Feasts of Unrule

"Feasts of Unrule is a condensed treatise on the philosophy of right & on human rights in general, & on the genealogy of morals in particular. In dialogue with Arendt & Derrida, Armand critiques the ascendency of Platonic "reason" to the detriment of poetry (so-called unreason), humanity, freedom & the liberty of one's own soul. Against Sartre, Armand argues that for a free-spirited poetry "to choose truth" is to be "committed" to writing, itself. In the present revenance of Cold War apocalypticism, such poetry is suppressed wherever it disputes a social order that desires to "own" the rhetoric of terror. Through the dissident writings of Darwish, Goytisolo & Rimbaud, Feasts of Unrule challenges the compulsive doublespeak of those regimes of "impossibility" - from Russia & Israel to the invisible third eye of capital - that stand in the way of a decolonization of western mind. Louis Armand's latest book is a poetic outcry & a howl against the dogmas of corporate-state power." Nina Zivančevic

"Louis Armand has long & systematically explored the transformations of literature, literary theory & literary culture in an era in which information technology & digitization have penetrated all these fields. His new book of essays, Feasts of Unrule, provides compelling testimony that, within the framework of conventional language, literary discourse is always potentially subversive, insofar as it is able to break out of a subservient relation to power & become a spectre that haunts it. Armand doesn't agitate for an "enagaged literature" in the Sartrean sense, but for a literature that engages with resistance, even at the cost of being accused of disrespect for reason, humanism & other vices." Miroslav Petříček