Dear Living Person

Art's chasing after its own limits is like our dreams of transcendence which must fail and, in so doing, justify our despair. Here, John Russell gives a corpse-eye-view of the bogusness of limits, not least the one between the living and the dead

Dear Living Person,

By the time you read this I will already be hanging from the ceiling of my live-work studio flat. My neck stretched to allow my feet to touch the floor, with the rope pulling at my neck so as to twist my head in an attitude as if casually looking out of the window, gazing at the territorialised conformity of the street below. People walk back and forward like banal cunts on their way to work or to pick up a coffee or some other shit. It looks like I'm standing here looking out the window.

Ten minutes ago, the people who recently moved into the warehouse flat downstairs popped up with a bottle of wine to introduce themselves. They thought I was just standing here - maybe thought I was a bit deaf or something - and walked right across to me, click-clacking on the sanded, wooden floor boards. And tapped me on the shoulder - they only realised I was dead when they saw my blackened face and the fly walking across my eye. I guess they may be moving out now.

I can feel the bluebottle fly (Calliphora) laying its eggs in my eye. They find you quickly when you die - seize the opportunity. Pale whitish larvae will soon hatch. It's getting dark outside.

Some heavy shit happened to me when I was young, but it could be argued that it was the architecture of this building which really tipped things over the edge. These ex-warehouse units are fucked. Nothing is parallel or forty-five degrees. It's all over the place. Plays with your mind over a period of time, because you are living in it and you can't get away. The floors in particular are fucked. You walk up a slope from the living room area to the small kitchen. Fucks with your head.

The guy from downstairs has just popped back up again - turns out he's a necrophiliac. He's just spent 15 minutes fucking me up the arse. God knows what that felt like - fucking my bony old ice-arse - can't have been the best. He was crying in the end. That's all a bit too weird for me. And now I've got his spunk dripping down my leg. He didn't even give me a reach around ha ha ha!

Anyway my last artworks are all lined up over there, against the wall, if you fancy a look. It's my Ivory Series. Oil paintings of ivory carvings (and a few marble ones). Of animals and humans. It's the whiteness that interests me. The representation of the shininess on white sculpture. Have you read Moby Dick? Yeah... the way white is used there. And... err... also referring to the whiteness of the white cube? Yes... they are a bit like Michael Krebber...

I'm a big fan of Michael Krebber, and his group of friends in Cologne - I love the language they use, mockery, irony, light digressions and particularisms - its such an amazingly truthful, intelligent, loving, inclusive social scene. And man I'm so grateful to Michael... for the way by becoming a tortured, contorted human bridge between the dinosaurs of '80s German painting and new, radically contextualised, gendered, 'gayed' and thereby politicised art networks... he, in a sense, gave me permission to paint.[1]

It's weird because I just got a phone call from the studio of Cosima von Bonin asking if I want to be in a group show they're organising called Various Angels at Gallerie Buchholz which is soooo cool. My ivory paintings will just fit in so well. I'm very happy about that.

But the problem is, as always, the issue of the frame or limit... as with Michael Krebber, it's all about frames and limits. If his work is a marker for a kind of work that doesn't exist (yet) because the kind of situation required to allow that kind of work to exist doesn't exist (yet) - or something like that. Then that's about limits. It always is, whether you are referring to medium specificity, institutional critique, the readymade or the relationship between art and non-art, text/image, critical/uncritical, politics/aesthetics, inside/outside and so on. It's always about limits. About playing out the relationship between the finite and the infinite.[2] And, by extension, playing out the relationship between life and death. The limits between life and death. And this is always the same. An irresolvable, irretrievable non-relationship descending into mournful realms. That's my feeling ...

