« ... It has taken me years to admit -- perhaps only to myself -- that I don't care about writing something important, something significant. That my only hope, wish -- dream even -- is to write something beautiful ... » (139)
This book attempts to open the dossier of fidelity; and, in particular, attend to the question of the relationship between fidelity and its object, to the question of: must there be an object to fidelity? For, if one is faithful to something or someone, is one responding to the what, the characteristics of the thing, the person; or the who, the person, thing, as such? Which is not to say that what and who are necessarily distinguishable, separable, to begin with. However, if we open the possibility that the who is always already beyond us -- outside of knowability, if even only slightly -- this suggests that it is the spectre, the potential unknowability, that haunts all relationality. Thus, even if there is an object to one's fidelity -- for, without which one cannot even begin to speak of fidelity, speak of relationality -- this might well be an objectless object or, at least, an object that remains veiled from us.
In order to explore this relationship -- in which one cannot even be sure if there is a relationality; for, without the object, the nature, if one can call it that, of the relation is speculative -- the text takes the form of an exploratory fiction. Where it attempts to bear witness to the possibility of fidelity -- keeping in mind that fiction is both the limit to, and condition of, testimony -- whilst quite possibly only testifying to the possibility of being able to testify.
Nothing more.
Author Biography:
Jeremy Fernando is the Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, where he is also a Reader in Contemporary Literature & Thought. He works in the intersections of literature, philosophy, and the media; and has written fifteen books - including Reading Blindly, Living with Art, and Writing Death. His work has been featured in magazines and journals such as Berfrois, CTheory, TimeOut, and VICE, amongst others; and he has been translated into Japanese, Italian, Spanish, and Slovenian. Exploring other media has led him to film, music, and art; and his work has been exhibited in Seoul, Vienna, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He is the editor of the thematic magazine One Imperative; and is a Fellow of Tembusu College at the National University of Singapore. Yanyun Chen (b.1986, Singapore) works in charcoal. Her studio-based practice is driven by questions and craft, through contemplating the relationships between theory, process, method, and the art work. She attempts to open conversations about what it means to draw, read, think, respond. Her works revolve around the themes of suspension and animation of death/dying, memory/memorials, light and atmosphere, and nudity/nakedness/bare. Her first exhibited series Chasing Flowers challenges the "still-life" genre, by making charcoal portraits of flowers as the flowers wilt and decay. Her drawings were exhibited in Singapore, notably ChanHampe Galleries, Visual Arts Development Association Singapore, and NoiseSingapore. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, where she obtained her Masters in Communications. She received the Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal Award and the Nanyang Scholarship for her Bachelors in Fine Arts [Hons] 1st class from Nanyang Technological University (Singapore); and has been trained at the Florence Academy of Art (Sweden), The Animation Workshop (Denmark), and under puppet makers Miroslav Trejtnar and Zdar Sorm (Czech Republic). Currently, she teaches drawing at Yale-NUS College and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
![[Given, If, Then] by Jeremy Fernando](https://d3fa68hw0m2vcc.cloudfront.net/6db/18346641.jpeg "[Given, If, Then] by Jeremy Fernando")