Filths savor nothing but themselves.
—William Shakespeare, King Lear (1603)
With this call for content the open-access, multimedia journal Keep It Dirty is announcing its new volume, “Filth.” This volume, a critical project related to “filth,” will be published online starting January 1, 2016 by punctum books. Submissions of text, audio, still images, video and other formats are welcome, provided they are complete at the time of submission and are somehow related to the concept—or more accurately, the nonconcept—of “filth.”
As a new theoretical conversation, Keep It Dirty, vol. a., “Filth” concerns itself with what (de-)constitutes filth, and its particular and potent relation to other topics, engaging the hierarchies underpinning associated situations within arenas social, aesthetic, ethical and political. The designation of the volume—“a”—(re)marks upon such systems of difference, or différance (Jacques Derrida), and, resembling Jacques Lacan’s objet petit a, signifies the volume’s entanglement within a variety of topics, ultimately oriented towards the paradoxical designation of an uncanny alterity—that which Lacan describes as “the other [autre] which isn’t another at all.”
The editors anticipate submissions regarding (but not limited to) the following topics:
- “dirt” vis-à-vis “filth” (“filthy mouths” vs. “dirty minds”; “filthy rich” vs. “dirt poor,” etc.)
- cultures of cleanliness; grooming, sociality and sexuality (especially from a Freudian or Lacanian perspective)
- identity politics or ideological critique, related to grime, impurity, and bodies both individual and collective
- technologies of waste and/or erotic imagination: sex, capital and consumerism; pornography, smut and obscenity
There are no content, length or format restrictions. Please submit materials to [email protected] before December 1, 2017. Earlier submissions are encouraged.
Questions regarding Keep It Dirty, vol. a., “Filth” can be addressed to Christian Hite, editor: [email protected]