To explain this. What is important here is the legacy and/or prophesy and/or curse of conceptual art which spirals out at us from the 1960/70s as a ‘discourse of limits'. This legacy bleeds out of the second coming of Duchamp (in the 1960s) and resurgence of critical interest in his ideas of the readymade. As a reaction to the various (Modernist) configurations of medium specificity. Following Pop Art and Minimalism, it contests what might be articulated as art. Experimenting with (for instance) popular culture as art, non-specific objects as art, politics as art, idea as art, performance as art. And then, following the realisation that anything might be art but not everything is art, the focus switches to how or when things are articulated as art. That is, constituted (as art) not through the simple placement of an object in a museum but through social relations of recognition which constitute the institution, which constitute the art object. And the realisation that in constituting objects as art, art institutions also function in various (non artistic) social and political ways. And so, institutional critique develops as a critique of the art institution as a legitimising structure (of the specialness of art, of class structure etc.) and involves attempts to: ‘... analyse and expose the social institutions from which the laws of positivist instrumentality and the logic of administration emanate in the first place.' The very institutions ‘in which artistic production is transformed into a tool of ideological control and cultural legitimation.'[3] This involves a continuous (critical) staging of the institutional production of the object as art, as a discourse of limits (the staging and re-staging of limits). After which, it was claimed, would follow a discourse of rupture.[4] ‘The artist, if he wants to work for another society, must begin by fundamentally contesting art and assuming his total rupture with it. If not, the next revolution will take over his responsibility.'[5] But it is difficult to understand what format this rupture might take, what it would do, or how it would happen. If an artist maintains a ‘critically' located position, the critical or political content and/or performance of the work is inevitably staged within the structures of which it is critical and which it relies upon for its visibility. This is a kind of critical not-belonging, as Hans Haacke suggests, the ‘contradictory position of playing the game while criticising it.'[6]

In this respect, institutional critique has moved from a critique of the art museum and gallery (1960s and early 1970s), to a critique of the artist's role - the subject performing the critique - as institutionalised (from the 1980s onwards), to a critique of the audience as a constituent part of the institution (2000 onwards, although this also seems like a return to previous models, e.g. Manet).[7] As well as this, more recently there has also been a move away from anti-institutional modes, to less confrontational models of negotiation and transformation. A move away from the attempt to oppose or even destroy the institution to an attempt to modify and solidify it.[8] For instance, Nicolas Bourriaud's ideas of 'relational aesthetics' where artistic praxis exists as a context (or laboratory) for experiments with new ‘models of sociability' and social interaction, as a form of micro-utopian politics, takes place in the institution-as-oasis, pitched against a world where, ‘human relations are no longer "directly experienced", but have become blurred in their "spectacular" representation.'[9] Amongst others, Claire Bishop has problems with the political potential of Bourriaud's ideas, proposing instead the concept of antagonism drawn from ideas of radical democracy and arguing that a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased, and therefore in which new political frontiers are constantly being drawn and brought into debate.[10] And then, more recently still, the artist/theorist Andrea Fraser has suggested that a movement between an inside and an outside of the institution is no longer possible. As she writes, ‘with each attempt to evade the limits of institutional determination, to embrace an outside, we expand our frame and bring more of the world into it. But we never escape it.'[11] ‘We are the institution,' Fraser writes and concludes that it is not a question of critiquing the institution, but rather a question of creating critical institutions, what she terms ‘institutions of critique,' established through self-questioning and self-reflection.'[12] Fraser also writes that the institutions of art should not be seen as an autonomous field, separate from the rest of the world, in the same way that ‘we' are not separate from the institution. Thus only negotiating and refining new articulations of limits, new variations and new nuances of the ‘we' of the institution, us/them, escape/no-escape and so on.

The problem here is that all these performances (testing/experimentation/politics/withdrawal/play) are tied to the limits of the institution (in their critical function), reproducing or representing the means of their own (critical) confinement or articulation. The emphasis is always on limits, set against a background of art historical moves which emphasise transgression, a going beyond or expansion. For instance, the move from medium specificity to art in the expanded field, to art in general and so on. Not so much a crisis of limits as a trauma of limits. An anxiety regarding boundaries and the dialectic between located and unlocatedness. That is: what is contained, what is excluded, what is allowed, what is censored, what can be transcended, what is visible and what is invisible and how this is registered, monitored, authorised. Fuck... my fingers... keep moving...jerking. That is, the relationship between the small world of art and everything else.[13] The non-dialectic of existence and non-existence. And finally, as I proposed earlier, this ongoing negotiation of limits ends up mirroring the binaries of finite/infinite and life/death.

