Theory Is Like a Surging Sea

104 Pages·2015·8.92 MB·English

by  Eileen Joy

THEORY IS LIKE A SURGING SEA

Theory is like a Surging Sea

Michael Munro

dead letter office
BABEL Working Group

punctum books ¬ brooklyn, ny
THEORY IS LIKE A SURGING SEA
© Michael Munro, 2015.

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This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-
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First published in 2015 by
dead letter office, BABEL Working Group
an imprint of punctum books
Brooklyn, New York
http://punctumbooks.com

The BABEL Working Group is a collective and desir-
ing-assemblage of scholar-gypsies with no leaders
or followers, no top and no bottom, and only a
middle. BABEL roams and stalks the ruins of the
post-historical university as a multiplicity, a pack,
looking for other roaming packs and multiplici-
ties with which to cohabit and build temporary
shelters for intellectual vagabonds. We also take
in strays.

ISBN-13: 978-0692493908
ISBN-10: 0692493905

Images on cover and throughout book from
NASA’s Earth Observatory & Goddard Space
Flight Center.
q

This book is dedicated to Eileen Joy who changed my life.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

y

// 1

§I. Dichtung und Wahrheit

// 5

§II. ‘Without this nothing thinks’:
The Enigma of the Active Intellect

// 15

§III. Nearer to You than the Sea

// 23

§IV. Vertigo, Beatitudo:
Spinoza and Philosophy

// 33

§V: The Idea of Prose
APPENDIXES
// 43
I: Theses on Aesthetics as First Philosophy
// 55
II: On Exactitude in Non-Library Science
// 59
Coda: The Riddle of History Solved
REFERENCES
// 67
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

.

Excerpted sections of this text have appeared previ-
ously in the pages of Berfrois, HTMLGIANT, Queen
Mob’s Tea House, and the BABEL Working Group’s
program for its 2014 biennial conference, On the
Beach: Precariousness, Risk, Forms of Life, Affinity,
and Play at the Edge of the World (punctum, 2014).
Thank you to Russell Bennetts, Katy Bohinc,
Zahid Chaudhary, Rey Chow, Jodi Dean, Craig
Dworkin, Shuwei Fang, Aranye Fradenburg, Daniel
Heller-Roazen, Eileen Joy, Haun Saussy, and Josef
Stern.
Special thanks to everyone at the King County
and Sno-Isle Library Systems, and in particular to
everyone there with any part in processing interli-
brary loans.
Thanks too, with love, to my family and to s.,
comrade.