More about Richard's sublime music at richardskelton.wordpress.com and corbelstonepress.com.

RGAP (Research Group for Artists Publications) was "formed by Martin Rogers in 1994, and was previously sited at the School of Art and Design, University of Derby" –

In 2002, RGAP moved out from the University to become an independent, not-for-profit artist-led organisation, and has continued to publish artists' books and editions, and work with other centres in the UK and abroad, setting up collaborative projects, publications, exhibitions and events. This includes the organisation of the Small Publishers Fair – an international event held annually in London.

As well as working with visual artists, RGAP has published editions by composers, writers, sound, and performance artists, and works have been featured in numerous exhibitions related to artists’ books and publications.

"Slowly, patiently, with unstoppable momentum, he explains in his ramshackle English that the full stop is all very well for other writers, but it is not for him..." László Krasznahorkai interviewed by Richard Lea.

Slavoj Žižek in Conversation with Jonathan Derbyshire at Central Saint Martins (I've seen Žižek a few times 'live' now – and this is him at his best, at his most philosophical, I think.)

Simon Critchley discusses his new book, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, with Dave True of Political Theology.

"Along the way Critchley touches on an array of topics: his respect for religion, the experimental nature of free thought, what love has to do with a politics of resistance, the genius of the Occupy Movement, nonviolence and its limits, the wisdom of Antonio Gramsci, and the illusions of Marxism."

Earlier responses to the book can be accessed via politicaltheology.com/blog.

Slavoj Žižek has yet another book coming out this year: excerpt available over on odbor.org (via progressivegeographies). The Year of Dreaming Dangerously is published by Verso and out in October.

Good stuff: Claire Colebrook on Happiness, Death and the Meaning of Life (pdf).

In this essay I will argue that Nussbaum’s affirmation of literature and narrative as crucial to the function of a sympathetic, flourishing and ethical life is typical of western philosophy’s normative definition of happiness, where happiness has always been aligned with a specific image of autopoietic life and meaning. That is, human life makes sense of itself, gives form to itself and engages in a style of praxis whereby its ends are internal to itself. From this image of life one thereby passes to an ethics. There ought to be no techne that is disengaged from life, and life’s proper techne – the art of life – is nothing other than making meaning of, or narrating of, one’s life. Literature would, therefore, not be one praxis among others that is added on to life. Rather, life in all its forms is self-creation, while human life renders this self-creation explicit to itself through narrative; human life is that one praxis that discloses the logic of praxis in general.

Derrida, by contrast, offers a genuine alternative to the image of selfforming life, and he does this through his textualism. There are, however, two crucial features of Derrida’s concept of text. First, considered rigorously, textuality is not a feature of language or writing; it characterises life as such. Second, textuality installs death in life. Life is not a trajectory of striving towards presentation, fulfilment and realisation. On the contrary, in order for life to be – for one to think that life is – there must already have been a non-living, counter-actualising potentiality. If this is so, then we will need to read literature not as a form of life-realisation but as a process of mourning...

"A refusal to think philosophy as simply content..."

I want to argue that works of art are machinic rather than hermeneutic. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari say that the unconscious is a factory, not a theater. By this they mean that the unconscious does not represent or mean, but that it produces. I want to say that works of arts are factories or machines, not theaters. They don’t have meanings, but are powers of producing differences in the world. They are real actors. They do not represent, even in the tradition of realism, but make. I read Proust, for example, and his exquisite discussion of various emotional states has the power to actually create new forms of affect in me that I never before had. I begin to love as Proust’s characters do. The work of art is thus a factory that both transforms the artist that creates it (artists tell me that they become something else as a result of their work) and that transforms the audiences that encounter the work. Works of art are difference engines that circulate throughout the world and that transform the people and things that encounter them. Picasso’s Guernica does not represent the bombing of Guernica, but both transforms the event of that bombing, giving it a new sense, and creates an affect for the slaughter of the innocents everywhere....

Machinic Art: The Matter of Contradiction

On 29 and 30 August 2012, the UK Kant Society (UKKS) and the Centre for Idealism and the New Liberalism at the University of Hull (CINL) will host a joint conference entitled ‘Kant and the British idealists’. The conference seeks to explore the relationship between any aspect of the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Kantians and the British idealists.

OMG, there is a UK Kant Society (this might be the worst website in the world, mind you)! Aims here; oh, and they publish the Kantian Review, btw. The conference will be held at Cave Castle Hotel, South Cave, near Hull, which looks very posh!

Looking forward to this: Liam Sprod's Nuclear Futurism: The work of art in the age of remainderless destruction (out end of September):

Starting from the end of history, the end of art and the failure of the future set out by such ends, Nuclear Futurism reinvigorates art, literature and philosophy through the unlikely alliance of hauntology and the Italian futurists. Tracing the paradoxes of the possibilities of total nuclear destruction reveals the terminal condition of culture in the time of ends, where the logic of the apocalyptic without apocalypse holds sway. These paradoxes also open the path for a new vision of the future in the form of experimental art and literature. By re-examining the thought of both Derrida and Heidegger with regards to the history of art, the art of history and their responses to the most dangerous technology of nuclear weapons the future is exposed as a progressive event, rather than the atrophied and apocalyptic to-come of the present world. It is happening now, opening up through the force of art and literature and charting a new path for a futural philosophy.

