hello, world?
By Anna Poletti
Seasonal begins writing sentences and thinking thoughts they never thought possible. They want to give László the pleasure of being nothing. The more they come to like him, to value his sensitivity, his sharp mind, his aesthetics, his ethics, and the more they want his respect, the easier it seems to become to think about destroying him. A new set of capacities which they had only dimly sensed are now coursing in their muscles, their cunt, their blood, their mind.
Abandoned by their Dutch partner after giving up their home and their job to follow him to the Netherlands, humanities scholar Seasonal finds themself single in a strange place for the first time in a decade.
Dipping into the rabbit hole of digital eroticism, Seasonal soon meets László, a male sub who volleys back their cerebral sexts and is seeking a dominant guide. His dating-app profile—a photo of Foucault and the ingenuous greeting “Hello, World?”—thinly veils his desire to be annihilated. It's a desire that Seasonal senses they can fulfill. But to do this means crossing the frightening gap between their desires and capacities.
Seasonal and László embark on an experiment in remaking intimacy outside the Republic of Gender. But as it continues, the two realize they are staging separate confrontations with domination: Seasonal finds they must confront their own relation to the violence and anger that marked their upbringing in working-class, small-town Australia, while László stages his own confrontation with his decision to leave Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. As they attempt to improvise a theater of domination that opens up possibilities of reciprocity, the energies of their sexuality stalk this collaboration, threatening to give them exactly what they bargained or begged for.
A feminist paean to perversity in the tradition of Pauline Réage’s Story of O and Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus, Anna Poletti's hello, world? dares to fully inhabit female power, and to fully face the violence, beauty, and uncharted territories of human sexuality.
“hello, world? is a stunning achievement that tells an electrifying story about the enigma of desire and surrender. In riveting and dynamic prose, Poletti takes us on a journey through the bewildering dynamics of sexuality and otherness, showing us a whole new world that beckons us to say hello.”
—Dr. Gila Ashtor, Columbia University, author of Homo Psyche and Masochism: A Contemporary Introduction
“hello, world? starts with that all too familiar scenario of uprooting one's life for a partner only to be let down by them. What Seasonal does then might also be familiar to many—they go on the apps, fuck around, find out. What they find are ways of engaging intimately with others that become experiments in the relation between the body and the body-politic under what we commonly call late capitalism and might wish to call late patriarchy. The violence of both call for forms of enactment, of selves in relation, that can provide some kind of figure for them, some way of figuring them out. The delight in this book is not just in how closely observed and felt these things are, but how closely thought as well.”
—McKenzie Wark, author of Reverse Cowgirl
Paperback, 240 pp.
Published Oct. 8, 2024