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Selling the aura

Back in old good Europe last summer, I have been about to realize, while walking in some subway's everlasting corridors that an era had just vanished. At first, I had looked at without truly being conscious and it is only a few days ago that the idea grew to be clear, that I have been able to go beyond what my eyes, nearly mesmerized, had captured.

The revelation became possible when a shock occurred: I thought I was browsing the online ad from whatever new (yet old) detective movie set in New York - but the trailer was actually advertising a book. And it is at this point that the huge wall-poster in the middle of which a writer (stupidly posing) advertised himself finally made sense. No wonder that the said novelist had managed turning all of his books into worldly translated successes, no wonder either that most of them had been or will be filmed, that was now a necessity, a must. I recall reading somewhere that this man's success was a marvel to critics, that they did not find anything special neither new nor breathtaking in his books. Yet, they were bought, yet he was loved by the crowd.

Definitely, Baudelaire's modernity had sunk for ever. Even writing was now part of the system; even books were goods to be sold, enjoyable light items to help people forgetting for good that they were not free. Today, writing is a business, to be precisely marketed, writers have to belong to the stardom which is paved with icons and photographs and movie pictures while words are used, disembodied, turned into the flesh of more and more and more images to be.

COLLAPSE JOURNAL

The first volume of 'Collapse' I received last week from Oxford happens to be great. The book itself is just beautiful and successfully tends to be an art object. AND it contains really interesting thoughts.Robin MacKay, the editor, has TRULY performed a wonderful job.

In his interview, Alain Badiou describes the links between physics and mathematics. The interviewers (Ray Brassier and Robin MacKay) are quite witty. As usual, Badiou emphazises his well-known thesis : 'mathematics = ontology'. But the true dialogue helps considering it in a new light.

Reza Negarestani speculates on guerillas as Deleuze and Guattari did, following a rather technical approach : a dramatic mathematical war against State !

In a continental and challenging way, Thomas Duzer powerfully argues against lacanian psychoanalysis and opens the field of the mathematics of intensity, as rational ethics and freedom's pragmatics. Bright, deep, original.

If I'm still not convinced about Nick Bostrom's threads, Grigory Chaitin's thoughts on Leibniz and epistemology fascinated me. This man is clever as the devil.

Nick Land and Matthew Watkins contribute as well to this masterpiece of Philosophical Research and Development.

And to make it better, 'Collapse' is not lacking drawings : Nick Tilford's crowds are wonderfuly dizzy.

Volume 2 will present an analysis of Quentin Meillassoux's last book, 'Après la finitude'. I also have understood that Graham Harman will attack phenomenology. In a nutshell, some great things are still to come.

Delete Dennett !

Is Searle the only way of calming him down ?

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