Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl

by Tiqqun, Ariana Reines (Translator)

A theoretical dissection of capitalism's ultimate form of merchandise: the living spectacle of the Young-Girl.

The Young-Girl is not always young; more and more frequently, she is not even female. She is the figure of total integration in a disintegrating social totality.
—from Theory of the Young-Girl

First published in France in 1999, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl dissects the impossibility of love under Empire. The Young-Girl is consumer society's total product and model citizen: whatever “type” of Young-Girl she may embody, whether by whim or concerted performance, she can only seduce by consuming. Filled with the language of French women's magazines, rooted in Proust's figure of Albertine and the amusing misery of (teenage) romance in Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, and informed by Pierre Klossowski's notion of “living currency” and libidinal economy, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl diagnoses—and makes visible—a phenomenon that is so ubiquitous as to have become transparent.

In the years since the book's first publication in French, the worlds of fashion, shopping, seduction plans, makeover projects, and eating disorders have moved beyond the comparatively tame domain of paper magazines into the perpetual accessibility of Internet culture. Here the Young-Girl can seek her own reflection in corporate universals and social media exchanges of “personalities” within the impersonal realm of the marketplace. Tracing consumer society's colonization of youth and sexuality through the Young-Girl's “freedom” (in magazine terms) to do whatever she wants with her body, Tiqqun exposes the rapaciously competitive and psychically ruinous landscape of modern love.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Feminism, Politics, Essays, France

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Tiqqun is a French collective of authors and activists formed in 1999. Their journal was the first to publish the collective author “The Invisible Committee.” Tiqqun's books include Introduction to Civil War, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, and This Is Not a Program (all published by Semiotext(e)).

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

*nods wisely* ...the women do, in fact, be shopping

[sanni · Rating 4 out of 5]

honestly really good. reading this felt like spending a whole day on twitter until your eyes hurt. or having a yelling conversation with someone while drunk and only remembering the next day some of how you felt during it. or digging your way into a weird thought hole while high. or like if i had a bunch of thoughts fired into my head and there was nothing i could really do about it one way or another to stop it or make it worth my while besides to just let them wash over me. and the. maybe the next day i would just be going about my day and find a new thought pattern i had never encountered before because having all those thoughts fired rapidly into my head scrambled up my whole brain and carved in some new neural pathways or something. i don’t know! but i liked it!

honestly though also if a man told me he liked this book though i would almost certainly be like uh, ok, blocked and reported and pepper-sprayed xx

[Rui Coelho · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a book about young girls. Tiqqun use teenage vanity and consumerism as an illustration to how contemporary societies mold us into agents of social reproduction. If you read it like that this is a valuable work about our everyday reification and alienation.
Nonetheless, some aphorisms sound personal and uncalled for. There is also plenty of BS, for example "The Young-Girl's ass is a global village". Really, Tiqqun? Is this suppose to mean anything?
Finally, it is vital to understand this book as a critique of capitalist social processes and not its victims. As Nina Power puts it, in her amazing review of this book, "behind every Young-Girl’s arse hides a bunch of rich white men: the task is surely not, then, to destroy the Young-Girl, but to destroy the system that makes her".

[Toni]

Maybe I had too high expectations for this "book" (really, the scattered fragments and aphoristic theorizing is something wholly different, more like a peek inside the laboratory of a gang of anarchists experimenting with exotic explosives that sometimes fails and sometimes succeeds in conjuring up great potential).

But I would be lying if I was saying that I was not disappointed. A friend told me, before I read it myself, that it would be good toilet reading. Which of course has more to do with its fragmented form than the esoteric terminology (it's possible to read two or three sentences and then close the book again, it may even be the best way of reading this book).

I almost found Ariana Reines' "translator's note" more touching than the book itself (see http://canopycanopycanopy.com/16/prel... ). It's really too bad they did not include that note in the publication, it would have put it into context somehow, made it more corporeal (ice cubed puke, wtf?) ... Anyway, I won't waste energy on criticizing a text for something is does not claim to be. Instead, I will point at some other entrances in the world of Tiqqun, that might prove more giving and simultaneously make this text more usable.

