Quentin Meillassoux: The Number and The Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés (2011/2012) [French, English]
Filed under book | Tags: · contingency, literary criticism, literature, mathematics, philosophy, poetics, poetry
“A meticulous literary study, a detective story à la Edgar Allan Poe, a treasure-hunt worthy of an adventure novel – such is the register in which can be deciphered the hidden secrets of a poem like no other. Quentin Meillassoux, author of After Finitude, continues his philosophical interrogation of the concepts of chance, contingency, infinity and eternity through a concentrated study of Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de dés, patiently deciphering its enigmatic meaning on the basis of a dazzlingly simple and lucid insight with regard to that ‘unique Number that cannot be another’.
Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard constitutes perhaps the most radical break in the history of modern poetry: the fractured lines spanning the double page, the typographical play borrowed from the poster form, the multiplication of interpolations disrupting reading. But the intrigue of this poem is still stranger, always resistant to full elucidation. We encounter a shipwreck, and a Master, himself almost submerged, who clasps in his hand the dice that, confronted by the furious waves, he hesitates to throw. The hero expects this throw, if it takes place, to be extraordinarily important: a Number said to be ‘unique’ and which ‘can be no other’.
The decisive point of the investigation proposed by Meillassoux comes with a discovery, unsettling and yet as simple as a child’s game. All the dimensions of the Number, understood progressively, articulate between them but one sole condition: that this Number should ultimately be delivered to us by a secret code, hidden in the Coup de dés like a key that finally unlocks every one of its poetic devices. Thus is also unveiled the meaning of that siren, emerging for a lightning-flash amongst the debris of the shipwreck: as the living heart of a drama that is still unfolding.
The English volume contains the entire text of the Coup de dés and three other poems, with new translations.”
Le nombre et la sirène. Un déchiffrage du Coup de dés de Mallarmé
Publisher Fayard, 2011
ISBN 2213666989, 9782213666983
256 pages
English edition
Translated by Robin Mackay
Publisher Urbanomic, Falmouth, and Sequence Press, New York, 2012
ISBN 9780983216926
306 pages
Review (Michael Reid, Mute)
Review (Adam Kotsko, The New Inquiry)
Review (Thomas H. Ford, Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy)
Review (Edward K. Kaplan, Nineteenth-Century French Studies)
Review (Brian Kim Stefans, Los Angeles Review of Books)
Graham Harman’s blog post about the book, part 2
PDF, PDF (French, updated on 2015-1-24)
PDF, PDF (English, updated on 2015-1-24)
Michael J. Thompson (ed.): Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, capitalism, critical theory, cultural criticism, ethics, law, literary criticism, marxism, philosophy, political theory, politics
Georg Lukács stands as a towering figure in the areas of critical theory, literary criticism, aesthetics, ethical theory and the philosophy of Marxism and German Idealism. Yet, despite his influence throughout the twentieth century, his contributions to the humanities and theoretical social sciences are marked by neglect. What has been lost is a crucial thinker in the tradition of critical theory, but also, by extension, a crucial set of ideas that can be used to shed new light on the major problems of contemporary society.
This book reconsiders Lukács’ intellectual contributions in the light of recent intellectual developments in political theory, aesthetics, ethical theory, and social and cultural theory. An international team of contributors contend that Lukács’ ideas and theoretical contributions have much to offer the theoretical paucity of the present. Ultimately the book reintegrates Lukács as a central thinker, not only in the tradition of critical theory, but also as a major theorist and critic of modernity, of capitalism, and of new trends in political theory, cultural criticism and legal theory.
Publisher Continuum, 2011
ISBN 1441108769, 9781441108760
253 pages
PDF, PDF (updated on 2014-12-22)
Comment (0)Eduardo Kac (ed.): Media Poetry: An International Anthology (2007)
Filed under poetry | Tags: · code poetry, digital poetry, language, literary criticism, literary theory, poetry
“The first international anthology to document a radically new poetry which takes language beyond the confines of the printed page into a non-linear world of digital interactivity and hyperlinkage.
The work of the poets discussed in this book challenges even the innovations of experimental poetics. It embraces new technologies to explore a new syntax made of linear and non-linear animation, hyperlinkage, interactivity, real-time text generation, spatiotemporal discontinuities, self-similarity, synthetic spaces, immateriality, diagrammatic relations, visual tempo, multiple simultaneities, and many other innovative procedures.
This new media poetry, although defined within the field of experimental poetics, departs radically from the avant-garde movements of the first half of the century, and the print-based approaches of the second half. Through an embrace of the vast possibilities made available through new media, the artists in this anthology have become the poetic pioneers for the next millennium.”
Publisher Intellect Books, 2007
Lives of Great Explorers series
ISBN 1841500305, 9781841500300
224 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-30)
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