It looks as if I am going to be publishing the first volume of A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! myself. I hope that it will be available within two or three months via Amazon. It has taken me six years to get this far and I don’t want to have to wait another six years to finish the work before any of it is made public.
My current plan is to publish it in three versions: a hardback with better paper; a paperback with regular paper; and a Kindle ebook. I will also make available a PDF version free to download from my website though, naturally, I prefer people to buy it. (Not for the profit, of which I will make a token amount, but for the book sales.)
Publishing the book myself, I expect my main challenge to be getting it seen, read, and taken up in the discourses of philosophy and the other humanities on which it touches. To that end, I have asked several widely-respected individuals to provide blurbs for it. The first one, by Professor Susanna Siegel (Harvard) is in and I am happy to say it is positive!
Just as a newspaper holds its form constant while it varies the news content, the author of A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! finds a way to use a single meme in which Batman slaps Robin as a structure for conveying a sequence of reflections. Sometimes alternately, and other times all at once, these reflections are philosophical and picaresque, sarcastic and explanatory, literary and analytical, visual and discursive, musical and rabbinical, fragmentary and unified, continuous and interrupted. Kierkegaard meets Calvino meets auto-theory. The collision sweeps up some analytic philosophers, an avuncular joke-teller, and other characters who come and go. The pictures provide a rhythm, the captions start a melody, and the commentary improvises with chords, riffs, and surprises.
Gaining visibility, however, is not the only challenge the book faces in being taken up. The very idea of “being taken up” is problematic. I very much think of the book as a work of philosophy (though not exclusively such by any means) but it ‘performs’ (or perhaps ’embodies’) its philosophy in very novel ways. (Indeed, love the book or hate it, I believe it deserves some consideration merely for its exploration of how far one can mutate the forms of philosophy before one ceases to do philosophy at all.) But how might it be taken up? Would I be invited to give talks about it? I have given a few such talks and every time, I am baffled about what to say. I have found some expedients which I am pleased with but I wonder if they please anyone else – especially philosophers. And what would a philosophical review of the book be like? Would it get into the weeds with the account of my own hylomorphic metaphysics that surfaces in one of the commentaries? Fair enough, but that hardly responds to the book. It would be a bit like critiquing a work from Robert Morrris’s Blind Time Drawings Series IV through a discussion of the Donald Davidson text quoted in it, without so much as acknowledging that the text was delivered inside a drawing!
As I write this, I am finding the analogy with the Robert Morris drawings illuminating. I thought to look for interdisciplinary journals that might be interested in reviewing my book, but the issue, I am coming to see (in real time!) is not interdisciplinarity. It has more to do with something like quotation. Morris is not engaged in an interdisciplinary art and philosophy project but something quite different. What happens to things when they are subsumed (for example by quotation) by other things? Perhaps Hegel will have the answer.
And indeed, in volume II will appear a meme the commentary to which will be the perfect place to try and unravel this. (The text is a quotation form the novel Sophie’s World.)
Simon J. Evnine 