Trevor Owen Jones, The Non-Library. Punctum Books, 2014.
I have been forced to become . . . a librarian. ~ Georges Bataille
The Non-Library is a non-standard expression for life that is lived without mediation from words, images, or even ideas. While a thing called “the Library” continues to terrorize humanity even as it enters its last stages as a consequence of cataclysmic climate change and late capitalism, the Non-Library is a strictly performative, ahistorical immanence that suspends the Library’s insistent calls to categorization, representation, and reification. Of course, to describe or circumscribe such ineffability has its limits, but it also has its thresholds to cross: with commentary on Derrida’s Archive Fever, a deconstruction of Fichte, a parabiographical meditation on librarianship, and a vamping on the possible “Non-Virgil,” The Non-Library gently proposes a negative capability in liminal spaces in order to best escape and resist the Library’s stranglehold on human knowledge and its requisite social imaginations.
Building on the non-standard thought of Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy, while not beholden to it, The Non-Library attempts to leave the discourse of the university behind and uses its citations of Badiou, Borges, Bataille, and Dante instead to construct a philo-fiction more akin to the immanence of music and its many expressions rather than Philosophy’s demand that all questions be eventually answered, that the Real is ultimately thinkable, or that all of Life might possibly be contained in the Library.
Dear T.,
Already a few years ago now you composed a correspondence to mark the appearance of Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will. I return to that correspondence, on the publication of your first book, The Non-Library, because to do so seems to me somehow apposite. That may be the reason I find myself writing to you, to try to understand my sense of just why.
You note, in the last letter’s closing line, that Schalansky’s maps “are, I’m afraid, indeed the territory.” I wonder if it isn’t exactly on that point—or from it, as a point of departure—that the correspondence might, after a fashion, be continued.
Because the map—not to put too fine a point on it—is not the territory. That’s impossible, isn’t it, that the map should be the territory? Or maybe it’s a clue: When—or more to the point: where—might the map in fact be the territory, and what might that suggest about our notion of the impossible?
Judith Balso’s contribution to Pedagogies of Disaster (punctum, 2013) is titled, “To Rely on the Inexistent Impossible.” The inexistent impossible: not the least merit of that phrase is that it renders imperative a clarification of what, precisely, “the impossible” could be said to designate. The impossible is, by definition, what is not possible. It is not possible that what is impossible could exist. And yet it is not at all clear, with respect to the impossible, where existence stands in relation to possibility. There is an existence of the impossible, in the notion of logical impossibility perhaps foremost. But is there not something to the intuition that the impossible, in the strict sense, is inconceivable? When you write of The Non-Library at “the height of the impossible” I wonder whether the impossible perhaps culminates, at its height, in that part of it that does not exist. Even then: What, in the impossible, would be the relation between existence and non-existence? How might one describe, or inscribe, the cartography of the impossible?
That it may not be possible to do so is what I understand Balso’s phrase to imply. And that’s also the sense of the negative in The Non-Library I rely on in reading The Non-Library. That the map of the inexistent impossible may wholly coincide with its territory is what your book might be said to catalogue.
Forgive me for going on at length, but I felt the need to mark that correspondence, however remote.
To you my thanks and my congratulations.
M. - htmlgiant.com/reviews/on-exactitude-in-non-library-science/
Let us now descend into the blind world . . . . ~Dante
Dear T.,
Already a few years ago now you composed a correspondence to mark the appearance of Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will. I return to that correspondence, on the publication of your first book, The Non-Library, because to do so seems to me somehow apposite. That may be the reason I find myself writing to you, to try to understand my sense of just why.
You note, in the last letter’s closing line, that Schalansky’s maps “are, I’m afraid, indeed the territory.” I wonder if it isn’t exactly on that point—or from it, as a point of departure—that the correspondence might, after a fashion, be continued.
Because the map—not to put too fine a point on it—is not the territory. That’s impossible, isn’t it, that the map should be the territory? Or maybe it’s a clue: When—or more to the point: where—might the map in fact be the territory, and what might that suggest about our notion of the impossible?
Judith Balso’s contribution to Pedagogies of Disaster (punctum, 2013) is titled, “To Rely on the Inexistent Impossible.” The inexistent impossible: not the least merit of that phrase is that it renders imperative a clarification of what, precisely, “the impossible” could be said to designate. The impossible is, by definition, what is not possible. It is not possible that what is impossible could exist. And yet it is not at all clear, with respect to the impossible, where existence stands in relation to possibility. There is an existence of the impossible, in the notion of logical impossibility perhaps foremost. But is there not something to the intuition that the impossible, in the strict sense, is inconceivable? When you write of The Non-Library at “the height of the impossible” I wonder whether the impossible perhaps culminates, at its height, in that part of it that does not exist. Even then: What, in the impossible, would be the relation between existence and non-existence? How might one describe, or inscribe, the cartography of the impossible?
That it may not be possible to do so is what I understand Balso’s phrase to imply. And that’s also the sense of the negative in The Non-Library I rely on in reading The Non-Library. That the map of the inexistent impossible may wholly coincide with its territory is what your book might be said to catalogue.
Forgive me for going on at length, but I felt the need to mark that correspondence, however remote.
To you my thanks and my congratulations.
M. - htmlgiant.com/reviews/on-exactitude-in-non-library-science/
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