Jean-François Lyotard 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.

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

Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration

On Lyotard’s exhibition ‘Les Immatériaux’

Writing

2015

The Brain-Ear

Talk on Florian Hecker given at Graz Kunstlerhaus

Writing

2015

Jean-Louis Boissier, ‘The Bus of Les Immatériaux’

Reflections on Les Immatériaux by one of the exhibitors

Translation

2015

Jean-François Lyotard, ‘After Six Months of Work…’

Lyotard’s previously unpublished interim report to Centre Pompidou on the project for Les Immatériaux

Translation

2014

Immaterials, Between Acceleration and Anamnesis

Talk on Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux

Writing

2013

Skin Games: A Primer

Accompanying text for Florian Hecker and Reza Negarestani’s C.D.—A Script for Synthesis

Writing