the sinister science: it’s alive!

Eight years ago, I split my blogging life in two. One blog, Notes from the Sinister Quarter, for my research into the Situationist International, as well as other related left-communist and post-situationist writings. The other blog, work & days of the antyphayes, for my stuff on science fiction, poetry, “creative” writing, collages, etc.

Since then, I’ve finished my PhD (on the Situationist International, available here) and reached an impasse (or three) with my blogs. Updates are few and far between, and a certain inertia has pervaded my interest and intentions for them.

So, in an effort to start again on a higher level, and so in a relentlessly Hegelian spirit, here’s the sinister science, enthusiasm revived and raring to go. Or so I tell myself.

On, through, by way of the sinister science I’ll tear down the walls between sf and the SI. Literally–“ROAR!“–as I plan on writing on the Situationists and science fiction; figuratively, because this wall does not, in fact, exist at all: everything is afflicted by the sinister science, and the sinister science afflicts all.

And in any case, we’re now prepared for just such a pandemic.

So why is it called the sinister science? Stay tuned.

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The photograph above, of the Situationist Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, is taken from internationale situationniste, no. 2, December 1958, page 29. It was accompanied with a quote from Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle‘s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 1686). The quote in question–“And the heat to which they are accustomed is so excessive that what we have here in the heart of Africa would be enough to freeze them” —is from a section in which the inhabitants of the planet Mercury are discussed. I will return to the eminently science fictional content of Fontenelle and the association of this quote with the Situationist Pinot-Gallizio in a later post.

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