The theory of the Young-Girl deals more with "marking out the battlefield", that is, making the Young-Girl visible as one party among many. Peculiarly, the Young-Girl party is the party that wages war on ethical differences itself. That's why one can read the book as so many examples of how the Young-Girl tries to blur ethical differences, deny that there are any parties in conflict at all. This "marking out" of the Young-Girl party is important, because acquiring a gaze where we might be able to detect her within ourselves and in others is the first step to move onto annihilating her. Beyond this, the text does not share much about means to get rid of the Young-Girl.

Remember that the propagation of the Young-Girl is a sign of the failure of feminism. That's why new (radical "feminist") weapons must be invented. Another Tiqqun text that goes more on the offensive would be 'Sonogram of a Potential' (it can be found online, but could need a more thorough translation). 'Sonogram' chronicles some of the suffering found in the Young-Girl, but only as a starting point to try to forge offensive tactics – what they call "the mixed hypothesis" (i.e. feminism not only for women) and "ecstatic feminism". The text is also an interesting look into some of the discussions that went on in the radical feminist circles in Italy around 1977: like striking in the home sphere ("preferring not to" cook dinner, clean up, take care of the kids etc.).

Second, if the text confuses you with it's impenetrable language (as it did too me at some points), there is really no better place to begin with Tiqqun than the text 'Introduction to Civil War'. It is something like a catechism for Tiqqun, totally axiomatic in nature (and thus also painfully difficult) and can be read many times, each times revealing so many crucial ideas, at least that's what it does for me. In ICW, such concepts as forms-of-life, ethical difference, war, annihilation, hostility, Bloom etc. are clearly defined. It's the skeleton key to the world of Tiqqun.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before even starting my review, I think it would be helpful to note that most of the 1 star reviews for this book are from people who didn't disagree with the book, but rather badly misunderstood it. They obviously skipped the preface, which quite clearly and explicitly defines the term "Young-Girl", which doesn't literally mean a young female human. This all does raise a couple of major ironies: first off, the strangeness of the fact that the term chosen by Tiqqun is somewhat of a ruse (meaning more the capitalistic stereotype of the two terms "Young" and "Girl", rather than their nexus), and secondly that the work can so easily be misread in a misogynistic, chauvinistic way (what does this mean? Is this a deadly flaw?). It feels akin to Blade Runner 2049, which, if you watched it at all honestly, very severely criticizes and critiques the male gaze, how men often objectify women and reduce them to sex-bots/mommy-bots/wrist-bound waifu pillows/etc. The fact that people also thought that that movie was misogynistic betrays more about those viewers and their superficiality than any demerit in the film (or this book).

With that out of the way, I found this book to be probably one of the best and most digestible marxist/post-marxist critiques of consumer culture that I've read. This is largely due to its construction: the book is, as I mentioned, started off by a preface which is absolutely necessary, and then after that it is split into 10 loose groupings of aphorisms and re-contextualized quotations, sometimes from philosophers, other times from shitty magazines and ads. The real power often doesn't come from the aphorisms, but from the re-contextualized quotes and the aphorisms which build off of and respond to those quotes. There is very little in the way of concentrated, sustained theory, and things are more rapid fire, like poetry. This helps make the entire book more accessible, since it's abandonment of linear argumentation allows you to jettison aphorisms or quotes which are incomprehensible or disagreeable. The author(s) (a collective known as Tiqqun) instead opted for "trash theory", which is a "jumble of fragments that ... does not in any way constitute a theory." and which is meant to counter what they see as "The cardinal ruse of theoreticians resides, generally, in the presentation of the result of their deliberations such that the process of deliberation is no longer apparent."

