Becoming-Venison: On Enemies, Venison, and the Ontological Turn
Of Enemies & Venison (2026) is a title that feels very much within the heart of Becoming Press. Beyond some guiding signifiers like “Negativism” and “Queer Cynicism”, we had never outright planned an editorial line from the beginning—we were always in survival mode, sinking our teeth into the unsuspecting game that would make itself visible to us. It wasn’t until our 8th book, Unconscious/Television (2025), that we realised what was happening. Underneath our attempts to mould our editorial line like a bonsai tree—through the instrumentalization of (“non”-)philosophers like Lucretius and Jean Baudrillard and so on—a real editorial line started to appear, a shadow line.
The most cited philosopher in our books turned out to be someone Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; a translucent, astral figure who was rarely the main subject of a text, but who was ever present in our output. It wasn’t, after all, just Becoming Press who was doing the hunting; we were ourselves being hunted, captured, and transformed. We had unwittingly entered the territory of the Psychoanalytical Jaguar, who roams the ontological turn, a place where Man becomes Animal, and Animal becomes God.
Through our friendships with researchers like Lucas Ferraço Nassif, and the two editors of Of Enemies & Venison, Alessandro Sbordoni and “0nty” (the perfect anime name for one who wanders in these woods), we started to learn the ways of this world; we learned how to trap Boars, sterilise wounds, and avoid the gaze of the Jaguar. After years, we started to feel at home here, and we realised it was no coincidence that we would settle here—it was, for lack of a better term, a destiny.
The spiritual heart of Becoming Press is perhaps precisely the legacy of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and this belief that anthropology is a fundamentally philosophical practice. It is not just a kind of “cuteness” or “fascination” which drives our interest in the archaeological record, in the writings and symbolic realms of ancient peoples—rather, these traditions are understood as sites where different metaphysics of reality have been elaborated. Anthropology, in this sense, becomes philosophy conducted through the comparison of worlds.
The philosophical tradition which animates the spirits who inhabit Becoming Press’ world is itself caught up in winds of this ontological turn, because it moves away from the question of “how do we know?” (epistemology), towards the question of “what kind of worlds are there to know?” (ontology). This seismic shift changed the landscape dramatically, producing these topographies which revolved around Heidegger, Stiegler, Simondon, and Yuk Hui. Technics—Technology, Technique, Techne, and Technicity—became the new way to understand this multitude of worlds (and how they are produced); “objective reality” vanished.
This situation isn’t new, it is a world that was here before us, a world we were born into, but Of Enemies & Venison (2026) is a book that we are very proud of, because it is positioned right “at the vanishing point” of this ontological turn, as it is a radical step forward in that discourse. This book is not simply cosmotechnics applied to Ancient Mexico, as what Lou Manuel Arsenault unearthed here could change how we deal with the cosmos and with technics, in general. This book positions itself as the next act in the story, not a spin-off or sub-plot. From this book you can learn just as much about the world we live in, Becoming Press and friends, as you can about the world inhabited by Nahuatl-speaking folk of the Valley of Mexico in the pre-classical period.
The book, Of Enemies & Venison, is scheduled for printing this week, ahead of our planned release in early April. We will be organizing some launch events, first in Quebec, where the author dwells, and then in Berlin (and maybe more), and we will announce the dates for these as soon as we can. The preorder which runs until release has a small discount, to encourage and offer gratitude to early support, and given that this book will be printed via Offset, we have a much more limited number of copies, so you can use the pre-order to reserve a copy ahead of time.