Writing Death opens a meditation on the possibility of mourning; of whether there is a subject, or even object, that one mourns--of whether one is mourning, can only mourn, the very impossibility of mourning itself. The manuscript is framed by two attempts at mourning--Avital Ronell's "The Tactlessness of an Unending Fadeout" and Jeremy Fernando's "adieu." In-between--for this is where both pieces posit the possibility of attending to the passing, the memory, the fading of the person--is an attempt to think this impossibility. The text is continually haunted by the question of whether one is mourning the person as such, or a particular version of the person, a reading of the person. And in reading another, in attempting to respond to the other, one can never have the metaphysical comfort that one is reading accurately, correctly; in fact, one may always already be re-writing the person. Thus, all one can do is attempt to mourn the name of that person, whilst never being certain of whether her name even refers to her any longer. All one can do is write death."Ask not for whom the bell tolls... Eulogy: one of the many English words combining legein (to gather together) and logos (the word, the law). With eulogy though the speech-act itself is all important (eu-) and its impossibility evident in a written work. The site of the gathering together of words, of scattered sounds, disappears in the act of writing, itself scatter--all too forcefully underlining the cause, the event of dispersion that creates the need for gathering together. Jeremy Fernando's eulogy, this particular eulogy, is called Writing Death, and it reminds us that eulogy in its impossibility may well be the primary genre of writing. Writing and death have always gone together, hence Plato's suspicions of chirographic technologies. The author is absent, as is the subject. The text brooks no questions and gives no answers. Fernando's gathering of scatterings in the form of mini-meditations unfolds the weaving of textus that makes writing possible and makes death comprehensible in all of its paradoxical mystery and awe-ful presence. His is a book of catalysts: use them with care." --Ryan Bishop, Professor of Global Arts and Politics, the Winchester School of Art , the University of Southampton

Writing Death

Politics & Social Sciences

Jeremy Fernando

Philosophy

Uitgeverij

" ... Neither Jeremy Fernando nor Julian Gough are literally concerned with the nominal subjects of their respective contributions to this book; that much seems clear, if anything can be clear in the face of their extravagant attempts to take perhaps the dominant icon of contemporary capitalism - the iPhone (and its variants) - and allow it to mutate into a prickly, resonant metaphor for everything from September 11, ISIS, Anders Behring Breivik, blind gratification, the power of the image, and being itself. Gough's story - 'The iHole' - is not simply irreverent to capitalism's toys, it also seeks to pulverize flat notions of material reality by provoking and disturbing them and, in so doing, fulfills one of the central possibilities of the creative impulse. Fernando's larger target - in 'iS6' - is meaning, or our attempts to force the meaningless into the garb of meaning - although this doesn't simply extend to a different kind of avoidance. He just wants to keep the monster in the game, lest we forget we are monsters." - Neil Murphy, from 'Introduction: When Thought Wanders Off'

An Apple a Day ...

Julian Gough

Neil Murphy

Delere Press

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Books by Jeremy Fernando