Driftwork

always like the notion of intertextuality, its the way it invites us, the reader to understand and interpret a text as a meeting of texts. In structuralist and formalist approaches to texts and reading this has been understood as source or quotation bound. But equally it can be understood as reintroducing history into structuralism and formalism,the texts that Duras and Burroughs read and which enabled The Sailor from Gibraltar and The Ticket that Exploded to exist, also introduce history into the experiments. Duras interest in revolution, Burroughs use of science fiction are useful materials for this method. But perhaps the delineating of the connections between the internals of a text and the externals demonstrate the extent to which both writer and reader are in process. Not for nothing do I mention those most carnivalesque and polyphonic of writers…

After much thinking….here is sample list of a years work

Diary of an Escape Antonio Negri - 1985(2010/polity)
Imperialism: The highest Stage of capitalism - V.I.Lenin 1916(2010/Penguin)
Cosmopolitics 1 - Isabelle Stengers (2010/Minnesota)
The Fear of Barbarians - T.Todorov 2008(2010/Polity)
The Signature of All Things - Giorgio Agamben 2008(2009/Zone Books)
The Incredible Need to Believe - Julia Kristeva 2006(2009/Columbia)
Rescuing Justice and Equality - G.A.Cohen (2008/Harvard)
The Cybernetic Brain - Andrew Pickering (2010/Chicago)
Logic of Worlds - Badiou (2009/Continuum)
The sublime terror and human difference - Christine Battersby
delete - Viktor-Mayer-Schonberger (2009/Princton)
Dispatches form the Dark Side - Gareth Pierce (2010/Verso)

The Ranciere’s are obviously missing, the two or three Debord’s, some Mattelart and various books on Islamism and a couple of things by and on Marx…

Others…
A Sentimental Journey - Viktor Shklovsky 1923(1970/Cornell)
Night of the Golden Butterfly - Tariq Ali (Verso 2010)
Your Face Tomorrow - Javier Marias
Sunflower - Gyula Krudy
White Masks - Elias Khoury
Microtexts - Walser
The Notebook - Jose Saramago 2010/Verso
The Technician - Neil Asher 2010
Quantum Thief - Hannu Rajaniemi
Short Stories of Jane Bowles
Primeval and other times - Olga Tokarczuk… (2010/Twisted Spoon)
Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht - Erdmunt Wizisla (2009/Libris)

Not much cinema this year… to be honest there isn’t that much that I really liked. And most of the texts on Deleuze don’t really seem worth mentioning. What else ? Some of the books that others liked I found deeply suspicious and tedious.

That’ll do I guess.

Later, long after they had become a normal part of our local everyday life it had become clear to him that there were areas of the everyday that he simply didn’t like the aliens being engaged with. Not because of any latent prejudice against them or any desire to ensure that humans remained employed, it was many years to late for that kind of thinking. No, he’d simply developed a spontaneous dislike of alien opticians, especially the ones with those slimy green tendrils which creeped over his eyes as they checked for retinal tears at Moorfields eye hospital on Tuesday, and the bizarre side effect of the horrible aftertaste of aspirin that lasted for a hours, it was all simply to much he thought. He had said to the doctor that the tendrils were simply creepy, the doctor had asked if he really preferred how they used to do it. No, that was pretty unpleasant as well but still it wasn’t as creepy even if it had hurt more…

A passing theological moment… what will happen after the final universal judgement – will celestial bodies end ? Will animals and plants vanish into memory ? The difficulty that these questions pose themselves against is that it assumes the world was ordered to fit the dignity and habitation of humans, can it then exist after the humans leave for their transcendence. How can nature exist ? To this Anna Kavan wandering across europe really allows for a single response because you’ll remain “a stranger still” as you approach the “bright green field” having left the asylum after suffering a “scarcity of love”. The car driving across the ice, the heavy gun in his pocket. The girls, the drugs, the small bare rooms in which you can hear the birds singing in the trees. All this is marked by the fact of its being irreparable, its this which is written into Kavan’s world, her writing which engraves into things. Irreparable means those things that are consigned without remedy to their being thus, that they are precisely and only their thus (nothing is more foreign to Kavan than the pretense of being other than what one is); but irreparable also means that for them there is literally no shelter possible, that in their being thus they are absolutely exposed, absolutely abandoned. (rewritten Agamben from Irreparable p39 of the coming community)

On Jupiter the skies are always blue,
from palest blue to deepest darkest hue