I think of the text as a performative unit: a living material contained within an object. The written text thus remains in a state of potential until a body reads it. I imagine voices, images, and temporalities encapsulated within the book-object, continually actualized in the present, producing meanings that were not given in advance.
Dostoevsky Didn't Know Many Things
I+You=the World
Dostoevsky Didn't Know Many Things moves through an unsettling territory where reality begins to give way to the narratives we construct to explain it. The work places truth and fiction, identity and belonging, history and power in tension, and asks what happens when an idea becomes more important than a life, and how violence, time and again, finds arguments to present itself as necessary.
Through humor and the logic of the absurd, the dramatic text poses a broader question: how much of our humanity are we willing to sacrifice in order to keep a system of beliefs intact when faced with a reality that has the inconvenient habit of being complex?
68 pp. · 17 cm × 15 cm
ISBN: 978-631-90441-4-0
Etruska Editora
Живодійність (zhivodiynist’) is a Ukrainian neologism that names the potency through which a life becomes world.
I imagined this book, made of essay, poetry, and theatre, as a table set for literature, philosophy, and artistic expression to enter into dialogue about encounter as a force that creates reality. Between Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, Arendt, Lispector, the songs of an Arctic people, a dance, and the images that accompanied this search, a sensitive formula emerges: I + You = the World.
I began with a question: how do we participate in the appearance of the world? By the appearance of the world, I mean that event in which one presence affects another, one life responds to another, and between them something that did not exist before begins to come into being. According to philosophers of dialogue, the I needs a You in order to constitute itself as an I. The question then becomes inevitable: who is the You? And what happens if the + ceases to be a sign of addition and becomes a unit of meaning, a space? When does an encounter cease to be mere coexistence?
Needless to say, I have no answers: zhivodiynist’ arises precisely from these questions and from a few intuitions.
178 pp. · 17 cm × 15 cm
ISBN: 978-631-90441-2-6
Etruska Editora
Coming soon
Written in 1920, R.U.R. imagined a world in which the industrial production of artificial beings would free humanity from labor. A century later, as today’s levels of automation, artificial intelligence, and transhumanist projects have ceased to belong exclusively to fiction, Karel Čapek’s question feels unsettlingly close: what does it mean to be alive?
At the Reason factory, the Robots were created solely to work, and what was meant to guarantee a more efficient world ultimately throws the certainties of their own creators into crisis.
This edition returns directly to the Czech text published in 1920 and, under the title Reason’s Universal Robots, restores characters, nuances, and resonances of the original.
198 pp. · 17 cm × 15 cm
ISBN: 978-631-90441-3-3
Etruska Editora