Skip to main content

The Non-Library

Trevor Owen Jones

Published on March 13, 2014 by Dead Letter Office, an imprint of punctum books

SUBSCRIBE
Pages
104 pages
Languages
English
Dimensions
4.50⤫7.25 in.
ISBN (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-615-94544-6 (Paperback)
BISAC subject codes
BISAC: PHI004000
Thema subject codes
THEMA: GLK, QDTK

The Non-Library is a non-standard expression for life that is lived without mediation from words, images, or even ideas. While a thing called “the Library” continues to terrorize humanity even as it enters its last stages as a consequence of cataclysmic climate change and late capitalism, the Non-Library is a strictly performative, ahistorical immanence that suspends the Library’s insistent calls to categorization, representation, and reification. Of course, to describe or circumscribe such ineffability has its limits, but it also has its thresholds to cross: with commentary on Derrida’s Archive Fever, a deconstruction of Fichte, a para-biographical meditation on librarianship, and a vamping on the possible “Non-Virgil,” The Non-Library gently proposes a negative capability in liminal spaces in order to best escape and resist the Library’s stranglehold on human knowledge and its requisite social imaginations.

Biographies

  • Trevor Owen Jones

    (Author)

    Trevor Owen Jones is a librarian and writer, and lives in San Diego, California.

Endorsements

Ayanna Thompson

author of Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America

The Getty Fiend’s poems squall with incomparable implication: necessary and livid éclat through our embalmèd darkness, “dialed to high.” Every spiral of beauty on earth is changed under such duress. And such close observation exceeds lexical and idiosyncratic gymnastics—this is no mere concordance of hips and thighs. If there is obscurity here, it is on the part of the reader. If our phantasms are condensed, we might thank Ken White for his cinematic mitigations.

Usage metrics

Genres

  • Philosophy
  • Thought Experiments

Keywords

  • archives
  • Jorge Luis Borges
  • libraries
  • philosophy
  • theory