REVIEW // From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair

From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair
Simon O’Sullivan
Goldsmiths Press, 2024. £32 (paperback).

Having published three books in 2024, Simon O’Sullivan commented in interview that he attempts to write the same book over and over.¹ It is perhaps a self-deprecating take by the philosopher, artist, and prolific author, who in From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair returns to old friends: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Across fourteen essays, he offers novel takeaways from the content and form of their work.

In them, O’Sullivan addresses the four themes of the collection’s title through reflections on schizoanalysis (‘A Thousand Devices’), performance art (‘Notes on Performance Fiction’), and his own teaching practice (‘On Teaching and Writing as Care and Repair’). Structured in two parts, the first presents a more traditional adherence to the essay genre, in which O’Sullivan asks how fiction as a device can perform and destabilise fictions of the self—and, in doing so, how it might trigger changes in perspective, opening up new possibilities for experiencing bodies, the world, and time. Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis presents one such device, but other compelling foci quickly emerge over case studies ranging from artificial intelligence and neuroscience to magic and the occult. In the second part, O’Sullivan offers more personal reflections, moving ‘from academia and art to other worlds and to my subjective experience within them’.²

The essays emerged in response to the writing process for O’Sullivan’s novel The Ancient Device, also published last year. O’Sullivan therefore developed the text by moving from fiction to non-fiction before adding theoretical sources to cushion these ideas. His form reflects this process: citations are left to endnotes, where they elaborate on, rather than support, his own theses. Despite an admiration for, say, Georges Bataille’s present first-person narrator, he warns us that this volume remains an academic text for the most part.³ Each of the tightly structured essays is preceded by situating or explanatory words of introduction, and followed by a more allusive coda. In many ways, the book begins to perform its own theory.

Early on, O’Sullivan establishes the relationship between the nested fictions that constitute our reality and nested time loops. Rather than linear—predominantly western, modern—understandings of time, he draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, ancestor worship, and artificial intelligence to speculate on retro-causal time frames. These might allow us to delve into the distant past or future for new fictions. The appeal and success of O’Sullivan’s book lies in his ability to synthesise such complex and disparate themes. Nor is he afraid of repeating himself. I counted over sixty variations on the phrase ‘as mentioned above’, while ‘to repeat the point’ appears twenty times. Through these repetitions, O’Sullivan enacts the time loops discussed. For instance, while his application of Bataille’s base materialism and Ray Brassier’s nemocentric subject to Black subjectivities initially seems superficial in that it could also apply to a number of marginalised identities, it begins to sharpen his and his readers’ lens to explorations of Black futurist time in subsequent essays. Hence, while they stand alone and could be read in any order, these essays are best read chronologically. O’Sullivan does the jumping around for us, making connections, foreshadowing, and harking back to earlier themes throughout.

O’Sullivan implicitly calls for less dualistic thinking, preferring one that is more whole, more plural and, as emerges in the second part of his book, more healed. He dethrones fictions of the human through his engagement with beyond-human time and landscape.

Yet in a book that otherwise so elegantly traverses subjects (and subjectivities), the ‘magic’ of his title seems curiously left behind in the first half of his work. While in ‘Part Two’ the author provides us with the definition of magic arrived at with students while teaching a seminar on Occulture, and relates witchcraft to practices of care, his call for more imaginative connections might have benefitted from a stronger foundation of magic as a technology in ‘Part One’.⁴ The analysts he cites were themselves of course influenced by esotericism, from Freud’s early comparisons of psychoanalysis with magic to Jung’s lifelong personal and professional fascination with the occult.⁵

Yet in distinction to psycho- and schizo-analysis, which O’Sullivan compares to the self-transformation and self-determination of ‘magick’ as defined by English master magicians Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, I wonder if further engagement with (less white, less masculine) magical practice might move beyond theories of the self to the care and repair O’Sullivan finds in his own practice, such as the Afro-Caribbean cosmologies he implicitly refers to in discussions on landscape and in quotations of Sylvia Wynter.⁶ However, we have been promised these in a forthcoming book: a sequel to the 2019 Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, once again in collaboration with David Burrows. The writers already discussed the poetry of Sun Ra in the 2019 text, while the work of Audre Lorde and Ifi Amadiume, or more recently Rita Indiana and Marques Redd, now springs to mind. I similarly missed discussion of such texts outside of a western framework that fulfil a ‘need to decolonise our more dominant knowledge systems—including the institution of the university itself’, a lacuna that the artist, academic, and educator Ranjana Thapalyal addresses in Education as Mutual Translation: A Yoruba and Vedantic Interface for Pedagogy in the Creative Arts.⁷

We find ourselves, therefore, looking at other texts to complement this volume of essays, which is no bad thing: perhaps the way O’Sullivan’s scholarly form resists the analysis of occult practices reflects the need for a kind of device specificity, depending on context. His repetitions of themes expressed in different terms—be they medicine, magic, or memory—then come to reflect how the elasticity and multiplicity of language is itself a further nesting of fictions. It helped, too, to read O’Sullivan’s earlier novel as a companion to his essays. In a time loop with which I was familiar by then, they felt like an illustration of the theory, rather than the other way round.

In its defined, consistent structure and self-conscious repetitions, the book becomes the kind of mirror or perspectival device described by the author as required for thinking through, if not quite performing, shifting fictions. Unlike Bataille, Deleuze or Guattari, O’Sullivan has kindly separated his devices into more easily digestible novels, essays, performances (with the group Plastique Fantastique), and seminars. The ability to pick one up and put another down, or to take them out into our worlds—forgive me, our fictions—is then where the author’s magic lies.