| "Crossing the Line: Kathy Acker, Williams S. Burroughs and the Politics of Piracy" investigates Kathy Acker and William S Burroughs' insistence that pirates and acts of piracy are models for political action in late capitalism. Acker and Burroughs' later texts, Don Quixote, Empire of the Senseless and Cities of the Red Night and Ghosts of a Chance respectively, use pirates as both aesthetic and narrative tropes. I seek to show that Acker and Burroughs' use of pirates is an attempt at fashioning a wide-ranging critique of late capitalism and changing and expanding forms of control and power. The pirate, for Acker and Burroughs, becomes a figuration, a vessel, for the re-imagining of a politically active, restive, mode of being. By investigating the role of piracy in their texts, I open a space of discussion that highlights Acker and Burroughs' commitment to revolutionary politics indebted to their deep belief in the power of literature to shape and engender communities. The literary enunciation of affective communities illuminates the gap between literature and theory. Acker and Burroughs maintain the importance of affect in human relations. In other words, in the face of what Fredric Jameson labels the waning of affect under late capitalism, Acker and Burroughs posit highly charged affective relationships between people. |
