What people are saying about A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!

Just as a newspaper holds its form constant while it varies the news content, the author of A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! finds a way to use a single meme in which Batman slaps Robin as a structure for conveying a sequence of reflections. Sometimes alternately, and other times all at once, these reflections are philosophical and picaresque, sarcastic and explanatory,  literary and analytical, visual and discursive, musical and rabbinical, fragmentary and unified, continuous and interrupted. Kierkegaard meets Calvino meets auto-theory. The collision sweeps up some analytic philosophers, an avuncular joke-teller, and other characters who come and go. The pictures provide a rhythm, the captions start a melody, and the commentary improvises with chords, riffs, and surprises. (Susanna Siegel, Harvard University)

A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! is, among other things, an extended exercise in what you’re not supposed to write. If we are told not to explain our jokes, the whole thing is an explanation of the joke. If we’re told to say, at every step, what motivates our choices of topic, the book is gleefully and inexplicably obsessive. It’s a book about representation, pastiche, logic, Judaism, psychoanalysis, shame, music, Batman, and the characters we play in attempting to understand ourselves. It’s a meticulous, midrashic, imaginative, funny, insouciant, sincere piece of work. Part of the joy of philosophy is the experience of trying on someone else’s vocabulary, concerns, convictions, and habits of reasoning, and seeing how our own are transformed in the process. I think I have never read anything that is so full of this joy. (Ian Olasov, CUNY)

To open a volume of the Talmud is to be confronted more by commentary than by any primary source. The Talmud itself is a commentary to the Mishna, which itself is, in some sense or other, a commentary on scripture. The Talmudic text constitutes just one column in the middle of the page, surrounded by later commentaries. On the one side, a commentary by Rashi, the great French exegete. On the other side, a commentary that often comments on Rashi’s comments, by the generation of sages that followed him. Comments on comments on comments. One sometimes wonders, by the time one reaches the depths of insight at the end of this chain of comments, whether the original source was really hiding these treasures, or whether they’ve been smuggled in by the imagination of the commentators themselves. The author of A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! stands in this proud tradition of Jewish commentary. Evnine’s memes are a form of commentary to begin with: social commentary and more. But the author’s commentary on those memes offers so much more depth, in philosophy, psychology, and Torah. Were these treasures really lying in wait, in Evnine’s memes, or has the commentator conjured them up, ex nihilo? Evnine himself is certainly Jewishly literate, but “Evnine” the commentator is in another league entirely, a great Rabbi of the generation. I have tried to contact the real Evnine to discover something of the identity of Evnine the commentator, but all I received was an instructive slap! A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! is funny and profound and profoundly funny. (Rabbi Samuel Lebens, Professor of Philosophy, University of Haifa)

Imagine a joke that begins, “Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Bruce Wayne walk into a Yeshiva….” and you will glimpse what awaits you in A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!. Astonishingly creative, intellectually rich, and personally intimate, Evnine’s text shatters the boundaries of conventional philosophical writing, to enchanting effect. (David Livingstone Smith, author of Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization)