Diagramming in the margins of philosophy

Abstract

Abstract This critical reflection emerges at a tangent from a concurrent creative practice-led research project into the diagram at the intersection of art praxis and post-continental philosophy. It was provoked by a realization that the diagrammatic was in operation at all levels of the project and core to its methodology as well as its content. The following is the consequence of a resistance to the assumed ‘transparency’ of the academic procedure of a literature review, wherein the process of reading is understood to be an instrumental form of information mining. It is a meta-inquiry into how drawing diagrams in the process of reading may open a new register for thought. The analysis takes an auto-ethnographic form, with my own experience of reading and autographic marking-up on paper-based texts – as forms of ‘drawing on text’ – offered as case-study for reflection.