The Parapornographic Manifesto

Literary Nonfiction. "Edenborg's manifesto shines brightly within a constellation that includes Bosch's garden, Spinoza's philosophy of immanence, Bataille's essays, Duchamp's artworks, Ballard's Crash, and Acker's mash-ups. Sexuality in the realm of parapornography is not a place of humanist truths and psychological meaning (a vision of sexuality that dovetails all-too-neatly with the neo-liberal vision of the atomized, rationalist self) but rather an event that destroys 'meaning and identity through a mechanical repetition.' What I like best about Edenborg's brilliant and provocative book is that it brings into play, in an almost Blakean manner, so many seeming contraries: it's both anti-utopian and thoroughly communistic, proletarian and ethereal, a paean to hate and shame and yet an argument for the revolutionary (and anti-social) possibilities of love, a nuanced historical overview of sexual imagery and also a glimpse into a future that seems only pulse-beats away."—James Pate