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Passionate Being: Language, Singularity and Perseverance

Lomax’s third sole-author book, Passionate Being, explores the non-division between practice and theory, criticism and creativity. Formal experiments bring attention to the action of language and its presuppositions. Lomax proposes language as an experience in the world rather than a means of representation.

The book extends Lomax’s research into the written image and the transposition of writing into the repertoire of visual art as originally set out in her previous books, Writing the Image (2000) and Sounding the Event (2005). Passionate Being integrates an inventive play of citation and annotation that embodies academic and scholarly reference. Written in the first and second person, the book pursues the core questions ‘What can you say?’ and ‘What is it to be an example?’ Lomax’s research into the peculiar existence of the example (through using concrete examples to show what examples do and, moreover, drawing upon Giorgio Agamben’s insights into the example and ‘paradigma’) underpins her writing and gives insight into key ideas on community and presupposition of the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The book concludes with the formation of a necessity – an ‘ethos’ for living and thinking – that is the ‘dividing of the division’ (Saint Paul) between the linguistic and the non-linguistic, of having the word (humanitas) and not having the word (animalitas).

Lomax has given numerous related public talks and lectures, including ‘Beginning, ends and middles’, Writing and Critical Thinking In Architecture 2 symposium (2011) and ‘A conversation with myself’, Writing as Architecture open seminar (2010), both at the Architectural Association, London; ‘Writers in conversation’, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010); and a workshop at Birkbeck, University of London (2010). Lomax’s short text, ‘Beginning’, was published in Inside, a newspaper printed by YH485 Press, Nottingham (2010).