Invitation to ZOË

ShareThere is a conference in Napa this July called ZOË. Not BIOS: ZOË. The distinction is older than the Christian writers who then took it up: ζωή names life in its fullest sense, βίος the managed arc of livelihood. The conference is named after the first: a question my work in theory, design, and poetry has circled for decades.The coming essays on this Substack hinge on the difference between production and rendering. To produce is to hold under constraint; to render is to set the surface such holding would have produced, without it. The regime that these essays describe is one in which rendering has become both endemic and systemic, and production residue rather than rule. In this context, what counts as a life—alive, alove—let alone a good one? What is allowed and foreclosed by abundance? The questions cease to be rhetorical the moment want itself can be inmachinated.ZOË gathers exactly around that pressure point, bringing Athens, Jerusalem, and the Valley into the same…