This can be most clearly seen in the example of work that tries to escape ‘cultural confinement'; work which attempts to accelerate away from limits and limitation.[14] Here we can see the discourse of art/non-art played out most clearly. Think of the work of Robert Smithson and Dan Graham in the 1960s, or more recently Seth Price's appropriated films and the spirit of Hito Steyerl's recent, much lauded ‘In Defense of the Poor Image'.[15] These ideas and artworks are played out within the expanded and indeterminate conception of the institution suggested by Graham's or Smithson's magazine works or Seth Price's ideas of dispersion, in which magazines and websites are seen as places where art may or may not be recognised as art, drawing attention to the fact that the institution is in fact the sum of the set of relations of the people it contains and that these constituencies are changeable and dynamic.[16] The artwork has become infinitely spatially expanded and the site of the work of art is the totality of cultural sites within which it is mediated and consumed - performing the potential of art and non-art simultaneously, dependent upon the point of consumption. This is the ‘dialectic' of art/non art stretched across infinitely expanding surfaces of consumption. Except the problem here, of course, is that something can only be consumed as ‘art-and-non-art-simultaneously' from the perspective of art (the art institution). And the frisson of excitement experienced is the flirtation with annihilation. That is, if art is pitched at a wider (mainly non-art) audience, then it risks loosing its art status and visibility as art and its differentiation from the chaos of other non-art messages - ‘everything else'. In this context it risks loosing itself within the infinity of extra-institutional social relations. In this respect the move towards the possibility of an infinitely expanded institution leaves open problems of indeterminacy both in relation to status as art and to how this indeterminacy might operate. I'm finding it difficult to concentrate here... there are strange spasms running down my left arm, flicking my fingers and thumb.

Image: Geza Farkas - Decomposition

This is an institutional version of the sublime where the artworld is presented (in a variety of different ways) with an experience of the terror of the infinity of the outside or unlocated. This is the same sublime Robert Smithson humorously points to in his juxtaposition of the finitude of the art world with the infinity of other systems (for instance his juxtaposition of the chronological/historical time of the artworld with the mineral/geological time of Spiral Jetty (1970)). A cosmic institutional critique, where art's ‘thing-ness' is confronted by a period before consciousness, given-ness, or social relations.[17] If a tree falls over in the North Pole, in the Jurassic period, does it make a noise?

What this amounts to, therefore, is not a discourse of limits or a trauma of limits but a bureaucracy of limits. A move to art in the expanded field where anything can be art but not everything is art. The move beyond medium specificity to post-medium, post-institutional, art-in-general, art-in-the expanded field, sculpture-in the expanded field, curation in the expanded field, the literary turn, the pedagogical turn, is only the move to infinite generalisation: art-in-general-in-general, the-general-in-the-general, generalisation of the general (rather than a Deleuzian landscape of multiplicity and immanence, for instance). And synchronised with this, a move to a generalised bureaucracy and administration of form. Perhaps that's why there is a lot of work at the moment which presents itself as a catalogue or index of disparate forms and references: materials, ideas, genres, themes, styles (for instance, the work of Steve Claydon operates elegantly in this context).

In this context the curator is the key performer - as organiser, collector, cataloguer, archaeologist, manager and guardian. And for instance, Rancière is the philosopher-par-excellence, as the philosopher of aesthetics-in-general and the generalised interdisciplinary. In a world where there are no categories, we are left to experiment with the senses. A meta-politics and framing of a common sensorium, rearticulating freedom and equality in relation to new relationships between thought and the sensory world, between bodies and their environment, between the circulation of language and the social distribution of bodies.[18] Rancière is the writer of this position, an extra-institutional relational aesthetics. He's not very good, but then this is not a very good position. With the dissolution of genre he offers us a generalised reorganisation of senses in general in general in general in general.

Like a bad press release where things are always ‘going beyond' or ‘breaking boundaries', the impetus or desire for a move beyond limits is the curse of conceptual art, which is the curse of transcendence. What began as a desire for difference becomes a bureaucracy of limits and an administration of generalised multiplicity. This is the desire for difference as the same as different, as opposed to the absolutely different which is not the other-as-the-beyond. It is in this distinction between two ideas of ‘difference' that we see the root of the problem: the fetishism of limits is connected to a particular performance or philosophy of language, specifically deconstruction. As a kind of parergonal fetishisation of limits. As the discourse of ‘and/or' and the dream of impossible transcendence. Developing out of conceptual art's ‘linguistic turn', whereby the staging of conceptual art emphasises the fact that the artwork is dependent upon (and created by) the structures and languages of the institution which stage the artwork as art, art is twisted to the linguistic.

This can be navigated either art historically via the conventional chronological narrative of morphological transformation (style, movements, trends, etc.); or socio-historically in relation to transformations in the world/society/politics; or in relation to conceptual art's engagement with Anglo-American philosophy of language (Kosuth),[19] or retro-translated via Foucault's ideas of discourse (De Duve).[20] Blood pooling in my legs - bloating out my feet and calves. But whatever the route or genealogy, contemporary art is wedded to the rhythms and cadences of deconstruction which seem to fit seductively and cutely with the sympathies, attitudes and ontologies of contemporary art. This simultaneously allows for ‘critical' analysis and the re-interpretation of texts whilst maintaining conventional dreams of transcendence (through impossible transcendence) - as a glimpse of something else, of hopeless hope and other familiar art dreams. For instance, Derrida defines deconstruction as the experience of the possibility of the impossible - that is, the (impossible) possibility of the impossible marking ‘an absolute interruption in the regime of the possible'.[21] Marked by their aporetic or antinominal status, their possibility conditioned by their impossibility and so on.[22] And Derrida's understanding of différence is as ‘neither this nor that, neither sensible nor intelligible, neither positive nor negative, neither superior nor inferior, neither active nor passive, neither present nor absent, not even neutral [...] it ‘is' not and does not say what ‘is'. It is written completely otherwise.'[23]

Image: Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights, A Gallery Talk, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989

Transcendence as neither this nor that, marked only by the limit it is beyond and différence as 'that which is never present as such, is absolutely other, discernible only through its trace whose movement is infinitely deferred, infinitely differing from itself, definable at best, in terms of what it is not.'[24] In Derrida, obviously, this is connected to his ideas of desire, where the field of desire is completely ensnared in a field of transcendence. Again, as Smith describes it, ‘desire has traditionally been defined as an irredeemable ontological lack which, by its very nature, is unrealisable - precisely because its object is transcendent or absolutely other (Good, One, God, Moral Law). From Plato and Augustine to Hegel and Freud, desire has been defined, ontologically, as a function of a field of transcendence, in relation to transcendence (as expressed in an Idea).'[25]

In this ‘desire' for impossible transcendence, as a kind of Romantic aporetics, art deteriorates into a bad (boring) joke, endlessly repeated. The same joke of impossible transcendence, mourning infinitely its impossibility, as a titillating tragedy of hopeless hope and impossible non-futures and so on. And you can't even pretend you don't get the joke or don't know about the joke or aren't taking part in the joke, unless you are truly ignorant, in which case the joke is on you. Conceptual art as a prophecy of overcoming, ends up as the discourse of the parergon: neither/nor, either/or. The non-dialectic of life/death from the perspective of life (human). Where the ‘/' becomes the sliding registration of the unregisterable. As Smith writes: ‘from the viewpoint of immanence, in other words, transcendence represents my slavery and impotence reduced to its lowest point: the absolute demand to do the absolutely impossible is nothing other than the concept of impotence raised to infinity.'[26]

This is a procession/recession of limits, from art/non-art, to finite/infinite, to the fiction of the ultimate limit of life/death - the ‘master-limit' which validates and codes all other limits. As Reza Negarestani writes, this is an ‘ontological apartheid' or ‘instrumental capacity' pseudo-articulating ‘the vitalism of the living and the givenness of its ontological status (the Ideal) in relation to the fiction of ‘the dead'[27]. A correlation between ‘the contingent outside qua undetermined and the determinable necessity of being / the living, whereby ‘only by binding the dead as a negative agency can the living establish its myth of inherent persistence, intelligibility and difference or determination as such.'[28] A persistence which is mirrored in the limits of capitalism, where ‘the contingency of the outside [...] is subtractively transformed to the intensive necessity of capitalism so as to both extend capitalism to an afforded outside and affirm the existence of capitalism as a necessity'.[29] A persistence which is maintained, as in art, by a criticality concerned with the fetishisation of limits as the promise of transcendence.

But how can this situation be un-performed. As Negarestani writes ‘contra Žižek's reckless negationalism (zombified negativity), negation must be extricated from its instrumental extensity whereby the contingency of the outside is subtractively put into service on behalf of an intensive affirmation of an ideal necessity.'[30] In his 2008 essay 'The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo'  Negarestani performs this extrication through the image of an elaborate Etruscan torture whereby:

a living man or woman was tied to a rotting corpse, face to face, mouth to mouth, limb to limb, with an obsessive exactitude in which each part of the body corresponded with its matching putrefying counterpart. Shackled to their rotting double, the man or woman was left to decay. To avoid the starvation of the victim and to ensure the rotting bonds between the living and the dead were fully established, the Etruscan robbers continued to feed the victim appropriately. Only once the superficial difference between the corpse and the living body started to rot away through the agency of worms, which bridged the two bodies, establishing a differential continuity between them, did the Etruscans stop feeding the living. Once both the living and the dead had turned black through putrefaction, the Etruscans deemed it appropriate to unshackle the bodies, by now combined together, albeit on an infinitesimal, vermicular level.[31]

