[D66] Excommunication

[J.N.]

http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/566/576

Culture Machine, Reviews
Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (2014) by
Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark
Marco Deseriis

Marco Deseriis

Excommunication is a strange book, if anything because its agile and
crystalline prose often runs into the very limit of what philosophy
can and should be able to communicate. The third in the University of
Chicago Press Trios series,Excommunication is a three-pronged probe into
the aporia of excommunication—the perfomative anti-
message that terminating all communications ‘evokes the impossibility
of communication’ (16). Make no mistake, Galloway, Thacker, and Wark are
not interested in revisiting the deconstructive axiom for which the
conditions of possibility of a system ultimately coincide with it
s conditions of impossibility. Nor do they seem concerned with resuming
a version of the Lacanian Real—the foreign, inaccessible, and traumatic
dimension that traces the boundaries of the symbolic order.