Memory theatre
By: Simon Critchley ; images Liam Gillick
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2014
Place of publication: London, United Kingdom
Language: eng
Number of pages: 68
ISBN-13: 9780992974718
Subjects: Philosophers; Fiction; Memory (Philosophy)
Description: A French philosopher dies during a savage summer heat wave. Boxes carrying his unpublished miscellany mysteriously appear in Simon Critchley's office. Rooting through piles of papers, Critchley discovers a brilliant text on the ancient art of memory and a cache of astrological charts predicting the deaths of various philosophers. Among them is a chart for Critchley himself, laying out in great detail the course of his life and eventual demise. Becoming obsessed with the details of his fate, Critchley receives the missing, final box, which contains a maquette of Giulio Camillo's sixteenth-century Venetian memory theatre, a space supposed to contain the sum of all knowledge. That's when the hallucinations begin -