Essays
“Likeconomy Piece,” TOHU MAGAZINE Special Issue: Limbs, Editor Reem Ghanayem (February 2026), English, Hebrew, Arabic
“Collective Forgetting: Permission to Forget. Editorial,” TOHU MAGAZINE Special Issue: reColletcive forGetting (January 2025), English, Hebrew, Arabic
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“What to do for the Sake of Love?” TOHU MAGAZINE Special Issue: Long Distance Relationships, Guest Editor Tuçe Erel (December 2022), English, Hebrew, Arabic
Michal B. Ron follows an archival treasure of Hannah Bruckmüller's. She starts with Marcel Broodthaers’ contribution to James Lee Byars’s World Question Center, where a question about love is calling from a distance of time, and creates a new questionnaire that asks for responses: what do you do for the sake of love?
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with Hannah Bruckmüller and interventions by Noa Ginzburg, “From i-dentity to ur-dentity. An Odysee to Uranus with Paul Beatriz Preciado,” COUNTER-SIGNALS 4: Identity is the Crisis (2021): 248-269.
In the luggage of the gender-migrant, the customs officer at border control finds:
1 property —— what would you take with you on a trip to Uranus?
2 a mother —— how to leave the land of your fathers and your mother tongue?
3 a name —— taking a new name, can you get it right?
4 a lease —— signing a contract with new initials
5 a bed —— sleeping, dreaming, fucking in your rented apartment
6 nostalgia —— can we call this home? w h e r e are we ever at home?
Transitioning from female to male: author Paul Beatriz Preciado settles the collected columns, “the chronicle of a crossing,” in “an apartment on Uranus.” Transitioning from poetry to arts, Marcel Broodthaers settles the fictitious “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles” in the house he shares with his family.
When we ask ourselves what we are doing in our apartments, we come up with a list:
1 sleeping
2 reading
3 drinking
4 eating
This list recalls the activities Broodthaers enumerates as defining “Being Narcissus” in his artist book Magie. Art et politique (1973).1 The narcissist is busy with saying “I.” Preciado does not get tired claiming “I”: “I am the multiplicity of the cosmos trapped in a binary political and epistemological system, shouting in front of you. I am a uranist.”2 “Let everything literally become mirrors,” writes Broodthaers. Borrowing words and structures of institutional critique from the 1970s as our masks, we discuss subjectivity and identity as institutions in the field of arts and philosophy almost fifty years after.3 This evolves in a conversion of authorship and readership: Who are we? Sometimes Michal talks to Hannah, sometimes you are addressed, dear reader, emphasizing the fact that we all say “i.” Your “i” is like my “i”: i d e n t i t y . Preciado falls in love with Athens and with Greek mythology. The philologist Barbara Cassin guides our way to this country of the past: “Tell me muse of the man of the many tricks!”4 With Cassin we will embark on Preciado’s odyssey to Uranus, in order to get to know more about the land that this author is going to invent on this “other planet,” “much too far away.”5 Take me for a ride, man of the many tricks!
1 Marcel Broodthaers, Magie. Art et Politique (Multiplicata, 1973), 22:
Being Narcissus.
1 sleeping —— Plains of sleep. Dreams —— etc.
2 reading —— The book as it transforms itself into images. Let everything literally become mirrors.
3 drinking —— After the acid wine, the gentle wine. And then the sea. May the glass find the clearest spring and fill with a water saltless and full of alcohol.
4 eating —— Cobras, vipers, boas, grass snakes ... … later on to be fascinated with one’s own image as with a snake. Later again, naked.
2xSummary of Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Semiotext(e), 2019) on the publisher’s home-page: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/apartment-uranus [3 April 2020].
3 Compare Michal B. Ron, “Marcel Broodthaers, Fifty Years After, or History in ‘The Room of the Parrot’,” PhD diss., Freie Universität Berlin, 2017. Ron’s dissertation deals with the question of time in the work of Marcel Broodthaers, as related to historical thinking, to animals, and to children.
4 Barbara Cassin, Nostalgia. When Are We Ever at Home? Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault (Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 34. Cassin quotes from the Odyssean prologue, which “means, as Florence Dupont so rightly suggests, ‘I am writing some Homer in Latin.’” We enter the threshold of translation, navigating between tongues and languages: “Land of the fathers, language of the mothers: it is with the language of the other that one makes a new fatherland for oneself.”
