Worlds Built to Fall Apart

"Philip K. Dick was not a philosopher, but his novels and other writings pose deep philosophical questions. In this elegant volume, David Lapoujade explores the many worlds that Dick so prodigiously makes and then unmakes. Lapoujade maps the twists and turns of Dick's delirious logic, ever in search of a higher sanity."—Steven Shaviro, author of Fluid Futures: Science Fiction and Potentiality
 

"Reading Philip K. Dick seriously as a more-than-accidental philosopher, David Lapoujade illuminates connections between his novels, stories, interviews, and ‘exegetical’ writings with fluid grace, producing a cascade of insights even for those of us who’ve been reading Dick for decades. What’s more, an adept translation and introductory remarks by Erik Beranek makes this book an entrance into Lapoujade’s own lineage, through William James, Gilles Deleuze, and Étienne Souriau."—Jonathan Lethem, coeditor of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
 

"Worlds Built to Fall Apart is a slim book covering a great deal, pointing readers in various directions but then leaving them to find their own way through the mass of Dick's writing."—The Complete Review

Philosophically analyzing the work of one of the twentieth century’s most popular, and peculiar, science fiction authors

Despite his enduring popularity, Philip K. Dick (1928–1982)—whose short stories and novels were adapted into or influenced many major films and television shows, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, The Truman Show, and The Man in the High Castle—has long been a marginal figure in American literature, even in the science fiction genre he helped revolutionize. Here, an influential French philosopher offers a major new perspective on an author who was known as much for his eccentricities and excesses as for his writing. For David Lapoujade, it is precisely the many ways in which Dick’s works seem to hover on the brink of losing all touch with reality that make him such a singular figure, both as a sci-fi author and as a thinker of contemporary life. 

In Worlds Built to Fall Apart, Lapoujade defines sci-fi as a way of thinking through the creation of worlds and argues that Dick does so by creating worlds that fall rapidly to pieces. Whatever his mechanism to bring this about (drugs or madness, alien satellite transmissions or encroaching parallel universes), the effect is always to reveal reality to be a construction, in which certain people determine what appears as real to the rest of us. Orienting Dick within philosophy and drawing connections to a wide variety of other thinkers and artists, this remarkable reading shows how he proposes unstable, fluctuating futures in which tinkering with reality has become the best means of resisting total control.

Engaging with most of Philip K. Dick’s published works, as well as with several of his essays and his notorious psychic autobiography The Exegesis, Lapoujade hones in on the “war of the psyches” that underlies Dick’s critique of reality. He puts Dick’s work in conversation with a vast array of subjects—from cybernetics to schizoanalysis, and from Pop art to David Lynch, J. G. Ballard, and William S. Burroughs—revealing Dick’s oeuvre to comprise a profound reality defined by artifice, precarity, and control.

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David Lapoujade is professor of philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, whose numerous books include The Lesser Existences: Étienne Souriau, an Aesthetics for the Virtual and Powers of Time: Versions of Bergson (both from Minnesota).

Erik Beranek is a writer and editor and has translated works by Jacques Rancière, Étienne Souriau, Michel Foucault, and David Lapoujade.

Contents

Translator’s Preface

Introduction: On Delirium

1. Worlds

2. Causality

3. The Thinking Thing

4. On the Fantastic

5. Entropy and Regression

6. Those Who Possess Worlds

7. Artificial Worlds

8. The Digital Human (or, What Is an Android?)

9. Hunting and Paranoia

10. Between Life and Death

11. Bricolage (or, The Random Variable)

Notes

Bibliography