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the complete review - philosophy / literature

Worlds Built to Fall Apart

by
David Lapoujade

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : solid, concise but far-ranging study of Dick's fascinating work

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Como buen discípulo de Gilles Deleuze, Lapoujade no pretende hacer de la vasta literatura de Dick un corpus sistemático, ni proponer claves de lectura exhaustivas y contundentes. Lo que construye con su texto es un horizonte en el que los mundos de la filosofía y de la ciencia ficción se encuentran, colisionan, se alteran, enriqueciéndose mutuamente." - Gustavo Santiago, La Nación

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Worlds Built to Fall Apart takes a look at the work of the great science fiction author Philip K. Dick, with philosopher Lapoujade tackling it largely from a philosophical angle. As he notes at the start, Dick himself maintained that: "all his books revolve around a single problem: What is reality ? What is real ?" -- but as, Lapoujade points out, these worlds are inevitably "fragile and changeable"; centers and everything else do not hold; these are, as the title has it: 'worlds built to fall apart'.
       Showing an easy familiarity with Dick's voluminous output, Lapoujade considers Dick's many forms of reality in eleven chapters, each with a somewhat different focus. He notes, for example, that many of Dick's characters are in some way what would be considered mentally unstable -- schizophrenic and the like --, perceiving or imagining the world differently -- yet with their skewed subjective forms of reality often taking on objective form, becoming 'real', as it were.
       In one chapter he focuses on the basic question:

what is living and what is dead ? How do you distinguish between them ? How do you know that you are alive and not dead ? This question troubles many of Dick's characters: am I alive or am I dead ?

The farther he goes in his writing, the more his worlds cease to follow the laws of any physical world, obeying instead the principles -- the variable principles -- that govern psyches. In this sense, Dick's oeuvre is profoundly idealist. Given a series of inexplicable events, the question is not, what is causing it ? but rather, who is behind all this ?

- M.A.Orthofer, 14 July 2024

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Links:

• University of Minnesota Press publicity page
• Les Éditions de Minuit publicity page
• Cactus publicity page
• Preface by Erik Beranek

• Le blog de Fabien Ribery (French)
• Clarín (Spanish)
• En attendant Nadeau (French)
• La Nación (Spanish)
• philosophie (French)

• Philip K. Dick site
• Philip K. Dick at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
• Philip K. Dick at books and writers

• Faculty page

• A Journey into the Mind of Philip K Dick by Emmanuel Carrère, I am Alive and You are Dead
• See Index of Literary Essays
• See Index of Philosophy books
• See Index of Science Fiction and Fantasy books

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About the Author:

       French philosopher David Lapoujade was born in 1964. he teaches at the Sorbonne.

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© 2024 the complete review

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