Reading Blindly attempts to conceive of the possibility of an ethics of reading--"reading" being understood as the relation to an other that occurs prior to any semantic or formal identification, and therefore prior to any attempt at assimilating what is being read to the one who reads. Hence, "reading" can no longer be understood in the classical tradition of hermeneutics as a deciphering according to an established set of rules as this would only give a minimum of correspondence, or relation, between the reader, and what is read. In fact, "reading" can no longer be understood as an act, since an act by necessity would impose the rules of the reader upon the structure of what (s)he encounters; in other words the reader would impose herself upon the text. Since it is neither an act nor a rule-governed operation, "reading" needs to be thought as an event of an encounter with an other--and more precisely an other which is not the other as identified by the reader, but heterogeneous in relation to any identifying determination. Being an encounter with an undeterminable other--an other who is other than other--"reading" is hence an unconditional relation, a relation therefore to no fixed object of relation. Hence, "reading" can be claimed to be the ethical relation par excellence. Since "reading" is a pre-relational relationality, what the reader encounters, however, may only be encountered before any phenomenon: "reading" is hence a non-phenomenal event or even the event of the undoing of all phenomenality. This is a radical reconstitution of reading positing blindness as that which both allows reading to take place and is also its limit. As there is always an aspect of choice in reading--one has to choose to remain open to the possibility of the other-- Reading Blindly, by extension, is also a rethinking of ethics; constantly keeping in mind the impossibility of articulating an ethics which is not prescriptive. Hence, Reading Blindly is ultimately an attempt at the impossible: to speak of reading as an event. And since this is un-theorizable--lest it becomes a prescriptive theory-- Reading Blindly is the positing of reading as reading, through reading, where texts are read as a test site for reading itself. Ostensibly, Reading Blindly works at the intersections of literature and philosophy; and will interest readers who are concerned with either discipline. However as reading is re-constituted as a pre-relational relationality, it is also a re-thinking of communication itself--a rethinking of the space between; the medium in which all communication occurs--and by extension, the very possibility of communicating with each other, with another. As such, this work is, in the final gesture, a meditation on the finitude and exteriority in literature, philosophy--calling into question the very possibility of correspondence, and relationality--and hence knowledge itself. For all that can be posited is that reading first and foremost is an acknowledgement that the text is ultimately unknowable; where reading is positing, and which exposes itself to nothing--and is in fidelity to nothing--but the possibility of reading.

On Invisibility attempts to meditate on the relationality between the seen and unseen, known and unknowable, particularly when in relation with an other, when grappling - in touch with - another. This text opens the dossier that, whilst seemingly antonyms, invisibility is part of visibility; that each act of seeing is fraught with the possibility of blindness. And more than that, relationality with another is premised on this very unknowability. Which is why, not only does one encounter jiu-jitsu through practice, praxis; not only does one encounter jiu-jitsu through an encounter with the other; part of it always escapes us, remains enigmatic. Thus, not only is it arte suave, it is always also potentially arte bela. So, even as we attempt to address the question what is jiu-jitsu, part of it will always remain beyond us. Which might be why we have no choice but to turn to art: for, all that we know, can see, of jiu-jitsu will be fragments of it - sketches.

"On Blinking" opens a dossier on seeing. It looks not only to the epistemological sense of what it means to see or the hermeneutical sense of what is the meaning of that which is seen but attends to various sites of knowledge-photography, literature, and philosophy. And in doing so, it questions the privileging of presence and sight in Western thought. Thus, this book, through the essays- "Emerging Sight, Emerging Blindness" (Brian Willems); "Augen, Blicke, Statten" (Julia Holzl); "At the risk of love" (Jeremy Fernando); and "Suspended in a Moving Night: Photography, or the Shiny Relation Self-World" (Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen)- attempts to address the question what is seeing.

Poetry from Beyond the Grave is the first English publication of a large selection of poems by the Brazilian medium and Spiritist leader Francisco Candido "Chico" Xavier. These poems, originally collected in the volume Parnaso de Alem-Tumulo, were dictated to Xavier by a variety of spirits of Brazilian poets from the afterlife, as journeying souls or as witnesses of the spiritual city Nosso Lar, "our house." Poetry from Beyond the Grave is a veritable collection of haunted writing, in which poets present their posthumous work as if they were alive. The brilliant translation by Vitor Pequeno is supplemented by an extensive afterword by Jeremy Fernando, who traces what it means to speak through the other.

Requiem for the Factory is a conversation between two forms of writing: language, and light. This occurs in a tale that attempts to explore the relationality of a self to her self through the figure of a factory. Told through an "I" that refuses to remain stable, one is never sure whether this is a moment when the tale is recounted, recalled, or whether it is being told at the moment of telling. And this is why this requiem has to be narrated. What is foregrounded is not only the fact that memory, history, is fictional, but more pertinently that the self-and the "I"-can only be uttered, perhaps even known, through fictionality. This is not to say that the self is imagined-unreal-but that the imaginary is in the very fabric of reality itself. This is a tale of two writings that are speaking to, and with, each other, whilst also speaking in their own realms at the very same time.

"Ask not for whom the bell tolls... Eulogy: one of the many English words combining legein (to gather together) and logos (the word, the law). With eulogy though the speech-act itself is all important (eu-) and its impossibility evident in a written work. The site of the gathering together of words, of scattered sounds, disappears in the act of writing, itself scatter -- all too forcefully underlining the cause, the event of dispersion that creates the need for gathering together. Jeremy Fernando s eulogy, this particular eulogy, is called Writing Death, and it reminds us that eulogy in its impossibility may well be the primary genre of writing. Writing and death have always gone together, hence Plato s suspicions of chirographic technologies. The author is absent, as is the subject. The text brooks no questions and gives no answers. Fernando s gathering of scatterings in the form of mini-meditations unfolds the weaving of textus that makes writing possible and makes death comprehensible in all of its paradoxical mystery and awe-ful presence. His is a book of catalysts: use them with care. -- Ryan Bishop, Professor of Global Arts and Politics, the Winchester School of Art, the University of Southampton

Terrorism is usually regarded as the enemy of globalization and capitalism. However this analysis completely misses the point as terrorism is precisely what allows globalization to exist: by ensuring that the fantasy of total exchangeability is never fulfilled, terrorism sustains the logic of capital itself. Reflections on (T)error is a meditation on the problems of confining the thinking of terrorism within the logic of exchange. This logic keeps us in the cycle of exchangeability: we remain within the game of surplus value and one-upsmanship; human lives are the very stake with which this game is played. It is only through looking at terror as such - as a singularity - that this cycle might be avoided; not by opposition nor by distancing oneself from it, but rather by complete immersion in terror itself. This book seeks to respond to the need to reconstitute the question of terrorism from a philosophical standpoint. It is addressed to researchers that think the realms of terrorism, post-structural philosophy and media philosophy.