An image which we cannot conventionally interpret as primarily the image of the body tethered to the dead, but rather, more reassuringly, as ‘the soul qua living that is chained to the body qua dead.'[32] Mind and body, soul qua vitality and body qua inorganic hardware or instrument, whereby the horror of ‘intimacy with the dead' can only be sedated by extending the chains to the soul.[33] That is, the philosopher must ‘fasten us upon the soul in an attempt to reduce the horror of perpetual intimacy with the dead into a torment which will only last for a while.'[34] A similar maneuver to Nietzsche's description of how (as Christians-all-of-us) we imagine, or dream of truer and better world(s) beyond appearance but, when we fail to grasp these world(s), or are thrown out, fall into despair at what we believe we have lost (which in fact never existed). Mourning the loss of a higher and better world, we imagine ourselves to be guilty, punished or outcast, which gives meaning to our suffering as punishment for our sinful un-ideality, and simultaneously provides us with the source of our salvation.

Image: Dead Leviathan, Tainan City, Taiwan 2004

And art's embrace of limits as marker of its unknown outside is the auto-justification of its own position as the perspective from which its own transcendence/overcoming may be viewed. This dissolution into everything else, leaving behind the ‘soul of art' as some generalised idea of ‘creativity' that remains after all the disciplines/media and limits have been transcended. Rather this... anything... than nothing/contingency.

Or otherwise, more dynamically, Negarestani's image opens us out onto a landscape beyond the dreams of transcendence and the limits which already-never existed. A move from the bureaucracy of equivocity, proportionality and the reorganisation of limits as transcendence, to a univocity where being has only one sense - true ontological ‘equality' and ‘repetition', vibrating with the 'single clamour of Being for all beings' where ‘each drop and each voice has reached a state of excess - in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return.'[35]

And I was born with an umbilical cord around my neck, nearly hanging myself in my Mother's womb. Un-borning me to the absolute contingency and immanence that is anyway what life is. And three years later my brother emerged un-alive, dying an hour before birth from intestinal infection (necrotising enterocolitis) and septicemia. In this present situation I am absolute immanence/contingency. Because here the experience of difference and the beyond is tangible, before it is impossible. Looking back at myself from the position of the non-human and from the perspective of fiction. Amongst infinitely multiplying limits, multiplying infinitely. As limits are dissolved in the blinding light of infinite blackness. And as transcendence is transcended. Death as a kind of rotting backwards. A rotting across the decay. The following questions occur. Am I just a dumb anthropomorphism? Is it possible for me to ‘think' all this given that I am a corpse? Or is this just fiction. And if it is fiction what is the status of this ‘perspective' as fiction and as philosophy - given that it is still a perspective?

Looking at my own reflection in the window, in the way I am, now. Mirrored against the night. I'm crawling back at you/me in a ‘pact with putrefaction', moving back from object to the ‘already-dead', as a fiction of ‘the freedom of decay'.[36] Rotting backwards (as an object and as an image) from nowhere/nothing. But what is key here is that I am looking back from this perspective, from the eyes of the dead, at my own reflection in the window. Stretch-necked corpse in the window. Eyes flowering with fly larvae.

Anyway guess what - that cock sucker from downstairs - I just realised he nicked my cordless drill on the way out. What a fucker. Because I say my drill but it isn't - its Andy's from the floor above. I left it out on purpose so he could get it back. There's a staple gun there as well that belongs to Serge down the street.

Over the next few hours the green and purple stains of putrefaction creep up my abdomen like some beautiful ornate marble; then distension and swelling of the body and blebbing, with purple transudate spreading.

That guy from downstairs came up again. With a couple of friends this time. Someone was licking my ring piece for a while. Must be some kind of extreme necrophilia - people who like fucking decaying bodies. To be honest it's OK with me. Eyes bulging, organs and cavities bursting, veins marbling and the spread of putrefaction stains to neck and limbs. And as putrefaction spreads - slipping across the surface in a further play of resignification, the process overlaps and underlaps in the microscopy of figure, skin, pore, atom - searching for intelligibility and unintelligibility alike in the shine and sweat of transformation. A glutinous coming-to-be - oscillating and repeating across the liquid slick of gore and slime, with the movement of maggots swarming and bulging beneath the swilling surface; with the germs fucking and procreating above and the torso swollen and burst to expose the jellied organs within - pinks and gay reds - synchronising with the sunrise out the window.

