Yakim Petrov

The article “Finishing William Burroughs: The Ethics of Theft and the Gesture of the Joke” seeks to reconsider the legacy of the Burroughsian corpus of experimental texts (novels, essays, manifestos) by proposing a new trajectory focused on the conceptual and ethical stakes found in the work of the cult American author. Working in the space between the writer’s biographical trauma (the accidental shooting of his wife during a game) and the logic of Burroughs’ own texts, the article offers an entry point into his method and the specific ethics of a writing that exceeds the control of language. This writing may be defined as a speculative radicalization of the problem of (self-)citation, articulated through the notions of conceptual theft and the joke as a gesture of the cut.

The analysis of these techniques is carried out through a reading of Queer and its 2024 film adaptation by Italian director Luca Guadagnino. Presenting the unfinished second novel Queer as an initiaton work (in the sense developed by Radosvet Kolarov), the text reveals the play of a “citation of the Real” (the shooting), exposed through Guadagnino’s cinematic rendering. In unfolding the wager of this key Burroughsian remainder, the article turns to its central object of inquiry— the logic of theft and the gesture of a joke. These are linked to the methods of cutting and folding (cut-up and fold-in), which secured Burroughs’ cult status in postwar Western literature. 

The latter are theorized through late Lacanian psychoanalysis (the symptom) and Deleuzian concepts such as the body without organs (BwO) and his notion of humor. Through the attempt at a singular synthesis of these trajectories in Burroughs, the article reveals the ambivalent (political, psychosocial, and ethical) experiment of writing yourself out of language conceived as a totalizing system of control. 

Furthermore, besides functioning as an introduction to the Burroughsian ethics of resistance to language via theft and humour, the article aims to serve as a speculative tracing of possible connections between Burroughs’ writing practice and some pressing contemporary issues. These include the problems of informational (digital) control societies, the logic of large language models (LLMs), the consumption of nonsense content (“brainrot”), the institutionalization of paranoia, and of conspiratorial reason. These are the contemporary stakes that define the article’s experiment with the Burroughsian ethos.

Finally, beyond theorizing theft and the joke as a speculative approach to writing and ethics, “Finishing Burroughs…” also performs a brief demonstration. It applies the Burroughsian disposition to the local context of Russian propaganda, disinformation, and nationalist (patriotard) ideology.

The task of “Jests of the Infinite: Introduction to David Foster Wallace” is to mark some key aspects within the thought of the contemporary author David Foster Wallace. The main goal of the article is to open a conceptual field where the texts of a little known within the local context author could be discussed, analysed and criticised.

It is in this sense that the article is explicitly introductory and therefore limited not only to Wallace’s most famous work – the 1000+ pages maximalist novel “Infinite Jest” — but also to its title. Thus, what “Jests of the Infinite” presents is a speculative reading of the novel’s title, which is a quote from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. It is through this speculative reading that the article explores some of Wallace’s key ideas, themes and positions. Ideas and positions, which trace and weave together the fields of contemporary philosophy (both analytic and continental), Lacanian psychoanalysis and mathematics. So, what article еxplicates is how the mentioned fields can be found already within the title of Wallace’s maximalist novel. And furthermore, how such an explication opens the possibility for an interesting rethinking of modern culture’s constitutive tragedy (Hamlet) and also how it can ground the dynamic conceptual space for Wallace’s thought.

Last but not least, after the explication of the title, which will focus mainly on the concepts of the “jest” and the “infinite”, the article concludes with marking a specific counter-intuitive relation between Wallace’s thought and literary project and the philosophy of Alain Badiou whose project regards the fields of psychoanalysis and mathematics as crucial for the creation of a rigorous and operative contemporary ontology