Life Story – McKenzie Wark
Life Story by McKenzie Wark / tiny (!) 152-page paperback with jacket, 3 x 4.2 inches, from the revived Hanuman Editions / ISBN 9798989378067
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“My idols are dead, and my enemies are in power. Domination co-opts language, making it almost unusable, other than by machines. We are to be ruled without even the semblance of style. I speak instead of what I have loved: writing, the city. In the end, after many diversions, this body, this world—and you.”
From acclaimed theorist and trans icon McKenzie Wark, Life Story is a divulsion and revision of the author’s multiple forms. Life Story asks, “how to write not about love, but with love, in love, in form as well as content?” With an offering of lucidity amid disaster; a reinvention in the face of modernity’s unraveling. A tour of her selves, works, and worlds, Life Story is at once elegiac and mutinous, “an arc of history as built on an ontology of love.”
In Life Story, McKenzie Wark plays with her future epitaph, creating a biographical form that eludes captured data-points. But for our purposes, let’s say that this Australian-born writer and scholar is renowned for her work on media theory, critical theory, the avant-gardes, and in recent years, raving and transsexual narratives. She is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School in New York City.
