About the Book
A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! is an entirely original kind of work. It takes the form of commentaries on memes made with the image of Batman slapping Robin. The commentaries are written as if they were not authored by the same person who made the memes, allowing the author to consider himself and his work from the outside. The book defies genre by mixing discussions of philosophy, psychoanalysis, Judaism, language, and representation with self-writing and autotheory. These are juxtaposed like the items in a cabinet of curiosities or topics in an analytic patient's free association. Both pre-modern and post-modern in its inspiration, it is cerebral, playful, social, and intensely personal. It contains philosophy, including original philosophical research, but also explores new ways of doing and thinking about philosophy.
About the Author :
Simon Evnine is a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, in Florida, USA. Besides working on Batman memes, he is interested in social ontology and the philosophy of language. You can visit his website, simonevnine.com, to find information on his previous books and papers, among other things.
Review :
[T]hese reflections are philosophical and picaresque, sarcastic and explanatory, literary and analytical, visual and discursive, musical and rabbinical, fragmentary and unified, continuous and interrupted. Kierkegaard meets Calvino meets auto-theory.
Susanna Siegel, Harvard University, author of The Rationality of Perception
[A] book about representation, pastiche, logic, Judaism, psychoanalysis, shame, music, Batman, and the characters we play in attempting to understand ourselves. It's a meticulous, midrashic, imaginative, funny, insouciant, sincere piece of work. Part of the joy of philosophy is the experience of trying on someone else's vocabulary, concerns, convictions, and habits of reasoning, and seeing how our own are transformed in the process. I think I have never read anything that is so full of this joy.
Ian Olasov, CUNY, author of Ask a Philosopher: Answers to Your Most Important and Most Unexpected Questions
Evnine himself is certainly Jewishly literate, but "Evnine" the commentator is in another league entirely, a great Rabbi of the generation. I have tried to contact the real Evnine to discover something of the identity of Evnine the commentator, but all I received was an instructive slap! A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerge! is funny and profound and profoundly funny.
Rabbi Samuel Lebens, University of Haifa, author of The Principles of Judaism
Imagine a joke that begins, "Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Bruce Wayne walk into a Yeshiva...." and you will glimpse what awaits you in A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!. Astonishingly creative, intellectually rich, and personally intimate, Evnine's text shatters the boundaries of conventional philosophical writing, to enchanting effect.
David Livingstone Smith, University of New England, author of Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization and Approaching Psychoanalysis: An Introductory Course
On display are Evnine's remarkable erudition and wit but also his insight, his sensibility, and his vulnerabilities. Evnine plunges so deep, we reach what may be the common origin of the psyche's sadistic and masochistic impulses; a minute later, we are taken to rarefied air where Tarksi's theory of truth resides. This is the joint work of a philosophy professor and the young boy the professor once was. We are made privy to repressed desires but discover also that the voyeuristic pleasure an observer may get in such cases is mixed with the pain of recognizing ourselves in the movements of another person's bared soul.
Evnine's exploration is personal, but like the best personal explorations, it illuminates human psychology - our psychology.
Iskra Fileva, University of Colorado, Boulder, author of The Philosopher's Diaries at Psychology Today
The memes are presented as strange and opaque and as urgently in need of the background against which they might show up as funny or even intelligible; the surrounding commentary supplies the missing context. In this way the book makes art happen, right before our eyes, for what is art but this very kind of opportunity to make the passage from not getting it to getting it? That it is the artist's life - from his work as a philosopher and a musician, his psychoanalysis, his Jewishness and Englishness, embarrassing memories of childhood and accidental encounters on social media - that supplies the needed background is what makes this book so intimate, even if always dizzyingly ironic, so generous, even if also challenging.
Alva Noë, UC Berkeley, author of Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature
