art Archives – Robin Mackay

I’m a philosopher and director of the publisher Urbanomic, which aims to engender interdisciplinary thinking and production.

As well as directing Urbanomic, I have written and spoken on art and philosophy and have also worked with a number of artists developing cross-disciplinary projects. I have also translated innumerable essays and various book-length works of French philosophy, including Alain Badiou’s Number and Numbers, François Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-Photography and Anti-Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren, and Éric Alliez’s The Brain-Eye.

My research interests are wide ranging, but generally emerge from the ‘gap’ between the scientific worldview and humans’ spontaneous experience and self-understanding, exploring the philosophical, aesthetic, and political ramifications of attempts to negotiate this disparity—in particular, new variants of ‘geophilosophy’, which examine the relationship between philosophical thought and the contingent history of the earth, in dialogue with geology, psychoanalysis, myth, and other hybrid modes of knowledge and narrative.

I’m available for editorial, proofreading, copy-editing, and translation (FR>EN) work, and commissions. Or you could just buy me a coffee.

2021

Notes 4 Saps

Art is ‘wasted energy’

Writing

2021

Éric Alliez, ‘Spectres of Seurat’

Translation

2019

Marion Zilio, ‘Faceworld’

The face as technological apparel, in the age of the selfie

Translation

2016

Éric Alliez, ‘How Asger Jorn Stole the Value-Form of Modern Art’

On Asger Jorn, painting, situationism, and the avant-garde

Translation

2016

Speculation et Circulation: Alliances Opportunes et Théoriques entre Philosophie et L’Art Contemporain

On the various relations between art, philosophy, and contemporary disquiet (in French)

Writing

2015

Preface to ‘The Brain-Eye’

An introduction to the methodological and conceptual stakes of Alliez’s studies of modern painting

Writing

2015

Éric Alliez and Jean-Clet Martin, ‘The Brain-Eye: New Histories of Modern Painting’

A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern painting

Translation

2014

Thalassa: A Fantasia on a Fantasia

Ferenczi and the aestheme

Writing