Inexistent Ink: Michael Cisco and Quentin Meillassoux on Writing Worlds

Abstract

Ben Woodard’s chapter inquires into how Michael Cisco’s articulation of the weird touches on the oblique construction that accompanies the narrative matter of text itself (how what is written accounts for the effect of being read). Rather than discussing written marks as a material affect, the matter of inscription will be analyzed as an imperfect index of another world (whether actual or possible) where inscription is understood as the material generation of a sign that is meant to cause structural change in a thinker by indexing formally nonexistent places. If anything can be written (and anything can happen), how do we understand the limits of writing in terms of the limits of consciousness (and the thinkability of the page) and the telling of a narrative as the construction of a world.