Jeremy Fernando is the last romantic thinker in Singapore.

 ~ Denisa Kera, back cover blurb to Writing Skin

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that philosophy should be done ‘dichten’, as poetry. Jeremy Fernando manages to give this program a form, a direction.

Alessandro De Francesco, back cover blurb to Requiem for the Factory

Your book brilliantly explores the possibility that love, like art, might offer us that most exciting and creative thing: a transitional space. Love, your book suggests, assumes its own life, independent of its subjects. Your arguments are rigorous but your premises are cosmic.

~ Chris Kraus, inside front cover blurb to in fidelity

This work is responsible for initiating a new generation of reflections that make our philosophical certitudes tremble. Grappling with the implications of non-phenomenal reading, Jeremy Fernando scans the works of outstanding thinkers whose insight weighs heavily on our relation to language and world. Fernando locates the constitutive blindness that stalls the ethical imperative while giving it new meaning.

 ~ Avital Ronell, back cover blurb to Reading Blindly

Jeremy Fernando’s characteristic writing lures the reader into thinking they know more than they do. Like the space necessary for touch to occur, a secret is shared between the text and the reader.

~ Cera Y.J. Tan, back cover blurb to S/Ž

In the dark times in which we live, the spaces of art and culture are, without question, the last remaining spaces of freedom and resistance. It is there, and only there, that we can breathe. Jeremy Fernando's brilliant manifesto, alongside Natalie Christian Tan's striking illustrations, provides a model for breathing in a world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so. Fernando demonstrates how to resist with ideas, and most importantly, poetry. These stimulating exercises in breathing stimulate me, move me, touch me, and illuminate me. Resistance is possible. Breathe.

~ Alfredo Jaar, back cover blurb to Resisting Art

In his manifesto of sorts, Jeremy Fernando stages how art lies in the gap between the frame and the viewer.

 ~ Slavoj Žižek, back cover blurb to Nine Rings Around A Pit

There is something Shakespearean in a reader's ability to write while reading. We have to deeply thank Jeremy Fernando for having given us a sensitive, rhythmical and clever book about the glorious birth of a voice in everyone. He helps us see in the dark.

~ Philippe Beck, back cover blurb to For, the pleasure of the text

Davantage un geste barthésien qu'une simple collection de significations ou de pensées stabilisées, cette œuvre de Fernando présente au lecteur une véritable phénoménologie de ruptures et d'écarts et lui offre un voyage magnifiquement stimulant dans les expériences et l'inconnaissabilité fondamentale de l'art.

~ Anders Kølle, back cover blurb to Vivre avec l’art

Jeremy Fernando is one of those rare thinkers who, like a magician, has the capacity to turn reading into an act of dreaming. Yet, in leading us to think and to dream, Fernando, ever Heidegger's idea of a true teacher, never directs what is to happen in this dream, leads in a way that makes us, the readers, forget that he leads. This is the genius and magic of Fernando. In masterfully leading his audience into his dream, or his tale, without taking the position of the leader as such, he lets free his text to become not just his or my text, but as part of a tertiary entity. It becomes our memory, our dream, and our thoughts. The porosity of this act of ‘thinking with’ the other is an act that discourages primal fathers, figures of total authority, to be born.  

~ Daena Funahashi, back cover blurb to On thinking with

Fernando's gathering of scatterings in the form of mini-meditations unfolds the weaving of textus that makes writing possible and makes death comprehensible in all of its paradoxical mystery and awe-ful presence. His is a book of catalysts: use them with care.

~ Ryan Bishop, in response to Writing Death

Jeremy Fernando's prose — or perhaps we should say, poetry — builds effortlessly on the traces of deconstructive thought, feminist insights, and transgressive English literature. Being itself only hesitantly devoted to the conventions of academic writing, Fernando manages to show that faith and loyalty, but also doubt and disloyalty, are always co-operative. In doing so, Fernando's writing captures the essentially beautiful aspect of the hopeful awaiting and the necessary blindness that love, as well as such a writing, engenders, as it seeks to open up to the mysteries of human existence and even of existence as such.

~ Ingrid M. Hoofd, back cover blurb to On fidelity; or will you still love me tomorrow …

Jeremy Fernando channels a wide array of voices to get to the heart of what it means to be transformative. Instead of crises internal or otherwise, Fernando, by way of writers and thinkers as diverse as Cervantes, Hamacher, Baudrillard, Bizot, and others, discovers possibilities — that what might at first sight seem like self-imposed hampering impulses are in fact liberating gestures. For Fernando, self-imaginings are not imaginings at all but authentic epistemological and ontological re-constitution. These are to be the intent legacies of all our breakdowns and recoveries. 