Why this antagonism? The entire purpose of the "Young-Girl" project is to make explicit what Tiqqun sees as an implicit, hidden "total war", whereby various social forces can foster conformity and normality in such a way that the "Young-Girl" does the work for them. What is the "Young-Girl" I keep talking about? I'll let them explain:

The Young-Girl is obviously not a gendered concept. ... The resplendent corporate advertising retiree who divides his time between the Cote d'Azur and his Paris office, where he still likes to keep an eye on things, is no less a Young-Girl than the urban single woman too obsessed with her consulting career to notice she's lost fifteen years of her life to it. ... In reality, the Young-Girl is simply the model citizen as redefined by consumer society since World War I, in explicit response to the revolutionary menace. As such, the Young-Girl is a polar figure, orienting, rather than dominating, outcomes. At the beginning of the 1920s, capitalism realized that it could no longer maintain itself as the exploitation of human labor if it did not also colonize everything that is beyond the strict sphere of production. Faced with the challenge from socialism, capital too would have to socialize. It had to create its own culture, its own leisure, medicine, urbanism, sentimental education and its own mores, as well as a disposition toward their perpetual renewal.


The phrase Young-Girl is used because Youth and Femininity are the stereotypical ideals in the consumer world, not because youth or women have anything deficient in themselves. It's a metaphor used to describe a person who is basically reduced to a seducing commodity. Instead of there being a separate domain of economic matters, the consumer has subsumed consumption so that everything they do is consumptive, has an eye on the clock and on one's self image and one's saleability (which is even more exacerbated by social media). ["In love more than anywhere else, the Young-Girl behaves like an accountant, always suspecting that she loves more than she is loved, and that she gives more than she receives."]

I think it's kinda a fascinating theory, although I do think it goes too far in its conspiratorial use of an all-caps "THEY" throughout (which is conveniently never defined, but I fear what the authors might be hinting at). The problem with such vague conspiratorial "THEY" usage is that it falls into the classic trap of seeing a pattern, then assuming the pattern was explicitly (and malevolently) intended by those you disagree with. I see most of the problems which Tiqqun complains of not stemming from the Patriarchy or somesuch ghostly myth, but from the secular modern world which has filled in the gaps in the wake of God, the world which is suffering precisely because it has lost its Christian roots. As Tiqqun admits: "All the old figures of patriarchal authority, from statesmen to bosses and cops, have become Young-Girlified, every last one of them, even the Pope." This is why I hope there is some room for joining forces between Premodern and Postmodern critiques of modern capitalism.

A quick aside: I do agree that "They" are "masking the real war in all manner of false conflicts", but by "They" I mean "All Political Partisans". Politics are by definition the wrong level of analysis at which to resolve our problems. Politics are a symptom of larger worldviews and implicit assumptions, not the other way around. Theology and worldview are the correct level of abstraction at which to start, but this book at least agrees enough with what's wrong with the world that I can appreciate it, despite this major flaw.

The preface attacks what it considers to be "Empire" and the alienation/dehumanization which that has caused: "Society's final moment of socialization, Empire, is thus also the moment when each person is called upon to relate to themselves as value". Of course Christianity used to do this for most people, but the residual aftershocks of Christianity are increasingly fading, and consumer culture/mass media has taken new ground at each successive ebb. Because of this omni-commodification, "The Young-Girl knows so very well the value of things." This focus on valuation has an extreme detrement on the sanity of the Young-Girl, who is fighting a losing battle seeking eternal youth. Traditionally, there was dignity in old age, because wisdom came with it. Today, Youth is all that exists, and old age is sequestered away in nursing homes (not least because it is assumed to be racist and all the other -ists).

"The Young-Girl never creates anything; All in all, she only recreates herself" This is important. The consumer can never stop consuming and start producing, she can only re-produce herself (i.e. re-invent herself in a cult of "originality"). The only two roles of the Young-Girl are "consumption and seduction--Spectacle has effectively emancipated the slaves of the past, but it has emancipated them AS SLAVES." By this I think they mean that consumer culture sells "freedom" (via products), thus one is enslaved by the market, becoming a new type of slave, the slave who falsely thinks they're free. This is why Christianity is so important, because it acknowledges that the main delusion is even deeper: you can never stop being a slave. All are slaves, we merely pick our master (as St. Paul says, we should be "Slaves of Righteousness"). I'd be curious how Tiqqun would deal with this, i.e. what do you do when people are "actually liberated"? Are you really naive enough to think they'll stay that way? People love fitting in too much, love conformity too much.

