Back on July 21st, 2021, I wrote the following post on the Minus Plato blog (www.minusplato.com):
This isn’t really a post; it is a reminder; a memorial. As Minus Plato prepares for its 10 year anniversary (and potential conclusion) next year in May 2022, I am thinking a lot about that ‘Minus’ and what it means (and, specifically, what it means for me). On reading Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, I was struck by (trembled before?) his description of ‘the scholar of the future’ as someone who is willing to listen to and talk to ghosts. At the same time, I have been thinking about the library (and its double, the scholar – c.f Daniel Dennett ‘A Scholar is a Library’s Way of Making Another Library’).
▪ The Minus Plato Library
▪ The Empty Days Library
▪ Potu Faitautusi
This is all I can write here for now, but I may return to add to this post as a kind of hauntology of the archive of Minus Plato. Possibly after 2022.
What followed were over 200 daily posts narrated by a library’s ghost (it’s a long story) as the Minus Plato blog, platform and persona edges towards its conclusion on May 4th, 2022, 10 years to the day after it began. I am typing these words on the last day of the collaborative exhibition Whisper into a Hole (in partnership with Indigo Gonzales, Anna Freeman and Rebecca Copper) that took place at the Hopkins Hall Gallery at Ohio State University between April 4-13, 2022. The heart of the exhibition was a library, the Potu faitautusi/Reading Room (mentioned above), and so it seems fitting that during the run of the exhibition I would be feverishly compiling blogposts that gave voice to another library into a book. This book – comprising two volumes – is a record of this moment before Minus Plato disappears, while the creation of SHARE THIS: PRESS and its presence in your library, gesture towards a future beyond Minus Plato. Or not. So much of Minus Plato remains unfinished, but that is the point.
– Minus Plato aka Richard Finlay Fletcher, April 13th, 2022
Click the images above & below to read the two volumes of Our Library of the Future: A Ghost’s Story.
