Where Does a Body Begin? Biology's function in Contemporary Capitalism by S.R. (MYB) & i0 xen0

All this talk of Biopolitics and yet rarely is a biologist consulted. 

This is a limited run printing of a book entitled "Where does a body begin? Biology's Function in Contemporary Capitalism", written anonymously by the infamous "Meltdown Your Books" a.k.a "S.R.", who has written this book as a part of her Ph.D studies in Evolutionary Biology (with a focus on Mathematical modelling). 

The book's title "Where does a body begin?" asks a question that begins to reveal some of the issues faced in the field of Biology, namely the difficulty with which contemporary Biology has in determining the limits of the body, or rather what constitutes the body and what doesn't: where, precisely, is the body? Where does it begin?

The book begins with an anonymous contribution from one of our closest affiliates, i0 xen0, our favourite transsexual post-doc whose dissertation work also considered the philosophy and history of science and the use of computational modeling in scientific practice, has constructed a contents page in prose that aims to help the reader find a comfortable position with which to begin reading the text. This introduction is framed around a question that is equally as interesting as the book title: "When is a body?", and as this title implies, the piece dwells on the idea of the temporality of the body through a look at such ideas as Kairotic time and bodily seasons. 

We are presenting here a very fun, yet rigorously peer-reviewed and intellectual work from a Ph.D scholar who has a renowned sense of humor and a unique voice, that is supported by another fantastic artist and thinker from another universe. To cap it off, the book is illustrated by Rachel Lillim, whose visual style is so compelling and intense that it helps everyone see the work for what it is: otherworldly, playful and queer, but deadly serious and radical at the same time. It's a biology text about the body put together by a team of those who are, by and large, under-represented in the field.  

FOREWORD: 

"The laboratory is the seat of myopia and the starting line of global misanthropy, a factory of meaning which we call upon in times of distress to remind us of our higher callings. In its best moments it contains all the beauty of ecstatic and life-affirming art, and in its lowest it dredges up nothing but the cruelest and basest impulses, cast in dismal artificial light and remorseless bureaucratic pessimism.

These are not qualities which arise from ‘lab culture’, the prevailing emotionality which scientists are so fond of, but from the interconnected web of social constraints and flows into which a lab is set adrift. Labs contain direction and agency, surely, but they are also carried by waters and currents which stretch far beyond the local waters of a particular university or department. There are qualities to a laboratory that escape its own grasp, which have no face or center in a local view but necessarily shape and define the inclinations of scientists within them.

Some sciences, in their bucolic bays and inlets, can pretend they are not caught in the great maw of the social, but biology cannot erect any such illusions around itself, despite what biologists may tell their critics–and through repetition for themselves as mantra. It is a science of life undertaken by the living. In many ways it is the most profoundly social action possible, to study ourselves, the fundamentals of this property which defines us."

DETAILS:

€15,00, A6, 116 pages
ISBN: 978-9925-7984-6-9
Authored by S.R. (MYB) & i0 xen0.
Edited by Nicholas E. Powers
Illustrated by Rachel Lillim
Typography and Layout by Polymnia Tsinti
Produced and Published by Becoming