5 In the introduction, Preciado tells the anecdote of a meeting with artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in a dream, advising Preciado to get rid of the apartment on Uranus, because it is “much too far away.” Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Semiotext(e), 2019), p. 22. From now on abbreviated AU.
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with Hannah Bruckmüller and Noa Ginzburg, “Catchat: Following an Interview With a Cat,” PROTOCOLS Issue #6: TOUNGES (January 2020).
“This is an interview, recorded at the Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, 12 Burgplatz Düsseldorf,” announces the interviewer. “MIAOW! MIAOW!” replies the interviewee. In 1970, the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) conducted and recorded an interview with a cat. At the time, he was the self-announced director of a fictive museum: the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968-1972). The location of the interview — 12 Burgplatz, Düsseldorf — was home to Cinéma Modèle, one of twelve sections of the museum. The time and place are set, and a conversation begins: — “Is that one a good painting? […]” asks Broodthaers. “Miaow,” replies Cat.
Up until today, museumgoers pay greater attention to the artist’s questions than to the cat’s replies, and so the discourse on Broodthaers’ work mainly focuses on his words. But why? Actually, the cat, the interviewee, is the main protagonist. Once we tune in to all the voices that can be heard in this conversation, what do we hear? This essay sets out to listen attentively. We attempt to tie the two parties together in a shared alphabet and transcribe the conversation between Broodthaers (B) and Cat (C) anew. This unprecedented endeavor is mirrored in the typographical layout. Our textual enterprise takes a Talmudic form, putting in its center the dialogue, transliterated from utterances in French and Cat tongues into Hebrew and Latin letters, and opening up threads that introduce questions of translation and interpretation.
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“Collective Forgetting: Permission to Forget. Editorial,” TOHU MAGAZINE Special Issue: reColletcive forGetting (January 2025), English, Hebrew, Arabic
“What to do for the Sake of Love?” TOHU MAGAZINE Special Issue: Long Distance Relationships, Guest Editor Tuçe Erel (December 2022), English, Hebrew, Arabic
Michal B. Ron follows an archival treasure of Hannah Bruckmüller's. She starts with Marcel Broodthaers’ contribution to James Lee Byars’s World Question Center, where a question about love is calling from a distance of time, and creates a new questionnaire that asks for responses: what do you do for the sake of love?
with Hannah Bruckmüller and interventions by Noa Ginzburg, “From i-dentity to ur-dentity. An Odysee to Uranus with Paul Beatriz Preciado,” COUNTER-SIGNALS 4: Identity is the Crisis (2021): 248-269.
In the luggage of the gender-migrant, the customs officer at border control finds:
1 property —— what would you take with you on a trip to Uranus?
2 a mother —— how to leave the land of your fathers and your mother tongue?
3 a name —— taking a new name, can you get it right?
4 a lease —— signing a contract with new initials
5 a bed —— sleeping, dreaming, fucking in your rented apartment
6 nostalgia —— can we call this home? w h e r e are we ever at home?
Transitioning from female to male: author Paul Beatriz Preciado settles the collected columns, “the chronicle of a crossing,” in “an apartment on Uranus.” Transitioning from poetry to arts, Marcel Broodthaers settles the fictitious “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles” in the house he shares with his family.
When we ask ourselves what we are doing in our apartments, we come up with a list:
1 sleeping
2 reading
3 drinking
4 eating
This list recalls the activities Broodthaers enumerates as defining “Being Narcissus” in his artist book Magie. Art et politique (1973).1 The narcissist is busy with saying “I.” Preciado does not get tired claiming “I”: “I am the multiplicity of the cosmos trapped in a binary political and epistemological system, shouting in front of you. I am a uranist.”2 “Let everything literally become mirrors,” writes Broodthaers. Borrowing words and structures of institutional critique from the 1970s as our masks, we discuss subjectivity and identity as institutions in the field of arts and philosophy almost fifty years after.3 This evolves in a conversion of authorship and readership: Who are we? Sometimes Michal talks to Hannah, sometimes you are addressed, dear reader, emphasizing the fact that we all say “i.” Your “i” is like my “i”: i d e n t i t y . Preciado falls in love with Athens and with Greek mythology. The philologist Barbara Cassin guides our way to this country of the past: “Tell me muse of the man of the many tricks!”4 With Cassin we will embark on Preciado’s odyssey to Uranus, in order to get to know more about the land that this author is going to invent on this “other planet,” “much too far away.”5 Take me for a ride, man of the many tricks!
