Reading and Living the (Im)Material Movement of Sense: Jonathan Basile’s The Library of Babel and Xin Liu’s A Book of Mine

Engaging with unconventional new media, twenty-first century experimental writing practices prompt us to rethink how written texts work and make sense, given their new materialities. This paper opens up this problematic through two case studies: Jonathan Basile’s The Library of Babel (2015- ), an artwork that uses computer algorithms to generate a Borgesian library containing all possible pages written with the characters of the English alphabet; and Xin Liu’s A Book of Mine (2019-2020), a project that presents the artist’s entire genome, written in base pairs, as a print-on-demand series of books.
To explore how we may understand sense in light of these two different works of contemporary experimental literature, I engage critically with Gilles Deleuze’s theory of sense, positioning the problematic of sense in relation to the passage between virtuality and actuality as formulated by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition (1994). The paper contends that The Library of Babel and A Book of Mine allow us to reformulate the Deleuzian framework and reconsider the stakes of the (de)construction of embodied subjectivity in the context of contemporary technologies.