Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker

It's time to recognize Kathy Acker as one of the great postwar American writers.

Over the decades readers have found a punk Acker, a feminist Acker, a queer Acker, a kink Acker, and an avant-garde Acker.

In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark adds a trans-Acker. Wark recounts her memories of Acker (with whom she had a passionate affair) and gives a comprehensive reading of her published and archived works.

Wark finds 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. 

As Wark shows, Acker's engagement with topics such as masturbation, sadism, body-building, and penetrative sex is central to her distinct phenomenology of the body that theorizes the body's relation to others, the city, and technology.

Author: McKenzie Wark
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 09/28/2021
Pages: 216
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.64lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.45d
ISBN: 9781478014683

About the Author
McKenzie Wark 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.