You read them for the first time and they are enthusiastic about their verve and their playfulness. You read them a second time and are a little sobered. At the latest in the third book, the realization comes in that it is dealing here with an avant-garde idling. One that acts as if it is constantly outbidding and yet always presents the same monotony in new colors.

Ann Cotten's books are always parables of our overly alienated and dehumanized late modernity, where abstract systems such as capitalism and technology have long since taken over the control of society and the individual. This is also the case in her new work, which tells of the future. In a total of twelve prose pieces, "punitive troops" of long-term unemployed people fly through space in a vacuum, people spend their everyday lives in front of "feedback screens" or meet their clones. And if they do not stray through the space in floating shuttle bars, they sometimes travel via lyophilization machines, freeze-drying the mind, especially in the past.

Markus Kirchgessner / laif

Author Ann Cotten

Like all sub-and dystopia, this text does not throw its actual spotlight on a morning, but indirectly on the here and now. What we now observe at an early stage is spelled out by Cotten with radical irony. Such as the blind optimism of progress, the increasing competition between androids and humans or the perverting of the mind-body problem.

Bodies can be easily frozen and thawed in Cotten's distant universes. And the souls? They are stored in "networks [n] in the brain" and "are now mostly patches". Everything in this world is subject to materialism, which, however, is unable to fill a fundamental meaning vacuum: "Something in us hoped, despite all odds, that in the chunks that were taken to create the new planet, [.. ... ... we were digging and dug in every corner of our four hectares, we wanted to find something that fought with us, [... ...] stretched our lives meaningfully, but we found nothing as fresh, clean lavahumus. "

"Despite the stalactite cave of yearning"

Above all, it lacks the here described areas of the particular, resist or even mysterious. It is a critique of our present, which sees Cotten in the sign of economization, transparency dictates and Adorno's culture industry. is contrary to the aesthetic design of 1982 born in Iowa author. Because Ann Cotten's language is always aimed at enigmization and alienation. One picture lays over the next. Contours and statements blur, whereby their texts assume a highly subjective character.

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Ann Cotten
Lyophilia

Publishing company:

Suhrkamp Verlag

Pages:

463

Price:

EUR 24,00

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As a reader, you can not stick to anything. Overcoding and dialectical leaps and bounds throw you off course. Anyone who moves in Cottens literary universe suffers the fate of a drowning in the flood.

In addition to wonderful metaphors such as "Defiance is the stalactite cave of yearning, the negative of desires" are countless zusammengekleisterte thought pieces. "And so, too, that night went slowly, bubbling under, like a bloody ship in a sea of ​​oil, or pineapple in champagne, considering the fateful wheel of a paddle steamer." What we want to say to such phrases, is probably reserved for the smarter minds of the future.

But the blurring and digressions are not the main problem. The gesture behind it seems rather lamentable. Literary socialized by the Viennese avant-garde, especially the work of Friederike Mayröcker, the author has absorbed the post-structuralist thinking. Whether gender images ("The shuddering fan", 2013) or genre conventions ("Exiled!", 2016) - Everything is deconstructed with Ach and noise.

This strategy may seem hip and ingenious, and yet it is just the ever-warmed-up stuff of the day before yesterday. With her cramped exhibition of supposed political and aesthetic sophistication, an actually talented author ultimately sells under value.