But anyway been nice talking to you.

All the best

A corpse

[1] Quoted from Merlin Carpenter, 'The Sound of Bamboo', 2000. http://www.merlincarpenter.com/sound.htm

[2] As first glamourised in Jena Romanticism whereby ‘the work of art unites the realms of necessity and freedom epistemology and ethics, or the sensuous and the intelligible that Kant had sundered.' Simon Critchley, Very Little ... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy), Routledge 1997, p.105.

[3] Benjamin Buchloh. ‘Conceptual Art 1962-69: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions', October, 55 (Winter 1990), p.143.

[4] For instance see Daniel Buren, ‘Critical Limits' (1970), in his Five (5) Texts, New York: John Weber Gallery, and London, 1973.

[5] Daniel Buren, Is Teaching Art Necessary?' June 1968, Galerie des Arts, September, 1968, here quoted from Lucy Lippard, Six years; The dematerialisation of the art object from 1966 to 1972, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973, p.51

[6] Robert Morgan, ‘Interview with Hans Haacke', December 28, 1979, in Robert Morgan, Conceptual Art: An American Perspective, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1994, p.157.

[7] See James Meyer's essay ‘What Happened to Institutional Critique?' American Fine Arts, 1993.

[8] Simon Sheikh, ‘Notes on Institutional Critique', 2006, Tranversal Online Journal, Eipcp.net http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0106/sheikh/en

[9] Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Presses du Reel, 2002, p.18; Ibid, p.9.

[10] Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics', October, 110 (Fall 2004), 52; For a discussion of radical democracy see, for example, Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony And Socialist Strategy: Towards A Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, 1995.

[11] Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,' Artforum (September 2005), p.282.

[12] Ibid. p.283.

[13] Boris Groys, ‘On the New', Art Nodes, UOC, 2002. http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/espai/eng/art/groys1002/groys1002.html

[14] Robert Smithson, ‘Cultural Confinement' (1972), in Smithson, Collected Writings, 1996, pp.154-155.

[15] Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defence of the Poor Image.' Eflux Journal 10, November 2009, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/94

[16] For example: Dan Graham's Homes for America, 1966, or Untitled (Figurative), 1968, in Harpers Bazaar; Robert Smithson's The Monuments of Passaic, 1967, in Artforum; Robert Smithson and Mel Bochner's The Domain of the Great Bear, 1966, in Art Voices; and Seth Price's Dispersion, 2002, www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf

[17] See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency; London: Continuum, p.7. And/or Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010, pp.49-96.

[18] For instance, Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetic: Continuum, 2006.

[19] Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy, Studio International, October, 1969.

[20] Thierry De Duve, Kant After Duchamp, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 1997.

[21] Harold Coward and Toby Foshay Derrida and Negative Theology, Albany: SUNY Press, 1992, p.290. Quoted in, Daniel Smith. ‘Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought', in Paul Patton and John Protevi eds. Between Deleuze and Derrida, New York: Continuum, 2003, p.57. He adds ‘Deleuze, for his part, defines his philosophy, not as a search for the conditions of possible experience, but rather the conditions of real experience. Such is the formula of immanence.'

[22] For instance see Jacques Derrida, Aporias, California: Stanford University Press, 1993.

[23] Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, London: Routledge, 1992, p.74.

[24] Daniel Smith, ‘Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought', in Paul Patton & John Protevi, eds., Between Deleuze and Derrida. Continuum 2003,.p.54.

[25] Ibid. p.58

[26] Ibid. p.62

[27] Reza Negarestani, 'Hauntology, or Shady Vitalism, Eliminative Culinarism', 2008, http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/archives/2008/10/hauntology_or_a.html

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Reza Negarestani, ‘'The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo' Collapse, Vol. IV: Concept Horror, May 2008, p.131.

[32] Reza Negarestani, ‘Instrumental Spectrality and Meillassoux's Catoptric Controversies', 2009 http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/archives/2009/04/instrumental_sp.html

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, London: Athlone, 1994. p.304.

[36] Reza Negarestani, 'The Corpse Bride'

John Russell <john.a.russell AT btinternet.com> is an artist living and working in London,  http://www.john-russell.com