What do you think?
Rate this book
agon
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid Genre. "In the tragi-comic—and worse—chaos of our times—suppose our writing began to appear as letters caught in barcodes. Phrases and bits of words breaking off en route to scanners designed for registering information but not the disturbance of meaning. It is, literally, with this provocative vision that Judith Goldman's AGON begins. Fragments—words with ing or ite or ppeals detached—mark the violence and folly of our weaponized and otherwise benighted cultures. At times, a necessary lyricism wells up without betraying the truth of 'Cumulative transfers By the 'agreed upon' price / the Temp,est has of late stripped the pe,tals away.' There's even more to this many-genred book—one to be lived with, in the urgency of its poetry, its philosophical and socio-political inquiry—font of brilliance that sustains vitally agonistic conversation across perilous divides."—Joan Retallack
"The Commodification of Everything. That was the pivot point of materialist discourse not even five years ago. But now, it's time to crack open the piths of the most fundamental doings of our species. After the sweeping tide of ethnonational victories currently sweeping the globe, The Weaponization of Everything, is not merely the 'speak' of The Now, but the do of all its subjects, whether collusive or rebellious. Judith Goldman's AGON is borne amidst this new reality. Few works of experimental literature aim so high as to flush out the full range affectual coordinates as to reveal their age's Agon as a controlling demigod of our own making, that is, to raise up the Agon's 'agon'."—Rodrigo Toscano
"Judith Goldman's AGON confronts the ubiquitous naturalization inherent in the weaponization of race, gender, global warming, poetics, language, utterance, politics, torture, immigration, and whatever else is changeable under the guise of aggression masquerading as mental freedom. '...the intensification of weapons already in place,' and '...observed nearly everywhere,' AGON deftly solders ideas of defensive assimilation (weapons already in place) to our conscious and unconscious activities of daily living. One can only bow down in shock and awe to AGON's scorched earth dissemination of open-ended spaces to think, while thinking is still, hopefully, under what we presume is our jurisdiction."—Kim Rosenfield
A cross-genre work that intercuts and assembles three textual threads, AGON inventories ubiquitous contemporary exempla of in the culture propagated by neoliberalism, all social forms—ordinary, necessary relations, transactions, and communications—have been turned into fodder for social aggression. AGON audits the disavowed violence of abstractive technologies in their material effects, while also tracing the subtle anatomy of violence in its more "proper" spheres. Is poetry one of these? Writing alongside Amiri Baraka's invective "Black Art," AGON builds a dossier on the aggressivity peculiar to literary speech, thinking this issue in relation to the volatile politics around poetry in America at this moment.
"The Commodification of Everything. That was the pivot point of materialist discourse not even five years ago. But now, it's time to crack open the piths of the most fundamental doings of our species. After the sweeping tide of ethnonational victories currently sweeping the globe, The Weaponization of Everything, is not merely the 'speak' of The Now, but the do of all its subjects, whether collusive or rebellious. Judith Goldman's AGON is borne amidst this new reality. Few works of experimental literature aim so high as to flush out the full range affectual coordinates as to reveal their age's Agon as a controlling demigod of our own making, that is, to raise up the Agon's 'agon'."—Rodrigo Toscano
"Judith Goldman's AGON confronts the ubiquitous naturalization inherent in the weaponization of race, gender, global warming, poetics, language, utterance, politics, torture, immigration, and whatever else is changeable under the guise of aggression masquerading as mental freedom. '...the intensification of weapons already in place,' and '...observed nearly everywhere,' AGON deftly solders ideas of defensive assimilation (weapons already in place) to our conscious and unconscious activities of daily living. One can only bow down in shock and awe to AGON's scorched earth dissemination of open-ended spaces to think, while thinking is still, hopefully, under what we presume is our jurisdiction."—Kim Rosenfield
A cross-genre work that intercuts and assembles three textual threads, AGON inventories ubiquitous contemporary exempla of in the culture propagated by neoliberalism, all social forms—ordinary, necessary relations, transactions, and communications—have been turned into fodder for social aggression. AGON audits the disavowed violence of abstractive technologies in their material effects, while also tracing the subtle anatomy of violence in its more "proper" spheres. Is poetry one of these? Writing alongside Amiri Baraka's invective "Black Art," AGON builds a dossier on the aggressivity peculiar to literary speech, thinking this issue in relation to the volatile politics around poetry in America at this moment.
230 pages, Paperback
First published April 10, 2017
7 people want to read
About the author
Judith Goldman
51 books2 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 12, 2017
damn. this ollied all over my dumb brain--sliding from relentless weaponization to the politics of appropriation and citation, Lauren Berlant to Amiri Baraka, poetry to prose. tho I had to let go of wanting more poetry from it to enjoy. looking out for more from this press.
April 9, 2025
I know I just finished "Our Hideous Progeny" but I can't help but feel this book is a Frankenstein-like project. A re-animation of texts, a sutured and fraying set of paragraphs and poems, a charged corpse. It's agon(y). I found myself adrift as much as I found footing in the dense theoretical work. But I suppose that's intentional given it's constant interruptions, gaps, gasps. The central idea introduced is a weaponization (of all sorts of things but mainly language). The poems throughout the book straight-quote lots of bits current culture: racial violence, hate speech legislation, theory, news feeds, violent encounters in the news, etc... they're yelling. Loud. But the poems are riddled with holes, numbers, gaps, barcodes. So while activating/enunciating/repeating violent language, that language is simultaneously already ruptured, damaged, distressed (maybe fugitive). An interesting and deeply troubling read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews