Estelle Hoy | Manhattan Marxist Manifesto and Rage

Estelle Hoy is a rule-breaking, lucid contemporary art writer and critic, liberated from the constraints of strict meaning and form. Her writings are deliciously humorous, if at times absurd, but compelling and politically charged. Her work could be described as a “millefoglie” - a thousand layers of pre-emptive truthtelling which concerns anti- capitalist propaganda and social commentary.

Estelle Hoy’s critically acclaimed book, Pisti, 80 Rue de Belleville, was published in 2020 with an introduction by Chris Kraus. In 2024, she published a collaborative book, Jus d’Orange, with Camille Henrot, and a book of essays, saké blue, which gathers critical essays, art reviews, and poetic fiction. Hoy regularly publishes in the international art press, including Mousse Magazine, Spike Art, e-flux, Artforum, Flash Art, and Frieze. She has exhibited in galleries including White Cube, Kamel Mennour, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, alongside artists including Louise Bourgeois, Anne Imhof, Mona Hatoum, Sarah Lucas, Rick Owens, and Michele Lamy. Her forthcoming book Molotov will be released by After 8 Books in 2026.

LD: ‘Cables to Rage’ by Audre Lorde or ‘The Bell Jar’ by Sylvia Plath?

EH: I started a cafe space with an ex-husband, which was named after The Bell Jar. Back then, I was working full-time in social work at a homeless centre where many were experiencing addiction and severe mental health issues, like Plath’s, which ultimately took her life. It was great to be able to bring groups to the cafe because I could be sure they’d be welcomed and respected. There is so much stigma around mental health, addiction, and homelessness, and there is perhaps little opportunity to enjoy the same public spaces. The Bell Jar, both the book and the cafe, serve as a means to understand mental illness and its myriad societal prejudices. I had one ‘client’ who was particularly special to me; she experienced schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, including hoarding. She hadn’t showered for 11 years and would only eat white things, such as yogurt and cream. She was extremely bright, but tormented like Plath, and because of her OCD, she would ask me the same question over and over and over again. She was neurotic as hell, and would ask if her repeating the same question 300 times drove me wild, and I would say, “yes!” Then we’d laugh and laugh and start all over again.

LD: Différence et répétition. How Deleuzian! Perhaps by repeating the questions your friend was moving beyond limitations of the past or who she was, or how she was perceived in the world, and constructing herself anew over and over and over again with you as catalyst? However, unlike Sylvia Plath’s stifling bell jar, yours seems to have been a place of comfort and freedom from being othered or excluded.

EH: The Bell Jar became a community space for all kinds of people, and it took on a life of its own, bringing people together in friendships they most likely wouldn’t have had the opportunity to form otherwise. It seemed to break down a lot of stigma around mental health and help people understand the tumultuous nature of addiction and homelessness. I think about the space occasionally, but I think about my friend often. The last time I saw her was down the road from The Bell Jar, sitting on the ground in the shadows with her many bags, and that very afternoon she took her own life. I couldn’t bear to keep the note she wrote before her suicide, but it’s indelibly printed in my memory. Her funeral was held at The Bell Jar, and the community came to celebrate her life and extraordinary personality, and to mourn together. When I gave the eulogy, I read a short excerpt from Sylvia Plath: “I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.” Behind my friends’ glistening eyes and smiles, there were many shadows, miles and miles of them. I’m grateful to have known her and loved her deeply.

LD: There is visceral and unfiltered rage in your writing, not just as emotion but as a political stance: against capitalism, silence, cultural stasis. It also acts as a collective energy - something that binds, calls to action, rather than isolates. A someone who, in a previous life, was drafting climate laws, I feel we all need rage of “the left”. It is too easy to bury ourselves in the privileged apathy of middle-class velvet sofas, but rage is disapproved in polite circles, alongside public displays of affection, hoodies, potholes, junk mail, graffiti, call centres, menopause, immigrants, protesters, e-scooters, and bad punctuation. And yet, it is effective. It bypasses reason and activates the core like nothing else. So much so that rage is now being used by the far right to counteract “the cultural centre” to dismantle inclusion, connectedness, and disband globalisation. Can we fight rage with rage? Can artists, philosophers, especially post-structuralists who accept that there is no objective universal truth, provide an effective response to what is happening now?

EH: I have no idea how to answer this! A velvet sofa would be terrific. [laughter] I’ll go with post-structuralist Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments and suggest the operative word is ‘fragments’. Or maybe ‘lovers’? Let’s try both.

I’ve always enjoyed not knowing the correct use of punctuation, such as semi-colons, em dashes, and where the ownership apostrophe goes on ‘Barthes’. I went to school next to a sewage plant that blew across the school yard, so that explains something. I could sign up for adult classes, but resisting an objective universal truth within punctuation marks is also a celebration of the fragmented nature of our existence. This is an adequate response to the current swing towards the divided right, because when we fixate on the idea that we need to agree on everything to achieve a political aim, then we get bogged down by the grind of consensus being inextricable from fairness. In a way, this is a strategic way to stop ‘progressive’ movements from actually progressing…
Fragmentation - within discourse in leftist factions, for example - and an acceptance of its chronic existence mean we expect it, make friends with it, and move forward regardless. We can’t wait until we agree on every single political minutiae to take direct action; maybe it’s like what Lorde said - we all have the same goal of total liberation, so stop fussing over the totalitarianism of a political semi-colon and get moving. So my grammatical ignorance is a teeny revolutionary gesture, I’ll have you know. [laughter] Let the sunshine in on post-structural fragmentation! This answer is atomised in and of itself, but maybe this is precisely my argument. I’m attempting, as best I can, with the capabilities I possess and constraints I face, to make a clumsy and fragmented contribution.
Oh, and having lovers could provide an effective counter response because people are oxytocin-relaxed and more agreeable? No clue.

LD: Aren’t we all inherently fragmented? Divided by the unconscious, language, and desire, and while it might be a wound to be healed, it can also be a resource to be tapped into. I love your idea of more oxytocin-relaxed lovers accepting that this world is fragmented, that it is made of an infinite number of particles, experiences, and positions, and that is the beauty, but also the complexity of it. Maybe that is the answer to far-right political movements? More love-making, more fragmentation.
Did you see the potency of our collective consciousness through your son’s microscope?

EH: Microscopes are whistleblowers, which is why we bought my son one for his birthday last week. I mean, how can we retain our humanity and speak of collective values while failing to zoom in on what it means to be human at a cellular level? Denouncing the nihilistic effects of the zeitgeist we’re living in truly takes an optical instrument. Closely examining grey, mortal hair in this week’s scientific study in my kitchen, I realised that the current becoming of the world could be better understood if observed through a microscope, so that the naked reality of our ultimate mortality is entirely on display. Remembering our demise is an opportunity to focus on what’s coming up, a movie trailer of sorts, and perhaps this empirical mnemonic device will redirect us, remind us we’ve little time remaining. Besides, looking at everything all at once overwhelms the spirit, and our collective consciousness slips through the cracks - its desensitisation is automatic. This potent micro approach is, at the very least, a childlike strategy, and where there’s wide-eyed, open-hearted strategy, solidarity tends to grow.

LD: As creators, do we have a duty of care to take a moral stance, to expose, to transmit our values and beliefs? Do you think the character of an artist and integrity are different?

EH: Something Ocean Vuong said struck me yesterday regarding his students being held hostage by ‘cringe culture,’ whereby kids feel self-conscious about social media surveillance, and they don’t want to be perceived as being overly earnest or effortful in their writing, since they’re scared of public judgment. They perform cynicism because cynicism is often misread as intelligence, being cool, disaffected, defined by mutual distaste. They’re one type of writer at home, and another in the classroom. Artistic calisthenics.

I think in a roundabout way, this speaks to the considerable misalignment we’re seeing as it pertains to Palestine. More specifically, the key difference between character and integrity. Maybe character is our overall moral fibre; we might be kind, empathetic, ethical, or whatever. It’s a self-expressed or perceived state of morality by the people around us. But integrity, the way I see it, is who we are when nobody is looking, who we are when we’ll be castigated for standing by those ethics, and penultimately: what we do about it. Integrity is who we are under duress.
If our professed character crumbles under the fear of ridicule or is concerned with posturing ourselves differently from our peers, our character doesn’t really check out, let alone our integrity. They’re disparate and inconsistent. I’m not sure how to put this. Character and integrity should not be swayed by inconvenience, pressure, persecution, or coercion. When we’re all alone in the world, behind closed doors, when we don’t need approval or recognition, will we, in the very least, stop leaning back. Can we make it in the world without integrity, without moral fibre that is true around the clock?

