Lisa Robertson

On Reading Adorno : Any book, just by materially existing as a recognizable image of a book in the current disastrous political climate, is already, before having been opened, let alone read, an emblem of melancholy, Adorno suggests.

A City

Novelness: A Conversation with Kate Briggs (summer 2023; published by Granta)

NOVELNESS   Kate Briggs:  Lisa, we first met almost a decade ago, teaching writing together at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. We used to meet first thing at Gare du Nord to get on the 6 a.m.-ish train from Paris to Rotterdam. At that time I was working

Notes, Murmurations: On Notebooks, Coleridge, Kathleen Coburn, Composition across Time (a lecture given in October 2024 at Vancouver Island University)

What I wanted when I began to write is what I still want: a freedom-sensation that could return. I thought poetry could be that thing. With my companions, we called it “that thing”, not daring to define or limit its recognition. It’s less the nominative than the returning part

A smile, recited

Reading book two of the Life of Rancé in the bath this evening, with quiet joy I recognized a small sentence that Roland Barthes once cited in his essay on Chateaubriand’s last book. Some months previously I had read Barthes’beautiful preface with such attentive enthusiasm that although I

dust draft

“this dusty floor the uneasy sea” Virginia Woolf   We’re all of us the fallen material of some dream or another. Whose dreams dreamt us?  Like the houses built from the fallen materials of old walls crumbled, and the walls built of the fallen material of razed houses or long

"the political"

Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason "... for Benjamin "the political" was always overdetermined and never had an autonomous existence. It was deployed in a network of metaphors and myths, in a plurality of languages which held together its extreme moments of violence and the "complementary world" of