Phoretics: Goethe, Emerson, and Hazlitt by Israel Bonilla

Description

Paradise Editions, pamphlet

Publication Date: June 14, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 

Influence is always a relationship between living beings. Yet it is mainly an asymmetrical one, where achievement allows the flourishing of action. We are all indebted. We all seek either to conceal the debt or repay it with allusion. Spiritual debts, however, cannot be paid in full. Influence is a phoretic relationship: an organism travels by being carried on the body of its host. Perhaps when Voltaire, as he neared death, argued with Pascal’s Pensées line by line, he had stumbled upon the only commendable approach.

Israel A. Bonilla lives in Guadalajara, Jalisco. He is author of the micro-chapbook Landscapes (Ghost City Press, 2021) and the short story collection Sleep Decades (Malarkey Books, 2024). His work has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Exacting Clam, Firmament, Able Muse, minor literature[s], new_sinews, and elsewhere.

Explore more from our collection.