LD: I am on the fence. I remember a long debate with the Royal College of Art students during the Urgency of Arts session with the British writer and critic Orit Gat. The point of departure was Roland Barthes’s essay in which he, crudely put, killed the author in order to allow the reader’s meaning to be born. But of course, that was the 1960s, with no internet in sight or in hand. It was possible then to ignore information about the author - their values, ideas, and moral stance - and concentrate on the text. In the twenty-first century, the matter of the character of the author vis-à-vis their public position is far more complicated. There is no digital privacy. We are examined not by a small circle of open-minded, forgiving and forgetful acquaintances and fellows but the world at large. The scrutiny of our views is no longer local or contained; it carries the full weight and speed of fibre-optic cable’s. Nor is it temporary. Our digital positions are permanently etched into the cyber chronicles. And while I agree that without moral fibre and round the clock authenticity we are nothing but marketing puppets - lip-syncing, TikToking, Snapchatting our digital caricatures, yes I experienced firsthand that, for some, especially young people, without a right to forget, a moral stance can be both a radical and a terrifying prospect.
In our ARK |PARRHESIA issue (parrhesia meaning speaking truth to power without fear), we tackled questions of war, gender, power, AI, racism, colonialism, and disability. We invited a student who was privately vocal about the Gaza conflict to share their reflections in the magazine, in an attempt to create a healing bridge across the divide. They did not feel comfortable going public, and ultimately we respected their right to keep their views private.
After all, “we live in a highly polarised world, with an abundance of data yet imperfect information, skewed by algorithms. It is tragic that even multicultural universities are no longer safe spaces.” But this is not merely an institutional challenge; it is a systemic one. As physical contact and the spoken word were replaced by digital emojis, and AI enabled autocues, we lost our ability to speak and to hear to have a conversation, a discussion, a debate which broaden perspectives rather than re-entrench narrow positions. We lost our ability to think and began only to feel. We oscillate between private rage and public conformity, then flip.
Half a century ago, Hannah Arendt warned of the “banality of evil,” of obedience, and of the failure to think critically.
In your Manhattan Marxist Manifesto, you call to arms against apathy, greed, and the system. “We don’t believe that capitalism is an insurmountable structure, and it’s crystal fucking clear that this assumption is bringing us to the brink of extinction. We don’t have to resign ourselves to the concept that this is the sole future that our progeny can expect. Our liberation can come from freeing ourselves from our obsession with economic growth. Beyond resource sharing, we have come to think more and more that there is an element that could informally reframe our instinct of accumulation and expansion.” Do you stand by it?

EH: I stand by it. More than stand, I leap at it with the gusto of a javelin. I published this manifesto with Mousse Magazine, inspired by Chris Kraus, who has offered me friendship/mentorship for a decade. Her generosity has propelled my commitment to this type of mentorship exchange with interested parties. I’ve been involved in a prison writing project where members engage in a mentorship program, and I’m invited to give critical feedback while participants develop their text. The backbone of mentorship as a social force is the dissolution of competition, the fascist tendency that prevails everywhere. Therefore, we can think about ways to preserve our existence, our social and creative solidarity, through the traits and fingerprints of mentorship, which we can make up together. And it’s a two-way street of growing artistically; mentors learn from mentees’ strengths. Rhythm is super tricky for me sometimes, so reading a writer with innate rhythm is helpful for my praxis. I guess I mean mentorship as a decentralised, unranked relationship that flaunts the line of friendship, expansion, social imagination, and probably a lot of other things Daffy Duck would splutter over.
The cycle of struggle for Prison Writing Programs is delay in the process. It’s not a swift back and forth; there are many channels and ridiculous protocols to navigate. However, I’ve come to think that the ‘problem’ of delay can be reimagined as the total devastation of pressure to produce work with road-runner speed; another antagonism of fascist neoliberalism, which goes beyond a Looney Tunes political defeat and changes the cognitive and psychological composition of hyper-conforming society. Beep Beep!
Delay is a withdrawal from the condition of exploitation. Delay could be an attribute of artistic mentorship that moulds itself into a precious, slowed conjunction of events, allowing us to see people as individuals, not machines. Protracted time to think about one another’s work and person through the ‘inconvenience’ of delay becomes the peak of humanity.