists are always enemies of society. There is no reason to suppose that the interests of the free individual and the interests of the social machine will ever harmonize, nor is it desirable that they should. Permanent conflict between the two is the only perspective that makes any sense to me. But I expect that you will not see this, that you will continue to hope that if you repeat “the free society is possible” enough times then it will become so.
Paper, $20.00, 5.5″x8.5″, 400 pages
Order Enemies of Society from our distribution partner Little Black Cart.
Erratum
Corrected Table of Contents
Preamble: First Blood vii
1. Rejecting the Stamp of Group Approval: first wave individualists in the US and Europe
James L. Walker: A Unique One 2
What is Justice? by James L. Walker 3
On Rights, by James L. Walker 6
Stirner on Justice, by Tak Kak 7
Selfhood Terminates Blind Man?s Bluff, by Tak Kak 11
Egoism in Sexual Relations, by Tak Kak 13
Egoism, by John Beverley Robinson 14
Biographical note: John Beverley Robinson 17
The Land of the Altruists: a parable for the infant class, by John Beverly Robinson 18
Posterity: the New Superstition, by Benjamin De Casseres 20
Zo d’Axa’s Heresy 24
Individualism, by Pierre Chardon 31
Biographical note: Pierre Chardon 33
What do the Individualists Want? by The “Reveil De L’Eschlave Group of Paris 34
Renzo Novatore Outlaw Anarchist, by Daniel Giraud 36
Iconoclasts, Forward! 38
Cry of Rebellion, by Renzo Novatore 39
In the Kingdom of the Spooks, by Renzo Novatore 47
Biographical note: Renzo Novatore 45
The Bonnot Gang: A Reminiscence, by E. Bertran 49
Notes on Individualism, by E. Bertran 53
Three European Invidividualists: some notes on Armand, Martucci, and Novatore, by S.E. Parker 57
Individualist Perspectives, by E. Armand 63
Is the Anarchist Ideal Realizable? by E. Armand 67
Biographical note: E. Armand 68
An Introduction to E. Armand; what he was for, what he was against, by S.E. Parker 70
E. Armand: sexual liberationist, by Catherine Campousy 75
Letter to E. Armand, by Améca Scarfó83
On Sexual Equality: Edward Carpenter & Oscar Wilde, by E. Armand 87
Individual Differences: my polemic with E. Armand, by Enzo da Villafiore 93
In Praise of Chaos, by Enzo Martucci 98
Manifesto dei Fuorigregge 103
Individualist-Anarchism, by S.E. Parker 107
2. Rebels Building Dreams: second wave individualists reflect on their predecessors
John Henry Mackay’s Appreciation of Stirner 112
poem: Anarchy, by John Henry Mackay 117
poem: To Max Stirner, by John Henry Mackay 117
Biographical note: John Henry Mackay 120
John Henry Mackay, by E. Armand 124
The Anarchists, by Jim Kernochan 125
Men against the State: the expositors of individualist anarchism in America, 1827-1908,
a review by S.E. Parker 130
Pioneering Egoist Texts, by S.E. Parker 132
The Influence of Tucker?s Ideas in France, by E. Armand 137
Stirner on Education, by S.E. Parker 141
Voltairine de Cleyre, by S.E. Parker 145
3. Smashing Fossils: individualists & egoists critique leftism and its heritage
Anarchism vs Socialism, by S.E. Parker 150
Social Totalitarianism, by Francis Ellingham 154
Stirner, Marx, and Fascism, by S.E. Parker 158
Enzo Martucci on Communism 163
4. Savage Summit: egoist perspectives on Nietzsche Nietzsche, by Enzo Martucci 168
Notes on Stirner & Nietzsche, by S.E. Parker 172
Stirner on Nietzsche, by J.N. Figgis 176
Stourzh on Stirner and Nietzche, by Herbert Stourzh 178
Nietzsche: Antichrist? by S.E. Parker 181
5. A Maze to Trap the Living: society & the unique one
Anarchism and Individualism, by Georges Palante 190
Biographical note: Georges Palante 212
Anarchism, Society, and the Socialized Mind, by Francis Ellingham 204
A Note on Authority, by Enzo Martucci 217
A Letter to a Friend, by Laurance Labadie 218
Superstition and Ignorance vs Courage and Self-Reliance, by Laurence Labadie 224
Joseph Labadie: Archivist, Poet 235
poem: Imperialism, by Joseph Labadie 227
Some Notes on Anarchism and the Proletarian Myth, by S.E. Parker 229
Enemies of Society: An Open Letter to the Editors of Freedom, by S.E. Parker 234
Anarchism, Individualism, and Society: Some Thoughts, by Scepticus 238
Anarchy and History: An Existentialist View, by N.A.W. 241
Freedom and Solitude, by Marilisa Fiorina 245
The Morality of Cooperation, by S.E. Parker 246
In Defence of Stirner, by Enzo Martucci 250
Enzo Martucci: Italian Lightbearer 264
Brief Statements, by Renzo Ferrari 269
Malfew Seklew: The Jester Philosopher of Egoism, by S.E. Parker 270
Brand: An Italian Anarchist and His Dream, by Peter Lamborn Wilson 274
Down with Civilization, by Enrico Arrigoni (aka Frank Brand) 312
My Anarchism, by S.E. Parker 317
Appendix A:
Archists, Anarchists and Egoists, by S.E. Parker 323
Flaming Resurrections of a Charred Alphabet 328
(a glossary of basic terms)
To Sketch the Echo and To Paint the Link! 360
(a reading list)