That much is evident in how most people consume media. As Tiqqun says "the Young-Girl's language ... it was not made to talk with, but rather to please and to repeat." In other words, it's impossible for the Young-Girl to utter anything original, or to even seek out unpopular or challenging media. The farthest that most people today get is "reviewing" media, usually never questioning WHICH media they're consuming, and definitely never questioning the act of reviewing itself. For what else is a review than a mere individuation of one's conformity. Like "Yeah, I saw the same movie that everyone else did, but I had a slightly different opinion!" I review books to 1) Summarize and remember 2) Critique the book 3) Develop thoughts which it inspired in me 4) only incidentally to share it with others. I would rather not share it, frankly. But perhaps I'm trying to counter the fact that "wherever Young-Girls dominate, their taste must also dominate; this is what determines the tastes of our time."

I feel like there's a lot of tension, both inside of Tiqqun and myself, around the masses, around the proletariat. I want to fight for them, to free them from the mire, but at the same time it's very difficult and very frustrating, because people just don't care. "The Young-Girl manages to live with a dozen unarticulated concepts as her only philosophy ... the whole of her vocabulary can be definitively reduced to the Good/Evil binary. It goes without saying that, in order to consider the world, it must be sufficiently simplified..." This is the two-sided partisan politics I go around all day trying to undo in others and in myself.

One of the main problems is that if there is no transcendent, nothing but the body, then the Appearance (one's body) becomes the Essence (the core of one's entire being): ["Insofar as her appearance entirely exhausts her essence, as her representation does her reality, the Young-Girl is that which is entirely expressible, perfectly predictable, and absolutely neutralized."] Furthermore, it's no wonder that the transcendence limited to the bodily reveals itself this way: "The Young-Girl chases after health as though it were salvation."

It's notable that in this tract, Tiqqun makes quite explicit what is UNdesirable in the Young-Girl, but almost never explains what is to replace this. For example: "Managing to 'succeed in her sentimental and professional life at the same time': certain Young-Girls proclaim this as an ambition worthy of respect." Okay, so I think Tiqqun means that women (and people more broadly) shouldn't just compartmentalize their lives into the professional and sentimental, and try balancing those inside the capitalist structure, but I'm not sure what new, third route that we're supposed to take. And what does "sentimental" even mean? Spiritual? Where does the spiritual fit into all of this? Just a lot of questions left over.

"There is surely no place where one feels as horribly alone as in the arms of a Young-Girl." I actually had quite a visceral reaction to this, because I know exactly what this means. I've felt this. Nothing makes you feel more alone than being surrounded by people who aren't fully human. The problem is that these nullified people "know all too well what [they] want in detail to want anything in general", meaning they know which restaurants they like or what actors they like or what shade of lipstick they like or what places to vacation at, but they don't know why they're here or what gets them out of bed or why they should keep going or what is worth fighting for, let alone what their starting assumptions are, what their god is, etc. Instead, you'll notice when talking with a Young-Girl that "The Young-Girl wears the mask of her face." and, when she turns to leave, disappointed in your confusion: "The Young-Girl reduces all grandeur to the level of her ass."

Now this (ass) and other terms (such as the word Fuck) operate on a few different levels. There is the superficial level of physical, but there are the meta-physical levels of "that-which-seduces" and "that-which-retains-customers". Of course, the Young-Girl, in order to seduce, must "know the standard perversions", i.e. be able and willing to transgress just as far as is recommended by the "rebellion" which has been subsumed into capitalism. I'd argue that the net number of tabboos never changes, the placements of tabboos merely moves. So we've allowed more explicit sexual terminology and even activity, but we cannot question their use, now that they're allowed.

In fact, this same pattern was followed elsewhere as well: "The supposed liberation of women did not consist in their emancipation from the domestic sphere, but rather in the total extension of the domestic into all of society." It's interesting that you could say this to a radical leftwinger and a radical right winger and they'd both nod in agreement. A radical leftist would argue that we've merely made pants for women and opened jobs to women without changing anything underlying, i.e. any of the attitudes or assumptions or values, merely letting women dress like men and get stressed out working like men. A radical right winger would rant about the "feminization" of the world, where women have shifted values to favor equality and shun heirarchy (and they would keep going down some Nietzschian rabbit hole about slave morality and holding down the strong and successful). It is this multiplicity of interpretations which I think makes this book much more than a mere gimmick, and lends longevity and relevance to it.

