From the inside flap:

“

In this lucid and inventive work, Ian Buchanan argues that the pivotal concepts ‘assemblage’ and ‘affect,’ which were separated at birth, need to be reunited. Indeed, it is only by bringing them back together that we can fully understand their meaning. of Assemblage Theory and Affect (Bloomsbury, 2026) proposes three agenda-setting arguments:

1. Affect is a function of desire—its powers are the powers we attribute to desire. As such, like desire it should be considered a psychical agency. The assemblage, the body without organs and the abstract machine are all components of this psychical agency.

2. Affect is a capacitating power—it empowers us to meet life. Affect is not the measure of our response to a given stimulus, it is rather the capacity we have to respond to a stimulus in the way that we do. This is the essential argument of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic project which is a kind of survivor’s guide to late capitalism.

3. The capacitating power of affect depends upon the combinations of bodies without organs and abstract machines that we have been able to put together by means of the assemblages available to us. This is what Deleuze means by an ethics of desire.

”

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University

nathan.smith@yale.edu

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This episode’s centers on Sophie Lewis’s new book Femmephilia. A collection of essays published in various outlets over the last several years, this book will take readers through a number of disparate topics, from the recent Disney remake of The Little Mermaid to experiments with psychedelics to the bizarre meanings one might find at its end. Uniting it all though is an unapologetically anticapitalist and utopian feminism, one that sees in various examples and experiences of femme glimpses both of the contradictions of our present moment and brief glimmers of what an emancipated world might look like.

Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer, with work appearing in a number of outlets including London Review of Books, The Drift and e-flux. Her previous books are Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now.

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Wastelands and Wonderlands: Utopias and Dystopias in Film and Literature with Matthew Leggatt (SUNY Press, 2026) is an edited collection exploring utopias ad dystopias in films and literature. It challenges readers, in these uniquely dystopian times, to reevaluate their ideas about utopia and dystopia.

The book brings together film, literary, and utopian studies scholars from across the world. As an interdisciplinary collection, it covers a wide range of utopias and dystopias, from those of visionaries as varied as William Morris and George Lucas to such fresh new and distinctive voices like Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and N. K. Jemisin.

Contributors dismantle myths about utopian and dystopian film, literature, and television. Several chapters analyse the nature of utopian and dystopian fiction and its important relationship to our present moment. What's the future of utopia? What does it mean to be a utopia today? Do we still need the warnings of dystopia?

Whether through ecocritical work, work aimed at decolonizing utopian studies, debates about our relationship with technology and the nonhuman, forms of utopian hope and pessimism, or new thinking about cinematic and literary techniques and production, the essays offer fresh insight into the subject area and something to interest any reader.

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