~ Lim Lee Ching, back cover blurb to je me touche

There are no encounters in theory, it is said — for theory, whatever its claims, cannot open to the event. As Jeremy Fernando demonstrates masterfully, theory must become reading to give the encounter to thought

~ Christopher Fynsk, back cover blurb to Reading Blindly

Jeremy Fernando's The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death calls for the ability to respond to intentional death. It is a brilliant study about the blank spot within the becoming of teleology, and the game of 'finitude'.

~ Hubertus von Amelunxen, back cover blurb to The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death

Entre rodeos de citas, pinturas y dibujos que se entrometen y desdibujan los formalismos literarios, "A ghost never dies" es antes que un libro, una promesa. A ghost never dies explora cómo momentos, experiencias, alegrías, lamentos, risas, anhelos, canciones, duelos, obras de arte, la miríada de encuentros posibles, se han escrito en nosotros — en formas que permanecen veladas aún, que ocasionalmente brillan y que vuelven hacia nosotros como fragmentos para ser leídos. Toma la forma de una conversación entre dos textos — los garabatos de Jeremy Fernando y los bocetos de Lucía Sbardella — y, en esta danza, intenta traer historias de futuros; esto es, de pasados que no han sucedido del todo y que continúan acechando el presente que vivimos. Nuestras imágenes. Nuestras palabras. Un alegato por las existencias menores.

~ Dario Época, on a ghost never dies

Jeremy Fernando's On Fidelity; or, will you still love me tomorrow is a living, loving practice of intimacy with theory. Tentative because it cannot be otherwise, On Fidelity teaches that we are always in unfolding relationships (of all sorts) with concepts, and words, and time, and others. It provides a welcome shimmering to faithfulness and the languages of love and imagination.

~ Joe Dumit, back cover blurb to On Fidelity

The book is written in the mystical prose Fernando is so well known for. Fernando's style helps the work to come to life so that many of the ideas he writes of are not only expressed as ink on paper (as if our reading of the text had some form of direct 1:1 access to the text), but are performed through the very interaction between the text and the reader — the text constantly attempts to write on your body, to leave a piece of it with you as much as you leave a piece of you with it, and Fernando's prose accomplishes this by constantly veiling and unveiling, not showing us glimpses of other possibilities yet to be actualized and shutting them off in our face, but rather by reminding us of the specters of these possibilities that constantly haunt our own reading of his text. The work is a short read at around ~150 pages, but do not be deceived and believe that you will be able to sit down and read it for an afternoon and walk away, because this is where the beauty of the work resides. Despite the work's short length it will make you want to come back to it and reread it again and again, and not only to come back to it, but even go back to reread every text you've read with a new frame of mind, to allow every text you've read to be read again so it reads into you as much as you read into it, so you can once again feel the struggle between reader and text and yet again come out changed for it.

~ Julian LaRosa, review of Reading Blindly

Jeremy Fernando invites the reader to choose, to drift with the text, to close your eyes, reopen them, and question what it is to know.

~ Jasmine Seah, review of [Click]

[Click] takes us on a little meander through reflections of thought and light, and the loveliest of quotes and shapes of words ... the perfect accompaniment for contemplative nights.

~ Koh Tsin Zhen, review of [Click]

Jeremy Fernando is a humanist and a literary critic. With a dogged refusal of any certainties, his aim is freedom of interpretation. His task master is Werner Hamacher, and, not unlike Hamacher, his ultimate domain is the pragmatism of Austin and Searle, and perhaps even H.P. Grice … While he acknowledges Hamacher's dictum that ‘understanding is in want of understanding’, Fernando analyses the substance (sub stare) of understanding, a sublunary standing under, that giant process of waiting, like Vladimir and Estragon from which conditional felicity can never be absented, even for a while. It also puts Fernando in a line with various schools of philosophy, from existentialism right back to Kant and Hume. As we may glean from his treatment of the suicide bomber, Fernando does not shun controversy—but most controversial, perhaps, is his chapter on relationality, where he parts company with the likes of Kant and states, boldly, that ‘if the possibility of relationality precedes the subject, it follows that this is a relationality that precedes cognition’. Relationality as a pre-cognitive phenomenon, and not an integral part of cognition itself. If relationality is pre-cognitive, then ultimately all we are left to say is ‘perhaps’.

~ Peter van de Kamp, review of The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death

Of all the thousands of words written to explain Boris Johnson’s behaviour, yours have achieved the strongest effect — with erudite contempt! Bravo, maestro …

~ Dominic Newbould, on ‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown’

It is against the inclination for a returned word that Jeremy Fernando invites, even urges us to hold on to and thereby risk the promise of the other by letting go, in the sense that the words in every exchange may proceed from and go ahead of us … The test that Fernando offers the reader — and it is also one that surfaces in every act of reading — is a test of patience, where one is called not just to wait and see, but more importantly to wait and listen.

