Resources & Archive

re.press publishing events at Loop Melbourne

Two special events were organized by Paul Ashton of re.press publishing at Loop in the winter of 2019.

Justin Clemens has kindly put together an outline that helps frame the conversation of the first event. The philosophical fragment (George Vassilacopoulos) and aphorism (Jon Roffe). Two distinct styles were present.

Jon has shared a supplementary text. From it, “[t]he ‘I’ of the philosopher strives to vanish in what it states; the ‘you’ of these aphorisms renders the field of sense opaque.” This somewhat captures the mood.

George writes, “In the fragment the ego is shown to be capable of thinking without concepts, of erovoiding.” The PowerPoint will allow listeners to follow the centrality of works by David and Goya in his discussion of ‘erovoiding’.

Brad Haylock from Surpllus must also be thanked.

Indigenous people cannot forget the nature of migrancy and position all non-Indigenous people as migrants and diasporic. Our ontological relationship to land, the ways that country is constitutive of us, and therefore the inalienable nature of our relationship to land, marks a radical, indeed incommensurable, difference between us and the non-Indigenous. This ontological relation to land constitutes a subject position that we do not share, and which cannot be shared, with the postcolonial subject whose sense of belonging in this place is tied to migrancy.

That was Aileen Moreton-Robinson from the epigraph to Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, a text coauthored by Toula Nicolacopoulos and the George mentioned above.

The second event was sadly marked by the absence of Toula due to ill-health. George was thus onstage alone but spoke as Two.

A piece from the inaugural issue of CRAW Journal accompanies the audio file. Focusing their attention on the corporate university George and Toula state “the present moment calls for a minimalist thinking, one that understands decolonising as the work of deactivating the criminal being that underpins racist knowledge regimes.”

Also we ask for your generous support of local, independent publishing. The websites of Surpllus and re.press can be accessed by the hyperlinks.