SCUM Manifesto was considered one of the most outrageous, violent, and certifiably crazy tracts when it first appeared in 1968. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published this work just before her rampage against the king of Pop Art made her a household name and resulted in her confinement to a mental institution. But the Manifesto, for all its vitriol, is impossible to dismiss as just the rantings of a lesbian lunatic. In fact, the work has indisputable prescience, not only as a radical feminist analysis light-years ahead of its time -- predicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against under-representation in the arts -- but also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman. The focus of this edition, however, is not on the nostalgic appeal of SCUM. Rather, in a characteristically brilliant and erudite introduction, renowned scholar Avital Ronell reconsiders Solanas's infamous text in light of the social milieu in which it was written, and reinterprets its status as a cult classic. Ronell writes, "Maybe the Solanas tract was payback: it was clocked to strike the time of response to all shameless woman-hating manifestos and their counterparts, the universalizers." She conjures Derrida's "The Ends of Man" (written in the same year), Judith Butler's Excitable Speech, Nietzsche's Ubermensch, and notorious feminist icons from Medusa, Medea, and Antigone, to Lizzie Borden, Lorenna Bobbitt, and Aileen Wournos, illuminating the evocative exuberance of Solanas's dark tract.
