Life Story

by McKenzie Wark

From acclaimed theorist and trans icon McKenzie Wark, Life Story is a divulsion and revision of the author’s multiple forms. Life Story asks, "how to write not about love, but with love, in love, in form as well as content?" With an offering of lucidity amid disaster; a reinvention in the face of modernity’s unraveling. A tour of her selves, works, and worlds, Life Story is at once elegiac and mutinous, “an arc of history as built on an ontology of love.”

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2024

About the author

McKenzie Wark (she/her) is the author of A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, and The Beach Beneath the Street, among other books. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City.

Reviews

[Dylan Kiewel]

"what we do to make a living is not what we do to make a life."

"the unexamined life is not worth living but the unlived life is not worth examining."

mckenzie wark remains an inspiring example of a very modern critical but exuberant public intellectual who fucks. never boring to read, in fact exciting to read. she gets it. read this little hanuman in like 15 minutes and it was compact and brilliant.

[Gregor Kulla]

see raamat on mikroskoopiline! ühtlasi kirjutan praegu sellele esimest goodreadsi arvustust. herstory ... mõnusalt tummine, samas õhuline lugeda. raskuskesed on käidud läbi voolavalt ja teravalt – wark omab täpselt neid kogemusi, mida mina tahan ja neid järeldusi, millest mina mõtlen. või millest mõelda tahaksin. tellisin selle tema ja kathy ackeri raamatu ja nüüd tahan tellida reverse cowgirli, sest ma ei suuda seda e-raamatuna lugeda sue me

[Marcelo]

I love McKenzie Wark's writing, so this was right up my alley, even if I didn't particularly love the format of the book (all books are commodities, yes, but this one is pricey and uncomfortable to read because of its format). As usual with her work, I'm left pondering on so many beautiful and haunting passages, but these two stand out for me:

“When there might be no more happy endings there's no need of endings at all. In this time when time might end, let's return to the middle, where we might find that sideways time, that time without measure, that always will have been.”

“Life is long, as Jessica says. It's long if you can find the sideways time, to thicken it.”

[Hugo Lefebvre]

This is an deeply personal and poetic insight into the life, interior and exterior, of McKenzie Wark, which I had discovered through her book Raving. It tells of her life as an academic, a transgender woman, a New Yorker, a raver and a revolutionary.

« My idols are dead, and my enemies are in power »

How do we live meaningful lives when meaning is evermore evanescent, seemingly impossible to account for? This book is also an acount of the lived experience of the act of asking this question, without the delusion of pretending there’s one universal answer. It’s an invitation to continue searching with love and passion.

[in8]

https://5cense.com/25/1224.htm

[Becca Hester]

Leaves me with more questions to ponder than answers to hold, which is exactly what I hoped for.