“The idea would not be to accumulate capital as a publisher, but instead to focus on the expenditure of everything we have already accumulated and will accumulate (talents as well as money) in order to lovingly build and foster the reparative hospice wards of the convalescent and increasingly inoperative communities of the para-academic precariat — those who are the most vulnerable, both within and without the University proper, and who are literally ‘convalescent,’ literally meaning, those who are recovering, who are recuperating, who are always getting better while also always being unwell, and who choose to ‘recuperate’ together, which itself literally means ‘to take back” — to take back ourselves to ourselves, to take back our humanities, our university, and our commons, and to have some room, finally, to conspire, which is to say, to breathe together. Or, as Verwoert puts it,
If, living under the pressure to perform, we begin to see that a state of exhaustion is a horizon of collective experience, could we then understand this experience as the point of departure for the formation of a particular sort of solidarity? A solidarity that would not lay the foundations for the assertion of a potent operative community, but which would, on the contrary, lead us to acknowledge that the one thing we share — exhaustion — makes us an inoperative community . . . . A community, however, that can still act, not because it is entitled to do so by the institutions of power, but by virtue of an unconditional, exuberant politics of dedication.[28]
punctum books was founded, partly following the lead of Michel Foucault in his Preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus,[29] as an exercise and experiment in convivial and not-sad militancy of open thought, in refusing allegiance to the old categories of the Negative, and to publication itself as an art of living, an ascesis of freedom. Like the practitioners of Hakim Bey’s amour fou, we strive to be “illegal,” “saturating” ourselves with our own aesthetic, engaging in publishing ventures that would fill themselves “to the borders” with “the trajectories of [their] own gestures,” and never tilting at fates fit for “commissars & shopkeepers.”
– See more at: http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2015/02/let-us-now-stand-up-for-bastards.html