Introduction

Introduction Shepherd Steiner In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Gerard Genette brings our attention to the form of the book, and equally for our purposes now, to the steady format of a journal. With technical precision and with scrupulous detail for the protocols of bookmaking and publishing, yet taking nothing away from the imaginative adventure of the literary work itself, Genette describes the very literal apparatus of the book, like this introduction, our cover, our colophon, our table of contents, or this first paragraph, as a set of analytics that divide the inside of the book from the outside and vice versa. “More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext,” Genette writes, is, rather, a threshold, or—a word Borges used apropos of a preface—a “vestibule” that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back. It is an “undefined zone” between the inside and the outside, a zone without any hard and fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about the text), an edge, or, as Philippe Lejeune put it, “a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls the whole reading of the text.” (1–2) Threshold, edge, fringe, an “undefined zone,” and especially vestibule are all important in the case of Mosaic 54.3, a special author issue featuring the work of Frédéric Neyrat and including essays by Naomi Mandell, Sue Lovell, Gi Taek Ryoo, [End Page v] and Andrew Haas. There are so many insides and outsides here. Alongside two essays by Neyrat, you will find an interview focussing on the philosopher’s book, The Unconstructable Earth (2019), and you will encounter Arne De Boever’s introduction to Neyrat’s wider project via what he describes as “philosophy’s ins—and especially its outs” (1). I mention this remarkably playful and deep piece now, because in spite of appearances to the contrary—of publishing protocols that place his introduction second to my introduction, of intellectual jockeying to escape influence, and so on—it is given that my recourse to paratexts is an extension of De Boever’s analysis of Neyrat, and Neyrat on the authors he confronts. If this is one of the ironies of speaking of any author’s work, such metaleptic reversals also foreground the special power of Neyrat’s thinking, which is uniquely adept at summoning voices, or a barely felt set of forces from beyond the grave. Thus De Boever’s “On Frédéric Neyrat’s Critical Thought” introduces us to the key analytic tool of the thinker: the philosophical place, the variability, and the significance of “narratives of the outside” (2). A strong imperative towards anti-exceptionalism is shared by both authors. Thus De Boever’s recursive and rhetorical statement on absolutes: “give me your take on the outside, and I will project the ends of your philosophy. The outside is the measure to which Neyrat encourages us to hold the work of any philosopher—including, one has to assume, his own” (2). In De Boever’s introduction to Neyrat’s extensive corpus of works we are situated on the bridge between inside and outside that is so central to chiasmic thinking, summarily cut out of this two-way transit, and instead provided a new perspective—“another name of critique”—that overturns the centrality of the subject in order to highlight a counter force constitutive of the subject that is obstinately of the outside. Apart from serving as both a primer for understanding the value-laden questions which plague art and literature today and Neyrat’s unique intellectual trajectory, De Boever’s essay can be read as an object lesson in the optics of speculative realism. Which brings me back to the formal trappings of Mosaic 54.3 as a whole and as an issue made up of so many discrete parts, each of which variously inducts the reader in, facilitates and maintains the circularities of close reading, posits an outside, and in as many cases prohibits an exit from these interiors. Neyrat’s work is constantly pressing up against such limits, which is why...

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