Jeremy Fernando
Fellow at The European Graduate School
Biography
Jeremy Fernando (b. 1979) is a Fellow at The European Graduate School.
He sees himself first and foremost as a reader: reading being understood as a relation to an other that occurs prior to any semantic or formal identification; and therefore an event of an encounter with an other. And he works in the intersections of literature, philosophy, and the media; and has been described as having an “erudition and grasp of theory balanced by a playful approach to popular culture and, in real life, a sartorial elan that does, indeed, match his sobriquet.” [1] Much of Fernando’s work also involves the attempt to conceive of writing as scratching (scribere), tearing, opening; which is an attempt at maintaining the question, the quest — movement, journey, trans-, meta- — in what is inscribed. Another register that haunts Fernando’s work is the relationship between terror and thought: for, if choice, decision, judgment, is an inherent part of thinking, this suggests that all attempts to think run the risk of possibly effacing otherness. Responding to his work, the Italian poet Alessandro De Francesco writes: “Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that philosophy should be done ‘dichten’, as poetry. Jeremy Fernando manages to give this program a form, a direction.” [2]
His more than twenty books include Reading Blindly, Living with Art, Writing Death, and in fidelity; and his work has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, and Serbian.
A belief that form and thought are intermingled, quite possibly indivorceable, continually prompts Fernando to attend to different modes of writing, and his work can be found in various places, including journals such as Arte al Límite, Berfrois,CTheory, Full Bleed, and Qui Parle; literary reviewers The Berlin Review of Books and The Singapore Review of Books; and magazines like TimeOut, Prestige, and VICE. Experimenting with other media has led him to film, music, and the visual arts; and his work has been seen in Seoul, Vienna, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In 2006, his short film Ne Kan She Ma (co-written and co-directed with Kenny Png) received the Special Jury Mention at the Sidewalk Cinema Festival in Vienna.
To further explore the relationship between form and thought, in 2011, he co-founded Delere Press with the charcoal artist and writer Yanyun Chen, in an attempt to curate a space in which visual and written texts can converse in equal standing.
More recently, Fernando has been described by Hélène Cixous as “a natural inhabitant of the testament country. But not as a ghost: you seem to be highly alive as you “are” writing death — writing death to death — ” [3]
[1] https://literaryminded.com.au/…