I do also appreciate a few spots where Tiqqun calls out gnostic stupidity within Christianity, such as "What does the mortification of the body require? That we nourish a sacred and implacable hate for our bodies" (Spiritual Instructions for the Sisters of saint Vincent-de-Paul, 1884). This certainly is not something good, but neither is the other, more glossy extreme which is juxtaposed with it: "l'm gonna do whatever want with my hair!" Tiqqun's commentary? "The Young-Girl methodically reinvests everything from which she has been liberated with pure servitude"

Though this tract was written in 1999/2000, it was prescient in predicting social media: "Between the Young-Girl and the world there is a window. Nothing touches the Young-Girl, the Young-Girl touches nothing." A lot of seduction still happens through this window. Entire cults of personality and para-social relationships form. Mostly this happens via commiseration with ideas like "The exhausting ownership of bodies" and "The Young-Girl conceives her own existence management as a problem". Everything is a time management problem. If only I could plan this better, I could do x y or z, which I see my friends doing on social media. Unfortunately, "The Young-Girl is never plastic enough for her taste."

One of the most horrifying re-contextualized ads is this "How to lose ten years with the right lifestyle." We know that they're talking about looking younger, taking better care of your body, but we can also re-read it as wasting time which it mostly is. This waste of time is all I can really get from such phrases as "I can't get attached, ok?" which perfectly typifies the sexual dogma of the Young-Girl, which ultimately means that "it is not possible to love the Young-Girl, but only to consume her." It's also important to note that Tiqqun also sees this as functioning as a new religion: "For new gods, new superstitions."

When we get into this section concerning sexuality, it's important to remember the definition of Young-Girl as given in the preface, lest we fall into a chauvanistic, anti-woman reading of the text, which is rather easy. I think it's also helpful to try to parse out what is meant by the word "fuck", which is more than the superficial act and is more a metaphor for a more general prostitution. Try this word salad on for size:

It wasn't until the Young-Girl appeared that one could concretely experience what it means to "fuck," that is, to fuck someone without fucking anyone in particular. Because to fuck a being that is so really abstract, so utterly interchangeable, is to fuck in the absolute.


With that in mind, other quotes make a bit more sense:

- "none will be held at a greater distance than those she has let into her bed." means something along the lines of "the more we corporately interact with others on an exchange basis, the more we dehumanize them (and ourselves?)

- "How to be sexy without coming across as a bitch." i.e. how to "seduce" without showing your hand, without remembering that you're seducing

- "The Young-Girl is the commodity that insists on being consumed, at every instant, because at every instant she becomes more obsolete", hence the frantic lifestyles of secular people who never feel like they've vacationed enough or loved enough.

- "She is bought because she has value, she has value because she is bought. The tautology of commodities." translates to "Why is the song good? Because it's popular. Why is it popular? Because it's good" (same applies for the popularity of social media stars).

- "The broker of a fairly singular brand of transaction, the Young-Girl trains all her efforts toward achieving a good fuck." i.e. why else do we go to resume workshops and listen to pickup artists?

- "The Young-Girl's primary skill: arranging for her own scarcity." - if we are commodities, and we're scared of losing value, we have to balance that market value via scarcity!


All of this culminates in one of the most devastating aphorisms I found in the book: "Actual sex is but the poor objectification of all the coitus that she could just as well engage in. The Young-Girl's derision of all things is the mark of a religious intuition that has fallen into the wrong infinitude."

The first sentence is true on many levels, including the literal. In a hookup culture, one is always calculating, whether this current fuck fucks well enough, whether you could have found a better fuck at the club if you played your hand better (thinking all this even while you're being fucked). And there's the metaphorical ways you can spin it, such as "is this job worth my time? If I would have taken that internship in college could I have gotten x or y?", etc. I'm actually running out of space in this review, so yet another review of mine is going to the comments. See you there.

[Christopher Waller · Rating 3 out of 5]

aka the anti-thot manifesto

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

don't read this. it is crap. misogyny and ageism disguised by French post-structuralist/insurrectionist jargon.

