Simon Evnine is a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, in Florida, USA. Besides working on Batman memes, he is interested in social ontology and the philosophy of language. You can visit his website, simonevnine.com, to find information on his previous books and papers, among other things.
[T]hese reflections are philosophical and picaresque, sarcastic and
explanatory, literary and analytical, visual and discursive,
musical and rabbinical, fragmentary and unified, continuous and
interrupted. Kierkegaard meets Calvino meets auto-theory.
Susanna Siegel, Harvard University, author of The Rationality of
Perception
[A] book about representation, pastiche, logic, Judaism,
psychoanalysis, shame, music, Batman, and the characters we play in
attempting to understand ourselves. It's a meticulous, midrashic,
imaginative, funny, insouciant, sincere piece of work. Part of the
joy of philosophy is the experience of trying on someone else's
vocabulary, concerns, convictions, and habits of reasoning, and
seeing how our own are transformed in the process. I think I have
never read anything that is so full of this joy.
Ian Olasov, CUNY, author of Ask a Philosopher: Answers to Your Most
Important and Most Unexpected Questions
Evnine himself is certainly Jewishly literate, but "Evnine" the
commentator is in another league entirely, a great Rabbi of the
generation. I have tried to contact the real Evnine to discover
something of the identity of Evnine the commentator, but all I
received was an instructive slap! A Certain Gesture: Evnine's
Batman Meme Project and Its Parerge! is funny and profound and
profoundly funny.
Rabbi Samuel Lebens, University of Haifa, author of The Principles
of Judaism
Imagine a joke that begins, "Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
and Bruce Wayne walk into a Yeshiva...." and you will glimpse what
awaits you in A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and
Its Parerga!. Astonishingly creative, intellectually rich, and
personally intimate, Evnine's text shatters the boundaries of
conventional philosophical writing, to enchanting effect.
David Livingstone Smith, University of New England, author of
Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization and
Approaching Psychoanalysis: An Introductory Course
On display are Evnine's remarkable erudition and wit but also his
insight, his sensibility, and his vulnerabilities. Evnine plunges
so deep, we reach what may be the common origin of the psyche's
sadistic and masochistic impulses; a minute later, we are taken to
rarefied air where Tarksi's theory of truth resides. This is the
joint work of a philosophy professor and the young boy the
professor once was. We are made privy to repressed desires but
discover also that the voyeuristic pleasure an observer may get in
such cases is mixed with the pain of recognizing ourselves in the
movements of another person's bared soul.
Evnine's exploration is personal, but like the best personal
explorations, it illuminates human psychology - our psychology.
Iskra Fileva, University of Colorado, Boulder, author of The
Philosopher's Diaries at Psychology Today
The memes are presented as strange and opaque and as urgently in
need of the background against which they might show up as funny or
even intelligible; the surrounding commentary supplies the missing
context. In this way the book makes art happen, right before our
eyes, for what is art but this very kind of opportunity to make the
passage from not getting it to getting it? That it is the artist's
life - from his work as a philosopher and a musician, his
psychoanalysis, his Jewishness and Englishness, embarrassing
memories of childhood and accidental encounters on social media -
that supplies the needed background is what makes this book so
intimate, even if always dizzyingly ironic, so generous, even if
also challenging.
Alva Noë, UC Berkeley, author of Strange Tools: Art and Human
Nature
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