How does one write an experimental ABC, an impossible theory that would deal with a series of phenomena, concepts, places, sensations, persons, and moods? A para-philosophy? Returning to a once-abandoned project of fragmented thoughts where the author's voice moves from the serious to the pathetic, to the absurd, to the cynical, Simon Critchley's ABC of Impossibility finds new life in the form of this small encyclopedic and aphoristic text where the reader bears witness to the slow emergence of an attempt at a poetic ontology. ABC of Impossibility is a unique undertaking that...

What relation is there between the existence of a work of art and that of a living being? Between the existence of an atom and that of a value like solidarity? These questions become our own each time a reality--whether it is a piece of music, someone we love, or a fictional character--is established and begins to take on an importance in our lives. Like William James or Gilles Deleuze, Souriau methodically defends the thesis of an existential pluralism. There are indeed different manners of existing and even different degrees or intensities of existence: from pure phenomena to...

In our current landscape of communicative and connective excess, a very novel contemporary exhaustion exacerbated by our relation to the postdigital terrain is ever present. The Brazilian philosopher and schizoanalyst Peter Pal Pelbart pushes the vital question of our nihililstic age to the limits: how can one learn to be left alone, live alone, and perhaps, by way of a Deleuzian "absolute solitude," conjure a vitality for living again and, indeed, finding something truly "worthy of saying"? Through various poetic meanderings and meditations and building on the works of Blanchot, Musil,...

As historical processes increasingly become steeped in technology, it becomes more necessary for a discipline to emerge that is capable of comprehending these materialities to better understand the fields they inundate such as science, art, and warfare. This effort is further compromised by the inherent complexity and complete arbitrariness of technical languages especially when they are algorithmic along with the rapid pace in which they become obsolete, unintelligible, or simply forgotten. The Turing Machine plays a central role in the Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts, wherein...

Throughout a large part of the 1980s, Felix Guattari, known for his collaborations with Gilles Deleuze and his experimental and groundbreaking practices in psychotherapy, decides to shift his experimental work into a different medium of artistic and creative thought practice: the world of science fiction. Part self-analysis, part cinematic expression of his theoretical work, Guattari's screenplay merges his theoretical concepts with his passion for comic books, free radio movements, and film. So begins Guattari's journey to write a screenplay wherein a group of squatters makes contact with...

In the heart of Australia, on the cracked red earth, among wild vegetation, weathered bush, and dried-up creeks, hundreds of invisible pathways exist that become entangled on the earth's surface, underground, and in the sky, clouds, and wind. The Aboriginal people call them Jukurrpa: "the Dreamings." This web is the Warlpiri land. Practicing the Dreaming, by ritual art, is for the Warlpiri a way to reactivate their ancestral traditions to connect with the cosmos and respond to current social and political issues.

In 1979, anthropologist Barbara Glowczewski embarked on a journey to...

In 1963 Vilem Flusser presented a series of lectures at the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy (IBF) in Sao Paulo concerning the philosophy of language. The resulting ten essays would eventually be published in 1965 in the annual magazine of the Brazilian Institute of Technology and Aeronautics (ITA), and published here for the first time in book form.

Flusser prepared each lecture as a response to the dialogs that followed the preceding lecture, thereby expanding and explicating his philosophy of language in an intense dialogical process. Despite the fact that the other side of the...

Grafting: do we ever do anything other than that? And are we ever free from vegetal influences when we engage in its operations? For the philosopher Michael Marder, our reflections on vegetal life have a fundamental importance in how we can reflect on our own conceptions of ethics, politics, and philosophy in general. Taking as his starting point the simple vegetal conception of grafting, Marder guides the reader through his concise and numerous reflections on what could be described as a vegetal philosophy. Grafts are transplants either of a shoot inserted into the trunk of another...

Complex, haunting, imaginative and profoundly literary, Didactic Poetries is Beck's response to Schiller's statement: "We are still waiting for a didactic poem where thought itself would be and would remain poetic," and Hegel's claim that, "strictly speaking, didactic poetry isn't poetry."

For the acclaimed French poet, Philippe Beck, Schiller's task of attempting a didactic poetry remains as vital today as it was for Schiller's time. Is there a way to construct a poetry built and chiseled, hammered and stitched, from out of past narratives and poetries, condensed in such a...

"Music is the brute that shows.
It is the avowal of materials,
And stutters between its clanging of things."

How should one think this musical groove of the poem whose back and forth motion shuffles the material of ordinary language and revives the frozen speech of old chants? This question by renowned French thinker Jacques Ranciere is the entry point for his earnest and careful reading of one of France's most singular and important contemporary poets. For Ranciere, Philippe Beck sets himself the task of a poetry after poetry whereby Beck re-writes and transforms the...