Introduction

“The ego has a horror of the letter as such.”  – Jean-Claude Milner

At LetternetPress we take the above statement to be a given. The relation of the ego to literature is one of perpetual resistance, perpetual horror, and perpetual aversion. Hence the preponderance of blind and blinding ego fictions, of the identificatory games and droning muzak of the prose which dominates contemporary fiction in this our capitalist egocracy, a style of literature that we refer to as capitalist realism. It will be one of our tasks to attempt to continually dislodge the ego, to frustrate it and to attempt to reveal it in its foibles, not the least of which is its attempt to relegate social relations exclusively to the commodities that act to represent them, imbued with exchange value as they are. We, however, choose to posit something different; we choose to posit literature as a cultural value founded on the following wager, the very possibility of the individual, of human subjectivity itself…

Why should you read LetternetPress/OpenDrawerPublications? Here you’ll find nothing less than a challenge to the codification of the experience of reading. Here you’ll find a challenge to the recent attacks on the very notion of psychical space and process, attacks on the notion of a unique scene of the self, whether made by the cognitive sciences, constructivist researchers, neorealists giddy with empiricism, or even those attempting to link genetics and sexuation. Here, the challenge comes from literature…