« Since its earliest appearances in 1932, Flann O'Brien's 'John
Duffy's Brother' has fascinated and troubled readers, very often
simultaneously. Jeremy Fernando has offered, for the first time, an
extended meditation on the internal life and times of John Duffy's
brother -- an identity so anonymous, so approximate to each of our
selves that we can only know him by association with and through
the fictional. Using this intra-day nervous breakdown and
subsequent recovery as a starting point, je me touche locates the
precise site where the tensions between the unremarkable and the
histrionic meet in the human psyche, both individual and
collective. To Fernando, writers like O'Brien and Herman Melville
belong on the same arc as the impulses that gave rise to the global
Occupy phenomenon -- they see nothing absurd about the absurd
moments in all our quotidian dramas. Fernando channels a wide array
of voices to get to the heart of what it means to be
transformative. Instead of crises internal or otherwise, Fernando,
by way of writers and thinkers as diverse as Cervantes, Hamacher,
Baudrillard, Bizot, and others, discovers possibilities -- that
what might at first sight seem like self-imposed hampering impulses
are in fact liberating gestures. For Fernando, self-imaginings
(such as of the locomotive sort in O'Brien's story) are not
imaginings at all but authentic epistemological and ontological
re-constitution. These are to be the intent legacies of all our
breakdowns and recoveries. There is nothing loco about being
possessed of the idea of oneself a train; it is instinct as well as
groundedness ».
-- Lim Lee Ching
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