1 Marcel Broodthaers, Magie. Art et Politique (Multiplicata, 1973), 22:
Being Narcissus.
1 sleeping —— Plains of sleep. Dreams —— etc.
2 reading —— The book as it transforms itself into images. Let everything literally become mirrors.
3 drinking —— After the acid wine, the gentle wine. And then the sea. May the glass find the clearest spring and fill with a water saltless and full of alcohol.
4 eating —— Cobras, vipers, boas, grass snakes ... … later on to be fascinated with one’s own image as with a snake. Later again, naked.
2xSummary of Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Semiotext(e), 2019) on the publisher’s home-page: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/apartment-uranus [3 April 2020].
3 Compare Michal B. Ron, “Marcel Broodthaers, Fifty Years After, or History in ‘The Room of the Parrot’,” PhD diss., Freie Universität Berlin, 2017. Ron’s dissertation deals with the question of time in the work of Marcel Broodthaers, as related to historical thinking, to animals, and to children.
4 Barbara Cassin, Nostalgia. When Are We Ever at Home? Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault (Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 34. Cassin quotes from the Odyssean prologue, which “means, as Florence Dupont so rightly suggests, ‘I am writing some Homer in Latin.’” We enter the threshold of translation, navigating between tongues and languages: “Land of the fathers, language of the mothers: it is with the language of the other that one makes a new fatherland for oneself.”
5 In the introduction, Preciado tells the anecdote of a meeting with artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in a dream, advising Preciado to get rid of the apartment on Uranus, because it is “much too far away.” Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Semiotext(e), 2019), p. 22. From now on abbreviated AU.
with Hannah Bruckmüller and Noa Ginzburg, “Catchat: Following an Interview With a Cat,” PROTOCOLS Issue #6: TOUNGES (January 2020).
“This is an interview, recorded at the Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, 12 Burgplatz Düsseldorf,” announces the interviewer. “MIAOW! MIAOW!” replies the interviewee. In 1970, the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) conducted and recorded an interview with a cat. At the time, he was the self-announced director of a fictive museum: the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968-1972). The location of the interview — 12 Burgplatz, Düsseldorf — was home to Cinéma Modèle, one of twelve sections of the museum. The time and place are set, and a conversation begins: — “Is that one a good painting? […]” asks Broodthaers. “Miaow,” replies Cat.
Up until today, museumgoers pay greater attention to the artist’s questions than to the cat’s replies, and so the discourse on Broodthaers’ work mainly focuses on his words. But why? Actually, the cat, the interviewee, is the main protagonist. Once we tune in to all the voices that can be heard in this conversation, what do we hear? This essay sets out to listen attentively. We attempt to tie the two parties together in a shared alphabet and transcribe the conversation between Broodthaers (B) and Cat (C) anew. This unprecedented endeavor is mirrored in the typographical layout. Our textual enterprise takes a Talmudic form, putting in its center the dialogue, transliterated from utterances in French and Cat tongues into Hebrew and Latin letters, and opening up threads that introduce questions of translation and interpretation.
with Hannah M. Bruckmüller, “How Testo Junkie Transforms You,” TOHU MAGAZINE (July 2020).
“An author who had taken testosterone as a drug in a philosophical self-experiment that she documented in a book - it shook me up so much that it wouldn't leave my mind." Michal B. Ron and Hannah M. Bruckmüller discuss naming, sexuality, fables, giving birth and giving death, in response to Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie.
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The cover of Testo Junkie by Beatriz Preciado and the cover of Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado. Photo: Michal B. Ron
“An author who had taken testosterone as a drug in a philosophical self-experiment that she documented in a book - it shook me up so much that it wouldn't leave my mind." Michal B. Ron and Hannah M. Bruckmüller discuss naming, sexuality, fables, giving birth and giving death, in response to Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie.
The cover of Testo Junkie by Beatriz Preciado and the cover of Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado. Photo: Michal B. Ron