Justin Clemens

Of all the grades of doggerel, the limerick is one of the lowest. Brief, risible, finicky, the limerick is a form whose greatest successes never rise above the mildly embarrassing. Populist and participatory if not precisely popular, the limerick first becomes a hit in Victorian England with Edward Lear’s books of nonsense. It spreads at once across the English-speaking world like a highly-contagious linguistic rash. Yet despite never having enjoyed unqualified approbation from critics or public, the form has its enthusiasts and eminent aficionados: there is no lack of literary luminaries who have lavished love on the limerick. The present book continues this queer minor tradition, presenting 77 limericks about writers and philosophers from St Thomas Aquinas to Simone Weil. Including a critical essay that delineates the limerick’s salient features, along with a dictionary that collects brief physiognomies of the subjects of the limericks, this book dares to descend into the maelstrom of mediocrity and return, arms overflowing with mixed metaphors and microplastics.
Available from a range of distributors, including: https://www.manic.com.au/limericks-philosophical-and-literary.html

"The theoretical writings of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou stand at the heart of contemporary European thought. While the combined corpus of these three figures contains a significant number of references to each other’s work, such references are often simply critical, obscure – or both. Lacan Deleuze Badiou guides us through these crucial, under-remarked interrelations, identifying the conceptual passages, connections and disjunctions that underlie the often superficial statements of critique, indifference or agreement.
Working through the rubrics of the contemporary, time, the event and truth, Bartlett, Clemens and Roffe present a new, lucid account of where these three thinkers stand in relation to one another and why their nexus remains unsurpassed as a point of reference for contemporary thought itself."

Minimal Domination collects a selection of Justin Clemens’ art writings from the past decade. The title is drawn from contemporary mathematics: a minimally dominating set is the smallest set of points that neighbour all other points of a graph. A minimally dominating set is therefore a multiple and a structure which has privileged access to that which it is not. This is the secret of contemporary art: it creates discrete selections from which we can survey the whole.

Psychoanalysis was the most important intellectual development of the 20th century, which left no practice from psychiatry to philosophy to politics untouched. Yet it was also in many ways an untouchable project, caught between science and poetry, medicine and hermeneutics. This unsettled, unsettling status has recently induced the philosopher Alain Badiou to characterise psychoanalysis as an ‘antiphilosophy’, that is, as a practice that issues the strongest possible challenges to thought. Justin Clemens takes up the challenge of this denomination here, by re-examining a series of crucial psychoanalytic themes: addiction, fanaticism, love, slavery and torture.

Drawing from the work of Freud, Lacan, Badiou, Agamben and others, Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy offers a radical reconstruction of the operations and import of key psychoanalytic concepts and a renewed sense of the indispensable powers of psychoanalysis for today.

Using Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's groundbreaking study of the persistence of German Idealist philosophy as his starting point, Justin Clemens presents a valuable study of the links between Romanticism and contemporary theory. The central contention of this book is that contemporary theory is still essentially Romantic - despite all its declarations to the contrary, and despite all its attempts to elude or exceed the limits bequeathed it by Romantic thought.

The argument focuses on the ruses of 'Romanticism's indefinable character' under two main rubrics, 'Contexts' and 'Interventions'. The first three chapters investigate 'Contexts', examining some of the broad trends in the historical and institutional development of Romantic criticism; the second section, 'Interventions', comprises close readings of the work of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ian Hunter and Alain Badiou.

In the first chapter Clemens identifies and traces the development of two interlocking recurrent themes in Romantic criticism: the Romantic desire to escape Romanticism, and the problem posed to aesthetico-philosophical thought by the modern domiciliation of philosophy in the university. He develops these themes in the second chapter by examining the link forged between aesthetics and the subject in the work of Immanuel Kant. In the third chapter, Clemens shows how the Romantic problems of the academic institution and aesthetics were effectively bound together by the philosophical diagnosis of nihilism.

Chapter Four focuses on two key moments in the work of Jacques Lacan - his theory of the 'mirror stage' and his 'formulas of sexuation' - and demonstrates how Lacan returns to the grounding claims of Kantian aesthetics in such a way as to render him complicit with the Romantic thought he often seems to contest. In the following chapter, taking Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'multiplicity' as a guiding thread, Clemens links their account to their professed 'anti-Platonism', showing how they find themselves forced back onto emblematically Romantic arguments. Chapter Six provides a close reading of Sedgwick's most influential text, Epistemology of the Closet. Clemens' reading localizes her practice both in the newly consolidated academic field of 'Queer Theory' and in a conceptual genealogy whose roots can be traced back to a particular anti-Enlightenment strain of Romanticism.

Clemens next turns to the professedly anti-Romantic arguments of Ian Hunter, a major figure in the ongoing re-writing of modern histories of education. In the final chapter he examines the work of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou. Clemens argues that, if Badiou's hostility to the diagnosis of nihilism, his return to Plato and mathematics, and his expulsion of poetry from philosophical method, all place him at a genuine distance from dominant Romantic trends, even this attempt admits ciphered Romantic elements.

This study will be of interest to literary theorists, philosophers, political theorists, and cultural studies scholars.

Modelled on classical epics such as Virgil's Aeneid and Pope's Dunciad, The Mundiad is a mock epic poem celebrating the conception and birth of little Mundia, her heroic escape from her parents, medical staff and hospital, and journey into the real world. A world of deranged superstars, climate-change deniers, rogue states, multimedia extravaganzas, political bullshit, creepy talkback demagogues, financial crises, child soldiers, happy idiots, genetic engineering, death camps, pornographers and more.

Villain is a poetry collection by Justin Clemens. Invoking the spirit of celebrated French poet, vagabond and thief Francois Villon – some of whose ballads are translated here – these poems range from the violent and obscene to the lyrical and sublime, sometimes within a single verse. Villain unleashes a war of forms, perfect sonnets clash with mock haiku, heroic couplets and free verse — all directed towards capturing the contemporary world. But Villain also ranges over time and place, people and events, encompassing science-fiction creatures as well as medieval criminals.