Memory Theatre
Author(s): Simon Critchley
Philosophy | Fitzcarraldo Editions | Read our reviews! | Novel | Essay
Description: A French philosopher dies during a savage summer heat wave. Boxes carrying his unpublished miscellany mysteriously appear in Simon Critchley's office. Rooting through piles of papers, Critchley discovers a brilliant text on the ancient art of memory and a cache of astrological charts predicting the deaths of various philosophers. Among them is a chart for Critchley himself, laying out in great detail the course of his life and eventual demise. Becoming obsessed with the details of his fate, Critchley receives the missing, final box, which contains a maquette of Giulio Camillo's sixteenth-century Venetian memory theatre, a space supposed to contain the sum of all knowledge. That's when the hallucinations begin...
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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
“I was dying. That much is certain. The rest is fiction.” I first came across Critchley in his Very Little… Almost Nothing: Death, philosophy and literature, a consideration of the counterpull between nihilism and meaning in Blanchot and Beckett and others. In this novella, which presents as a memoir and occupies various positions in the triangle between fiction, biography and criticism, Critchley inherits from a fellow philosopher Michel Haar a set of boxes containing artefacts and papers concerning memory, as well as a set of charts graphing the events and deaths of philosophers through history. When Critchley discovers that Haar’s charts predicted the deaths of people who had died since his demise, and when he finds a chart predicting his own death in 2010, Critchley scales down his academic work and devotes himself to building a memory theatre, of the kind described in Frances Yates’ thoroughly interesting The Art of Memory, in his back garden. This attempt to symbolically represent the totality of knowledge in an accessible way obsesses him until the fateful day arrives and the whole enterprise is undercut. The book reads somewhere between a Borgesian work-at-one-remove and an undergraduate name-dropping exercise. Critchley, along with Tom McCarthy, is a member of the mock-serious International Necronautical Society.
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'Memory Theatre is a brilliant one-of-a-kind mind game occupying a strange frontier between philosophy, memoir and fiction. Simon Critchley beguiles as he illuminates.' - - David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas 'With a sense of mischief combined with surprising reverie, Simon Critchley has braided together ideas about memory from the past with the latest thinking about unreliable narrative, altered states and the mysteries of consciousness. Memory Theatre is a tantalising, textual Moebius strip - philosophy, autobiography and fiction twisted together.' - - Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic 'Simon Critchley is a figure of quite startling brilliance, and I can never begin to guess what he'll do next, only that it is sure to sustain and nourish my appetite for his voice. His overall project may be that of returning philosophical inquiry, and "theory", to a home in literature, yet without surrendering any of its incisive power, or ethical urgency. - I read Memory Theatre and loved it.' - - Jonathan Lethem, author of Dissident Gardens 'Novella or essay, science-fiction or memoir? Who cares. Chris Marker, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Frances Yates would all have been proud to have written Memory Theatre.' - - Tom McCarthy, author of C 'A strange, affecting and stimulating book that's both a philosophical history and a personal memoir. Sifting through the archives of a dead friend, Critchley takes a fascinating journey through the philosophy and history of memory, and the technologies of remembering dreamed up by thinkers since classical times.' - - Hari Kunzru, author of Gods Without Men
Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. His previous books include On Humour, The Book of Dead Philosophers, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, Impossible Objects, The Mattering of Matter (with Tom McCarthy), The Faith of the Faithless, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine (with Jamieson Webster), and Bowie. He is series moderator of 'The Stone', a philosophy column in The New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor. Liam Gillick is a British artist based in New York. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2002, represented Germany for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, and has taught at Columbia University since 1997. Public collections include: Government Art Collection, UK; Arts Council, UK; Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
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- : Fitzcarraldo Editions
- : Fitzcarraldo Editions
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- : Simon Critchley
- : Paperback