Ah, Poe!

In youth's spring, it was my lot
To haunt of the wide earth a spot
To which I could not love the less
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound
And the tall trees that towered around...

Adam Kotsko reviewing Meillassoux's new book on Mallarmé:

One never knows what to expect from the up-and-coming French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux. I certainly didn’t expect his second book-length work to be a “decipherment” of Stéphane Mallarmé’s enigmatic final poem, Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance). Still less did I expect it to be so absorbing and thrilling. The Number and the Siren is an erudite work of literary criticism, tackling one of the most difficult of modern poets...

HTMLGiant has its take:

Meillassoux’s study, breaking from the general studies and understandings of Mallarmé’s brilliant poem, posits that the poem itself can literally be deciphered, that meaning exists not exclusively in the blatant language or form of the poem itself, but rather that meaning is embedded, coded, within the work.

Also, an excellent take over on speculativeheresy:

First, though, I would like to reflect on the strangeness of the book. Adam and others have already remarked that the trajectory of Meillassoux’s work has been anything but predictable. Perhaps this should be less surprising than it is, since the thesis concerning absolute contingency put forward in After Finitude was taken very seriously by Meillassoux. There is no sufficient reason for anything and so why should we have expected his nihilism to play out as every other nihilism has? Indeed, this term, though seemingly embraced in The Number and the Siren, may not really be apt for a description of Meillassoux’s work. While there is a certain void lying at the center of his philosophy and while the privileging of primary qualities in After Finitude seemed to suggest a kind of scienticism, already we could see there a certain humanism at work. Limiting the law-like powers of Nature (with the capital-N intended) in order to make room for human salvation.

We’ve shared our enthusiasm with you before about Peter Manson’s new and long-awaited translations of Mallarmé’s The Poems in Verse (Miami University Press 2012), which have just been reviewed at The Guardian.

David Wheatley writes: “This is an exceptional translation, ranking alongside John Ashbery’s Rimbaud, Mark Ford’s Roussel, and Michael Hofmann’s Durs Grünbein.” High praise!

From the Poetry Foundation.

Easter Island is now little more than a tourist destination, its sacred sites reconstructed without any religious intent, making the island's given name ironic as Christianity supplants another religion based on the continuing life of the dead. Nicolas Cauwe’s narrative, originally published in French and, from a certain stiffness of expression, apparently self translated, has none of the lyric effusions of Pierre Loti’s account of 1872 or the indulgence of other personal narratives such as Katherine Routledge’s The Mystery of Easter Island (1919) and Heyerdahl’s Aku-Aku (1958), which is perhaps inevitable given the exhaustion of Easter Island's enchantment. The stunning colour plates at least offer a glimmer of an aura now faded; a glimmer, however, that still fascinates...

Fifteen years before the ‘i-doser’ reports hit the mainstream press a group of renegade academics at the University of Warwick were challenging their own experiences of cyberspace as an addictive substance. These explorations were both theoretical and more importantly practical.

The experimentation was led by philosophy lecturer Nick Land, an academic who took great pleasure in introducing himself as ‘working in the field of The Collapse of Western Civilisation Studies.’

Following the release of his collected works, for the first time in over 15 years the audio performance of Nick Land’s seminal paper Meltdown is available to listen to on the web [over at virtualfutures].

There used to be a UK (Glasgow and Leeds-based, if memory serves) Situationist-inspired magazine called Here and Now (published between 1985 and 1994). I'm looking for back issues... please email me if you can help. Thanks!

Thought and emotion also of course come to know themselves, achieve material clarity through things in the world – a ruined abbey, a peaceful river, the jumpy energy of a crowd in a foreign city. These things will (so to speak) explicate our thoughts and feelings for us, they will act as a ‘voiceless language’, in which the unconscious domain mentioned previously will come to rest, disclose itself..

Thought and feeling articulate themselves through that constellation of examples and figures that the world provides for us.It is not that we project emotion or thought outward onto these things. For that implies that the thoughts are already fashioned and require only to be transferred onto an object. Rather do we receive from them, the realm of objects, what it is we are thinking and feeling. ‘What we are thinking and feeling’ is therefore something that emerges retroactively, post 'expression'.

A "new blog mostly on philosophy and literature and the relation between the two" – welcome piccolorium.net.

The Kierkegaard Library "is a special collection that serves anyone interested in the writings and ideas of Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher, and related thinkers. The collection includes approximately 11,000 book volumes, some of which are a collection of editions matching those owned by Kierkegaard himself... The library also publishes the Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, an independent publication started by Robert Perkins in 1978. Issues are produced twice a year and include articles on subjects of interest to Kierkegaard studies and book reviews of recent Kierkegaard-related publications" and they are all online!