[-empyre-] -empyre- epilogue, forwarded for McKenzie Wark

[Timothy Murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

I've been travelling. Stopped off in Berlin, London, Plymouth (from whence
the Tolpuddle martyrs  were transported to the penal colonies of what would
be become Australia).

In London I went to the ICA to see a surprisingly depressing show about
London 1978-88, the decade between punk and 'Young British Artists'. In the
bookstore they were selling those Verso Radical Thinker editions for a pound
off.

I bought the Ranciere and Baudrillard's Fragments. (Sad that out of 20 books
in the series, only one is by a woman and none are from the South).
Fragements is very much in the style of Canetti's magnificent notebooks,
which in turn hark back to Chamfort, Leopardi's Zilbadone and the secret
history of the aphorism. (And perhaps Pascal, who of course would be the
complete antithesis of Baudrillard in his use of the form).

This is the fragment (a fragment of a fragment...) I choose to end this
month of JB on:


"One must free oneself from one's ideas in writing, not take charge of them.
One must free language from its purpose, free concepts from their meaning,
free the world from its reality -- which is an even greater illusion."
-- Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, Verso Radical Thinkers edition, London,
2007, p50


___________________
McKenzie Wark
http://www.ludiccrew.org
--
Timothy Murray
Acting Director of The Society for the Humanities
Professsor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video Studies
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853