Asymmetry founds the tragedy:
reason measures the limits of its models with precision;
it knows more than its moral judgment can bear.
— From the Overture
Reason Under Siege
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From the back cover
Reason remains. Besieged. The plot precedes thought. The side, chosen. The victim, designated. The culprit, named. The sequence of events, its before and its after, severed. Judgment ceases to be the conclusion of the sequence. Facts can survive the loss of the sequence that gives them meaning.
"Under siege" reaches beyond capture and defeat: resistance remains inside the ring. It returns a fact to its sequence. It switches the names and tests the principle. It distinguishes explanation from absolution. It revisits the verdict. Twenty sages appear before the sentence that claims to precede examination. The voice that follows is yours.
Holding to reasons costs more than picking a side.
From the Threshold
This book moves in four movements.
The first three convene fifteen voices:
five interrogate conflict,
five, power,
five, order.
All fifteen enter with a question of their own.
Together they tune the measure by which the book judges.
The interludes change the distance.
Doctrine leaves the voice that formulated it.
It appears as scene, mechanism, and consequence.
With the third movement complete, the path opens.
Axial gathers the tensions of the book.
Vigil convenes the five remaining voices.
Automaton enters a world where mediation learns, selects, and anticipates.
Colloquy seats all twenty voices at one table.
In the fourth movement the voices return.
They no longer expound.
They answer for what the book has left open.
Ten phrases run through the book like strings.
Each was tuned at a different point of tension.
The final index returns to that point.
The diagrams serve another purpose.
They reduce an operation until it can be seen.
The Chorus you have just passed named the twenty voices before explaining them.
The twenty-first seat remains empty.
It belongs to the reader.
Judgment begins
when the sequence opens again.
The Plates
Perhaps the blade keeps cutting through the fog, and in doing so, it regulates.
— Carlos Ott
The book includes unpublished works in graphite and watercolor by the architect Carlos Ott.
About the author
Engineer, doctorate from McGill University. More about the author.
Before you begin
It is written so that you can enter through any chapter, and so that finishing one makes you want to open another.
The condition the book examines, and the word that names it: Why It Is Called Reason Under Siege.
A book that hands over the instrument instead of taking a side: The Detector: Judgment.
A page from the book, as it reads: The Reading That Cannot Fail.
Before I was born, the sentence this book studies had already been carried out in my grandparents’ town: on September 18, 1941, in Širvintos.
2027 · Ikatu
Editions in English and Spanish.
Forthcoming.