~ Joel Gn, review of On fidelity; or, will you still love me tomorrow …

Tackling the question « what is the weight of a painting? » Jeremy Fernando employs his usual expansive approach to lead his readers down a rabbit hole. Beginning with said question and meandering to ruminations on death, Fernando — with characteristically easy languor, as though chatting with friends at a bar — draws on a broad range of thinkers such as Plato, Georges Bataille, Socrates, Hélène Cixous, Adonis, Sara Baume, Werner Hamacher, Catherine Breillat, and Meatloaf, amongst others. Fernando will tell you that it is not so much the destination as it is the journey; in effect, this book invites you to focus less on actually getting at the answer, but to enjoy the literal and metaphorical twists and turns the book takes you on. Better still, Fernando’s text is accompanied by photo reproductions of artworks that make the trip only more remarkable. A beautiful book for any kind of day, weather, and time.

~ Junni Chen, back cover blurb to the feather of Ma’at

At the heart of Fernando’s approach is the exaltation of citation and annotation: each one constitutes in itself a longing to remember and to relate, manifesting as an act of translation, for it gathers something from ‘there’ and carries it over ‘here,’ where it quickens, as much as it’s quickened by, a new fit and form. What he takes from other texts in order to gift to, and through, this text Fernando sees as a waltz between two integrities, charging, electrically, one with the other — between what can be known and what still resists being known, what has been expressed and what continues to elude expression. And while both share a certain riveted centre of common ground, of contexts touching and tangling, complete communication (as in reach) or comprehension (as in grasp), with its companion air of finality, is an undesirable impossibility. Where a citation might lead, and nothing but unnecessary might follow, or vice versa, cannot fully be clear simply because it should not be — and Fernando performs this Janusian dance with confidence and compassion.

 ~ Adibah Mustafa, back cover blurb to nothing but unnecessary

I’ve saved the most esoteric for last; Jeremy Fernando’s ‘my dream is yours’ is not analytical as are the others. In his forward, Kearney himself wonders if it fits. It not only fits; it exemplifies. After providing an abstract to get him through the academic door, Fernando proceeds to a surreal tour-de-force, a drama divided into five acts, mirroring on one level the “soap opera for men” that is pro-wrestling. The framing device is of a WWE performer in the process of demolishing his opponent and winning his match and thus the worship and adoration of the crowd. Along the way we get a glimpse into the US cultural psyche that does indeed revel in the cult of personality and the open yet unspoken knowledge that the fix is indeed in, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. United Statesians’ love of larger-than-life, trash-talking con artists is here in spades, with some pungent commentary on contemporary political figures (one in particular) and the whole thing is interspersed with quotes from wrestlers and French philosophers and snatches of song lyrics from Lana del Rey to the Carpenters. It’s a pop culture cage match, an intellectual battle royale.

~ Chris Sorochin, review of 100 Years of the American Dream

What a wonderful book you have written! So rich in beauty and in original aesthetic reflections. I appreciate how your writing, all your words, are chosen with tongue and ears (or perhaps skin!) —  always sensitive to links and connections between languages, between meanings, between etymologies, bringing out the possibilities for thinking across thresholds, making new constellations. I also appreciate how art in your writing remains trembling, uncertain, often unsettling, bringing as many shadows as it brings light, making art and one´s conversations with art an ontologically risky affair — far from any bourgeois salon´s — or for that matter, more contemporary exhibitions — happy confirmations of the ego. I think your term « immanent transcendence » is very helpful in respecting matter, weight, substance, but also in thinking the step beyond, le pas au-delà. Congratulations on this rich book of yours! It was a great joy to read it.

~ Anders Kølle, in response to The feather of Ma’at

A meal so lovingly prepared you wish and wonder if its words, too, are edible. If ‘abandonment is a form of freedom’ then time is at once precise and indefinite — like the memory of sherry buzzing on your tongue. And if food is love, and love is food, simple ingredients just won’t do — you need the magic of Jeremy Fernando’s language and Sara Chong’s paintings alongside a slab of butter and a goblet of gin. This body of work tastes like a stiff Irish coffee on a cold Sunday morning — goes down easy, and you don’t know you need it until you’re knocked out.

