For a fool such as I (Me)
Edition & text for the book published by Balazsi Gallery
Jack Burton
August 2026
I wonder what those final moments were like. Whether it was this very window. Or perhaps the one next to it.
I have only been to Paris a couple of times. But on my first visit I came to this same place: 17 avenue Niel. The apartment where Gilles Deleuze lived for at least two decades. A site of sustained thought. Wasn’t it he who said that travel unsettles the becoming of writing?
How can that be so true. How can writing break at one point, only to begin again elsewhere, like a rhizome. How completely I have lost the thread of what I was thinking and writing before this trip to meet Jack. In any case, the best introductions are written at the end, by retracing one’s steps.
We like to think that this book has neither beginning nor end. Yet this idea collides with the physical form of the book, as well as the Western way of reading: from left to right and from top to bottom. So then? It becomes a matter of finding the freest possible way of moving through it, generating a smooth territory we can slide across. In short, producing a non-linear narrative: open to doubt and digression, something that runs through all of Jack’s work.
Only he could understand what I meant when I spoke to him about Gilles Deleuze’s Abecedary: an eight-hour interview with Claire Parnet, published—at the philosopher’s request—after his death, in 1996. In it, Deleuze unfolds the core of his thought and his way of being in the world through words, concepts, and, at times, proper names.
I remember becoming obsessed with this abecedary at university, thinking it might have more to do with artistic practice than with philosophy. If we can still trace between them fixed categories based on affects and concepts. It hardly matters. What always drew me in was the porous relation between the two. The change in form that occurs between inhalation and exhalation, the intermediate states.
Then, as with so many things, I forgot about all this. But memory is a kind of capricious archive that sometimes seems to have a will of its own. It folds and unfolds in cycles upon itself. And here I am, years later, beneath the same window, thinking about the same questions. What does it mean to return? And where have I returned to? To Jack’s practice, to this city, to Deleuze’s abecedary, with its yellow subtitles…
Perhaps this can offer a key: not to make this book linear, but to give it a soft structure. We do not intend to present an exhaustive abecedary, rather a freer one. Some letters are missing. Others repeat. There are absences, displacements, and experiments with meaning. The aim is to write around words, not about them.
This book brings together Jack Burton’s photographic practice over the past ten years through a number of series: from Studio Landscaping to his most recent Cynic’s Bedtime, including the more intuitive approach of Soft Diary, which combines photography and collage. These series intertwine and are grouped around the concepts of this non-exhaustive abecedary. The texts that follow propose a lexicon and can be read in any order. This is where the possibility of deviation lies.
Just as one can move through a city and get lost in it, one can also get lost in language: an expansive dictionary, a shifting map. Not for nothing is Paris the city of drift.
Night falls beneath the window. It is time to continue.
*Introduction to the book