From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair

 

The practices of magic and contemporary myth-making in relation to landscape, performance, and writing.

From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair is a two-part book bringing together fourteen essays broadly concerned with the “fiction of the self” and with practices and explorations beyond that fiction. Each part of the book approaches this theme from a different angle.

The first part, entitled “On Magic and Myth-Work,” deals with practices of transformation and with contemporary myth-making in relation to landscape, performance, and writing. The second part, “On Care and Repair,” gathers together essays that are more personal, but that also look to various technologies (or devices) of self-care alongside ideas of collaboration and the collective. Crucial throughout this exploration are questions of agency and self-narration, but also how these connect to larger issues around historical trauma, neoliberalism, and ecological crisis.

The essays reference many other texts and fellow travellers, and also draw on the author's own experiences (and teaching) within various art and theory worlds, as well as with performance, magical practices, gaming, and Buddhism.

Charting a path between the sophistication of high theory and the nuance of cultural analysis, Simon O’Sullivan has tackled one of the most urgent problems of the twenty-first century: how do we imagine a future beyond the violence of the present, while maintaining a sense of care for the limits of the present.  If utopia is all too often an alibi for the harms of the present, there might nevertheless be forms of myth that take seriously the risks and perils of dreaming.

Writing with lightness and compassion, Simon O’Sullivan details practical ways we can work at loosening up the self in order to resist the patterns of power and better enter into salubrious combinations with others. The many inspiring “devices” O’Sullivan describes, with a ready-to-hand connotation of DIY—or rather DIT, Do It Together—include dreaming; meditation; performing fiction into reality; and reimagining witchcraft as care for one another other and for our planet.

Simon O'Sullivan

Simon O’Sullivan is Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Goldsmiths. His other most recent books are On Theory-Fiction and Other Genres (Palgrave, 2024); The Ancient Device (Triarchy Press, 2024); and (with David Burrows) Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). He is also part of the collaborative “performance fiction’’ Plastique Fantastique (see www.plastiquefantastique.org).