Goldsmith, Kenneth: I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness

Columbia University Press, paperback

Publication Date: June 27, 2023

Publisher Marketing: “My entire poetic production is founded upon Wittgenstein’s later writings. Although it has sat on my shelf for decades, I never actually read the Tractatus. But I always loved the idea of it; I am a conceptual writer, after all.”–– Kenneth Goldsmith

A major philosophical work, one of the most important written in the twentieth century, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s attempt to conquer reality through logic. Written as a series of precisely numbered propositions, it elucidates the relationship of language to logic and to reality, ending with an infamous statement of breathtaking clarity: “What can be said at all, can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over to silence”.

Originally conceived as part of ERIS’s Marginalia series of hand-annotated classics, this special edition consists of sixty-two original artworks inspired by the famous tract. Collages, drawings, sketches, handwritten comments, blacked-out and blanched text, shopping receipts and scans-within-scans—these are some of the techniques that appear in the pages of this book.

Kenneth Goldsmith, on his maiden voyage into the unforgiving rigour of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, shows no appetite for timidity. His works, placed side-by-side with the original text, reveal the breadth and depth not just of its original author’s genius, but also of the intervening artist’s creative fervour. This is a unique book, beautifully presented in large bound format, and including a handwritten afterword by the artist.