Realms Yet to Come: Two Questions for Cassandra Troyan

Christopher Higgs asks writer, artist, poet, and filmmaker Cassandra Troyan TWO questions for Entropy. "These questions arise from my particular approach to reading and critical analysis, which is deeply indebted to Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. As they put it, 'Literature is an assemblage…a book itself is a little machine…writing has nothing to do with signifying…it has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.'" Higgs manages to connect his approach to Troyan's recent works, Blacken Me Blacken Me, Growled and KILL MANUAL. First question: "What does your book do and how does your book do it?" Answer (partly):

...With THRONE OF BLOOD and in BLACKEN ME there are sections that I first wrote when I was 18, which was a very emotionally tumultuous time for me. I feel this process of return is related to how the book functions as a whole, a re-convergence on the site of young queer subjectivities. For my purposes, rather than conforming to a rubric of identity politics, I see it opening a site for an honest erotic imaginary by not cleaning up the embarrassing mess of juvenilia. BLACKEN ME is more raw in the sense that violence doesn’t serve as a potential shelter for certain vulnerabilities. KILL MANUAL is a survival guide, both for the reader and myself. Laced with the intensities of domination, BDSM, sexual violence, online intimate commerce, it is a mapping of the flows of desire in late-capitalism. In order to break from hegemonic systems, KILL MANUAL does a lot of genre-fucking: internet forums, Master/slave contracts, clinical analyses, suicide notes, operation procedures, etc. The contradictions of these conflicting forms endemic to repression contain within them the possibility of release, “I don’t feel alive unless yr / boot is on my skull / but this is not an invitation to the state.” This line from KILL MANUAL captures the ethos of the project by complicating sites of violence and pleasured interactions.

Read it all at Entropy.