STATIONS OF THE SUPERCROSS

Book excerpt: Those familiar with John O'Loughlin's work, particularly with his writings of the past few years, will know that he likes to combine philosophy, or a logically structured way of writing derived from years of abstract thought, with other approaches to text, including autobiographical, psychological, poetical (to a degree), historical, political, religious, and analytical, so that the results, sometimes confusing, are rarely predictable, but can take you by surprise, as when you pass from an autobiographical sketch or a political observation straight into an intensely analytical or philosophical section, though usually not without some forewarning or a lacuna of some sort in the layout of the text. So it is here, in this remarkable collection of structured aphorisms and maxims and what might appear to be essays but are, in fact, aphorisms of a more discursive nature within a title-shunning format that eschews paragraphs in keeping with its aphoristic bias – rather Nietzschean in a way – that he long ago identified with the concept of 'supernotes', or notes that have been copied from a notebook and reworked and refined and expanded upon until they resemble short essays, without, however, conceding much else to essayistic tradition. In such a mainly metaphysical fashion John O'Loughlin has consistently advanced the theoretical breadth and depth of his work, derived, naturally, from habitual thought processes, and the results should speak confidently and credibly enough for themselves without our having to say very much about them, other, of course, than that they continue in the vein to which we have become accustomed the struggle for truth, or philosophical credibility and metaphysical insight, and have continued the process to a new and hopefully final level or stage of completion which it would be difficult if not impossible for him or, for that matter, anyone else to reasonably surpass, bearing in mind the complexities that so exactingly comprehensive an approach to logic as he has fathered both here and in the past inevitably entail. So maybe the job, or task, which this author humbly and somewhat naively set himself over four decades ago, is now completed, and with such a degree of structural credibility that he has even been able to bend the rules and invent one or two new words and new ways of thinking about old words or subjects or categories that, frankly, should stand up to scrutiny and any amount of analytical attention. But, of course, a book of his is an adventure, never quite knowing where it is going or where, eventually, it will get to, and this one is no exception, since the sheer eclecticism of John O'Loughlin's writings makes it difficult to nail it down to a specific title, even if the subtitle he has chosen, viz. 'Attraction and Reaction in Gender Perspective', is certainly quite well-represented in the text, albeit by degrees and not at all at the beginning. Evidently a number of other specific titles came to mind, but none of them would have adequately represented anything but a fraction of the overall text, and so, in the end, he wisely and, we think, correctly opted for a title that would be both sufficiently abstract and sufficiently ambiguous (for it actually is, if you ponder it for a moment) as to do general justice to a style of writing that refuses to follow the usual linear patterns of composition of the 'straight press', including essayists, but gives you so many strands of thought to follow or think about that no single strand, be it philosophical or autobiographical or anything else, could possibly do justice to the entirety of the text, which, as intimated above, is of an intensely eclectic character. That is how he writes, how he prefers to write, and we make no apologies. You can take it or leave it. But those who persevere with his work – and not only here but in previous books – will, if they are sufficiently intelligent and of the right turn-of-mind, be rewarded to a degree that few other books, we venture to assert, would reward them, since few other authors could possibly claim to have achieved as much or to have brought their philosophy to such a conclusively logical pass, and you would have to be a fool or scoundrel not to see that or profit from it!