~ Brinda Gulati, blurb to Dinner for One

I love the gesture in which recipes, which are, in a sense, already written in verse become playful poems; and poems, in turn, become recipes for sparkling encounters with tasting and eating, with reading and thinking. And, can I just say: I fell in love with your totalitarian broccoli head on the spot! It is hard to keep the coffee in the mug or the broccoli on the plate when such hilarious figures show up for dinner! And Sara Chong’s paintings — with their empathic brushstrokes and her painterly wisdom — serve as a most-illuminating reminder of what paintings can do that no other media can. How well her palpable, “fleshy” brushstrokes fit together with the flesh of the text! What a great accomplishment to have opened up a space — for thinking, for reading, for tasting — in which desserts and matters of truth, soups and questions of love, start communicating — and have so many beautiful things to say to one another. It is absolutely strange, and it is absolutely delightful, and it makes for a most wonderful adventure.

~ Anders Kølle, blurb to Dinner for One

Jeremy Fernando illuminates the world as fiction …

~ Neil Murphy, back cover blurb to to play, perchance to …

A beautiful book – so many splendid readings of contemporary insanities and eternal difficulties of being. Literary alchemy: turning all this pain and all this madness into literature and thinking, beauty ...

~ Anders Kølle, in response to nothing but unnecessary

In this Kafkaesque world, one never knows what the next page reveals and withholds; and the reader is as baffled, and intrigued, as Jeremy Fernando's protagonist.

~ Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, back cover blurb to Cotton Candy

Playful, funny, musical. Jeremy Fernando invites the reader to wander, to dream, and, while wandering and dreaming, to consider words and how we make them and break them and let them make us break us bind us to each other.

 ~ Yeoh Jo-Ann, back cover blurb to cobalt | white tin oxide | green

On every artist's bookshelf you’ll probably find a well thumbed copy of John Berger’s < Ways of Seeing >, his text on art criticism in which he suggests that the way we see art is informed by what we know. Writer, reader, and artist Jeremy Fernando muses on this concept and discusses that perhaps art lies in the gap between the frame and the viewer, that moment when what you see becomes a work of art. He explores the notion of unknowing, the liminal, the chinks of light which lie in in the shadows and suggests that in order to see art better we should focus on the traces and marks which it leaves behind. That art is simply what remains of one's encounter with it. A beautifully written and illustrated ode to what lies beyond a work of art.

~ Clare Elson, in response to Nine Rings Around A Pit — an art manifesto, of sorts

It is almost unbearably beautiful, a cacophonous harmony, a (to lift a phrase from Dan Hicks) euphonious wail/whale. I love it.

~ Ira Allen, in response to cobalt | white tin oxide | green

A beautiful and deeply moving book, full of insights and precious thoughts extracted from the hopes and hopelessness of love. The depths of doubts and despair are carried to the absolute heights of expression, making of each fall and abyss a peak of poetry and writing.

~ Anders Kølle, in response to I wish we were lovers

To look at art, which I do, a lot, is also to engage with it, to allow it to leave its mark and to be open to it quite subtly (and sometimes quite obviously) changing you. In his book, < the feather of Ma’at > Jeremy Fernando invites the reader to pull up a chair, order a drink and sit awhile to ponder the ‘weight of a painting’, what is it that it gives, what is it that it takes and what exactly does it leave behind. Can a painting leave one’s heart weighty or weightless? Fernando will take you on a journey; a hop, skip and a jump of joy as he leads you through the world of a painting introducing thinkers, writers and artists along the way. He will draw you to the ancients giving Plato and Socrates a moment to speak. He muses on Breillat, Bataille and Cixous then allows Meatloaf, Lennon and Depeche Mode to interject, to ‘reach out and touch faith!’ Next he converses with the painters themselves, with Rothko and Rego and creates moments of reflection and illumination with the paintings of Yanyun Chen, Sara Chong, and Ashley YK Yeo, amongst others, allowing his text and their images to play a little, to interact and take time to get to know each other. In the end, he will bring you full circle, back to the beginning, a little lighter or heavier or maybe the scales are perfectly balanced. But you will have been around the world and you will be changed. Which is the whole point.

~ Clare Elson, response to the feather of Ma’at on ‘Snaps Art and Artists’

Composed of quotes, notes, writings, messages, and drawings, < I wish we were lovers > moves tentatively but eagerly across these pages to explore, and finally minimize, the distance between ‘you’ and ‘I’ and thought and feeling. 

~ Chris Kraus, back cover blurb to I wish we were lovers

A brilliant book on the artist Gabriela Golder, on the magic of photography and writing, and on writing with light in all its poetical and philosophical dimensions. The book places many old questions of temporality and relationality under a bright new light – making things visible and thoughts possible that were previously hiding beyond words.

~ Anders Kølle, review of un oeil d’or — how to start a fire with Gabriela Golder