hello, world? (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

A feminist paean to perversity: on remaking intimacy outside the Republic of Gender.

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.

For over twenty years, Anna Poletti has researched how media shapes the meaning we attach to lived experience. Her recent books include Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book (2020) and the Eisner Award–nominated collection Graphic Medicine (coedited with Erin La Cour, 2022).