protest debate

For George
(2010)

I found a note in my then mess-of-a-sketchbook, which I had taken down in the library of the University of Kitakyushu.

“It is recourse to the rational and reasonable for the ideal of universal communion that characterizes the age-long endeavor of all philosophies in their aspiration for a city of man in which violence may progressively give way to wisdom.” Chaïm Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argumentation (1963).

I had remembered reading this passage, and found the sketchbook in the boxes I was meant to sort through in my mother’s front room back in Nova Scotia. Violence giving way to wisdom. There is a special place in my memory for that point; like some as yet unexploited deposit. (…)

Japanese-translated broadsheet version pdf: protest-debate_japanese

English broadsheet version pdf: protest debate_eng

English linear version pdf: protest debate

This text appeared in poster form in the exhibition “Instructions from the Readymade Institution” in Sapporo, Japan, in 2017.