[Grace! · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5; this was definitely a little sofia coppola pro-ana tumblr at times, but i liked it

[Benno Readsabit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engrossing read. The typography (which is expressive to say the least), and writing style of solo paragraphs of really verbose, heady, extremely distilled philosophy was fun! Fun fun fun!
Tiqqun uses this book to present the reader with what they call "the young-girl:" a concept of the ideal consumer. It is an exhaustive, psychoanalytical look at how the young-girl, (paradoxically, not a gendered concept) is built up and broken down over and over again under the cogs of social, economic, political engineering. That's about the best thesis I can give fur this silly little red book lolz.
It can get a little repetitive, the writing style might be too academic and self indulgent for some people, but its NOT your typical anarchist philosophy read. Very much so a poetic epic that conveys all the harrowing emotional debacles of young girl-dom with, aaaaahhmmmmm..., harrowing word choice.
Really funny, absurd bits of magazine quotes thrown in as juxtaposition. You can't always tell when this book is being serious, or whether it is just doing some real post ironic shit when it says shit like "The young girl considers her ass a sufficient foundation for her sentiment of incommunicable singularity." Or like, "The young girl doesn't kiss you, she drools over you through her teeth. Materialism of secretions." Mmmmmmmmmmkay suuuuuuurr Tiqqun, whatver bro... But really bizarre changes in style are part of the whole design of the book, so buckle in, you're in for a lot of that.
This book killed any fantasy I had of humans exercising free will or developing class consciousness at any point.

"In the world of authoritarian commodoties, the living recognize within themselves, in their alienated desires, the enemy's demonstration of power."

[Park Frost · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a provisional rating. I may get around to revising it upon a second read some day.
There are a lot of problems with this book, things that say "Not to be racist but...." then scan the room for POC before saying something CRAZY racist. There are interesting ideas within the mix though, really insightful assessments, but the whole "this isn't to say young girls are 'young girls'" thing does not clear the responsibility. As someone who was formerly a young girl- one very much weighed down and at points very very aware of my demographic's intensely manipulative branding & usage- this says some things that really struck me deeply, big A HAs or OH YES, but then always overall managed to be extremely alienating, generalizing, leaving the reality of the young girl debased and demeaned, irretrievable and impersonal.
I would love to see a revised edition that claimed some responsibility for this and resolved the problems, because there are- i repeat- some very profound thoughts in here.

[Quinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm amazed that so many reviews on here are calling this work "misogynist". How is it misogynist to critique the objectification of women, the fact of which is pervasive in media and real life?]

If someone didn't point that out, as this writing did, I would have continued my life believing myself to be a failure because I don't contour.

Also, I read this in one sitting. I don't recommend you use this as a bathroom book as the paragraphs, though seemingly random, need to be read in one sitting. It's actually quite short and took me 2-3 hours.

[Simon Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

after reading this book, you too can be a young girl!

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

An illustration of the ideas in Civil War, insofar as the war is waged over and through agambenian forms-of-life. We see that “the imperials strategy first of all consists in organizing blindness to forms of life; illiteracy to ethical differences; making the battlefront unrecognizable, if not invisible; and, in the most critical cases, disguising the real war with all kinds of false conflicts” (ii). Into this mess wades the authorial collective here: “the retaking of the offensive from our side, then requires us to make the battlefront clear again. The figure of the Young Girl is a gazing machine, designed for that purpose” (id.). To be clear: “the concept of the Young Girl is obviously not a gendered concept” and can apply to anyone of any sex/gender configuration (id.). Rather, “the Young Girl is only the model citizen such as commodity society has defined it since world war one, as an explicit response to the revolutionary threats against it” (iii). The Young Girl “emerges as the culmination point of this anthropomorphosis of Capital” (iv).

What follows are “pearls extracted from their newspapers and magazines; expressions gleaned in sometimes dubious circumstances” and “gathered here under approximate headings” (vi)—the goal, then, is to record the construction of the imperial eidos zoe, the consumer par excellence, as built signifier by signifier in imperial consciousness production. If the selection of ‘young girl’ is irksome, and it may well be, the gendered intention is drawn apparently from that consciousness production itself. The important point is that this is discussion of ideology as deployed by power, a political dream, to use Foucault’s term. These are presented as gnomics, so they have limited utility; some seem rather impertinent, whereas others are merely clever, others yet very slick.

