Taking up perception, ecology, community, lingual value, and quantum life, Imagining What We Don’t Know: Creative Theory and Critical Bodies comprises twenty-four essays and theory poems that blend provocative neologisms – wild dialectics, distributed centrality, soft text, and more – with readings of visionary philosophers and UK, Caribbean, US, Australasian, and Oceania art and writing. Committed to experimental ideation and relational ethics, Imagining What We Don’t Know is for art and theory practitioners, philosophy rebels, creative writers, and anyone who relishes thinking about contemporary arts, transnational and transdisciplinary life, and how we imagine with language.
“Toward the end of this urgently searching book, in which art and life, literature and philosophy, imagination and realism are put into conversation, Lisa Samuels declares ‘I want to emphasize our present cultural interactions as gift and attention rather than as acquisition and accumulation.’ This emphasis, in essays such as ‘Withness,’ ‘does not seek to be somewhere other than in relation.’ Thought experiments in complex interrelations are enacted on almost every page, carrying through an implicit pledge to posit ‘a center at every point.’ A valiant necessity on this endangered sphere we sometimes (most accurately) call mother earth.”
~Joan Retallack