Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Joan Retallack writes that OCCULTATIONS enacts the courage of paradoxical evocation. For David Buuck, such evocation helps us consider that the body-in-crisis is not some theoretical abstraction but a lived condition, subject not only to the 'surveillance-industrial complex' but also to the limitations of language's ability to fully articulate 'what work this dying is.' In (un)mapping its state of accelerated becoming, this (collective) body asks whether it can, through radical re-narration of its (re)constitution by neo-liberal capitalism and militarism, allegorize the wider catastrophic affects these logic-systems have on an ecosystem. Is it possible, asks Laura Elrick, to construct the parameters through which the practiced lie of control might be relinquished, through which, at the same time, the fault-lines out of whose collisions our lives are rent might be sense-d? As place, the occulted recursively struggles to perform exploratory surgery on normative valuations of its capacities, on what is taken to be possible and what is not.