Attributes of this eidos zoe include: “incarnation of a certain alienated masculine imagination” (1); “total and sovereign consumer […] good for nothing but consuming” (2); a “stranger to her own desires” (3); “feels dizzy when the world stops revolving around her” (4); “scrupulously obeys the authoritarian distribution of roles” (5); “her appearance entirely exhausts her essence and her representation exhausts her reality” (7); she doesn’t speak, but “is spoken by the Spectacle” (9); “the purest form of reified relationships” (11); and so on. These are all from the section on “Young Girl as Phenomenon”; there are other groupings: technique of the self, social relation, commodity, war machine, etc.

Whereas letztermensch Bloom is “the crisis of classical gender roles,” the Young Girl is the response thereto of commodity domination (3). She is a product of “the formidable surplus crisis of capitalist modernity,” “proof and prop of the unlimited pursuit of the valuation process when the accumulation process itself is found wanting” (7).

Nietzsche repurposed: “The eternal return of the same fashions shows clearly enough that the Young Girl doesn’t put on appearances, but rather that appearances put her on” (7).

Overall, the “Young Girl’s triumph originates in the failure of feminism” (8). Indeed, “the supposed liberation of women has not consisted in their emancipation from the domestic sphere, but rather in the extension of the sphere over the whole of society” (12)—a sort of oikoization of the polis? Maybe: “the Young Girl is the elementary unit of biopolitical individuality” (45), which, as we know from Civil War, means that it is a form-of-life in the civil war used to individuate for empire. She nevertheless “postulates an irrevocable intimacy with everything that shares her physiology,” with a function to “tend the fading fires of all the illusions of immediacy on which biopower can hold itself aloft” (56).

Plenty more, some of it completely nonsensical, often intentionally provocative.

[Adrienne Blaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an academic text and as such you will find:

- nouns beginning with capitals (Bloom, Spectacle, etc.)

- circular sentences like,
“For the Young-Girl, seduction never ends, which is to say that the Young-Girl ends with seduction.”

“The Young-Girl is the anecdote of the world, and the domination of the world of the anecdote.”

- preliminary notes that read like self-serious social media posts (in a concerning number of different fonts)

- a theory of “Young-Girls” that also applies to men: “For the Young-Girl, as for a man in power, who in every way resemble each other when they don't simply coincide[…]”

“All the old figures of patriarchal authority, from statesmen to bosses and cops, have become Young-Girlified, every last one of them, even the Pope.”

This *Text* was first published in 1999 and is arguably still relevant to the current stage of Capitalism in 2024. While I loved this kind of academic writing as a liberal arts undergrad, I am less charmed by it after working in a newsroom where words had to be used economically and straightforwardly.

Despite the avowed gender neutrality of this Young-Girl, it’s hard to tell where cultural critique ends and misogyny begins. There’s a long history of pinning society’s ills on young girls. Saying that this “Young-Girl” is a tool and victim of Capitalism, doesn’t exactly sit right with me, although a lot of what I read resonated to a depressing degree. I actually woke up sad thinking about this theoretical “Young-Girl.” I’m coping by singing melancholy covers of pop hits like Primadonna by MARINA, “And I'm sad to the core, core, core.”

[Katie C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

idk why so many people gave this one-star reviews...they sat it pretty early on that anyone can be a young-girl: it's an abstraction/concept than it is about actual young-girls. yes, it's a gendered term but our language is gendered. i can see the critique that people are saying young-girls are at fault just as much as they are victims, but are they not? are we gonna pretend that we have zero agency left in this world simply to evade responsibility? (up for interpretation, perhaps...)

anyway, i picked this up at open books because it was half off and i found it quite interesting. weird formatting but overall, found certain sentences spot-on, certain i totally disagreed iwth, and many i did not fully understand lol.

made me think about what it means to be a consumer, my thoughts on being a young woman right now, what love/sex means, seduction, the dating market, and maybe this all felt relevant as i have discovered with horror r/seduction and have recently had to hear men talk about their failed relationships

[Andy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretentious garbage.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a particularly good work of theory, not a particularly good work of propoganda, nor a particularly good work of poetry. One has to ask, what is the point of it?

[Sergio Segura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nick Land meets the Yandere Psycho Femcel Girlfriend Grippy Sock Jail Facebook group. Keep it out of the hands of your leftist friend who's just had a breakup and is teetering on the verge of a psychotic breakdown or else he'll take it literally and start screaming about how women are bourgeois. There are probably better avatars of capital than "the other girls". I don't know what to rate it—four stars? Three? It's very creative but every time I open it up again, it gets worse. Pairs well with Oblivion by Grimes on loop.

[Catherine · Rating 1 out of 5]

One star for the truth that consumerism is bad for the soul and the body. And also the commitment to an utter lack of methodology up in here, and the resulting quasi-zine'd poem, is unironically kind of great. Too bad the content is a misogynistic pile of crazy, and leftist male ~irony is the sincerest thing in the world! Better said here: https://thenewinquiry.com/further-mat...

[Carrie · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Did not like it" is an understatement. Deeply, bitterly, openly, and predictably misogynistic. Yawn.

[6655321 · Rating 1 out of 5]

this is the worst output Tiqqun has ever had, a meandering mess filled with pointless aphorisms & faux depth

[Alex Wexelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This manifesto-cum-cyberfeminist-Marxist-screed is part of a post-structuralist tradition of saying whatever the fuck you want, like Deleuze and Guattari telling us that the desiring-machines, "shit and fuck" in the opening of Anti-Oedipus. It's a shitpost. If you are looking to get offended, then you certainly will. I promise you don't want me to attempt to explain Debord to you, which means I can't really tell you what this book is about, which is OK. I'm not Ezra Koenig. I'm not gonna force this one on you.

But, basically, to sum it up, the Young-Girl is an idea and not a thing. We can thus project whatever we want on her. She is a consumer who cannot connect. And we are told about her in hundreds of aphorisms.

[Jennie · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars bc I’m literally dumb as fuck from months of scrolling w no end in sight, online shopping, and being generally vapid and annoying and literally just bumbled and stuttered when trying to explain one (1) snippet of this to vinay so ya this little book chewed me up then spit me out in quite an unattractive way. Very sharp and charmingly angry, fun(ny) form I liked a lot and I will deffo get more out of the snippets themselves once I stop being thick (in the head not the ass) and read Foucault / baudrillard / whoever else. I forgot what else I had to say besides that I think I read this at the right time and the sections on war & contradiction were my favorite thank you byebye

[Suu-Mei Chew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to take a gender studies class on this alongside Lana del Rey, Sophia Coppola’s resurgence in popularity, the proliferation of various -girls, and -cores… tldr bar Italia read this then made miracle crush

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/rev...

[Janet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got me fundamentally deeply angry, in an unsure and self-critical way, although in retrospect I think it's too deeply misogynistic (and all the anti-artificiality that goes with) to be lauded as a screed of radical cultural critique. The ADHD experimental structure is effective, though.

[Jere · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It wasn't until the Young-Girl appeared that one could concretely experience what it means to "fuck", that is, to fuck someone without fucking anyone in particular. Because to fuck a being that is so really abstract, so utterly interchangeable, is to fuck in the absolute."

[lia 🐩 · Rating 2 out of 5]

muy manifiesto? siento que estoy desacostumbrada a esto, leer afirmaciones no sustentadas, pero sí dice la portada que son “preliminary materials”. hay cosas interesantes obviamente, la relación entre la feminidad y la juventud, el mercado y el deseo, la belleza como trabajo acumulado. me gusta el formato de estar cambiando de tipografía grosor etc

[Mateusz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aż bym się przeszedł do Poznań Plazy

[Hazel Mc Partlan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly 0/10 for font design wank however

[jobelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

confirmation that everything i’ve ever written in my journal from age 16-22 is true,, sex as simulacrum..……..

made me think of men who see the women they date as personal porn stars, incels/pick up artists who see dating as a calculated game they either lose or need to master/rig, and women who are in their divine feminine soft girl era