Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal

By David Dowker and Christine Stewart

Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal is a poetic investigation of melancholia and the baroque. As a collaborative reading of writers such as Walter Benjamin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, David Dowker and Christine Stewart have created a series of linguistic interjections that run from the allegorical barricades of the baroque to the topological confound of the modern, incorporating (for example) Medusa and the Sphinx, aestivating snails and the alchemy of bees. Lush and extravagant, this is writing tuned in to the terrestrial spectacle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookhug Press
• Release date: May 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781927040713

Book preview

Virtualis

Virtualis

Topologies of the Unreal

David Dowker & Christine Stewart

BookThug · 2013

FIRST EDITION

Copyright © David Dowker & Christine Stewart, 2013

The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of The Canada Council for The Arts and The Ontario Arts Council.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada

Cataloguing in Publication

Dowker, David, 1955-

Virtualis : topologies of the unreal / David Dowker and Christine Stewart.

Poems.

ISBN 978-1-927040-71-3

I. Stewart, Christine, 1962- II. Title.

PS8607.O98747V57 2013      C811’.6      C2013-901281-8

Contents

I. Phantasmagoria, or the Empire of Senses

II. Grid Meridian

III. The Flowery Realm of the Barricades

Some Readings

I. Phantasmagoria, or the Empire of Senses

No longer a phantasm and not yet a sign, the unreal object of melancholy introjection opens a space that is neither the hallucinated oneiric scene of the phantasms nor the indifferent world of natural objects. . . . The topology of the unreal that melancholy designs in its immobile dialectic is, at the same time, a topology of culture.

– Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture

Patience arrays its strategies.¹ The blue sky faience

and the startling flows. Tincture of days passing.

Rapture of plant consciousness, suppliant plaintive

refrain. Sidereal inertia of the earth return posture

and the vibratory distances between dreams.

This time the vertigo is temporary. It effects a textuality

of sex. Brazen