"Annotations of a Failure" is an experimental, polyphonic work that unfolds as a staged confrontation between the author, his deceased mother, his schizophrenic brother R—, and an entity called the Annotation: a figure that functions simultaneously as footnote, critic, superego, and literary afterlife. Not exactly memoir, nor play, nor philosophical treatise, the book performs failure as a lived condition rather than a result to be overcome.

Structured in eleven acts, the text moves through dialogue, lyric fragments, critical glosses, and dramatic stage directions that are never merely theatrical. Each voice speaks from a different psychic position, and none is granted authority. The mother appears at once intimate and persecutory, tender and annihilating; R— speaks from the unstable brilliance of psychosis, offering insight that is inseparable from danger; the author oscillates between analytic rigor and collapse; Annotation interrupts, reframes, corrects, and exposes, refusing the comfort of narrative continuity. The result is not synthesis but tension sustained over time.

The reading experience is intimate, volatile, and self-interrupting. Language hesitates, revises itself, contradicts itself, and then insists again. Philosophical reflection collides with familial memory; lyrical passages coexist with scholastic commentary; stage directions bleed into confession. The book does not seek to explain anxiety, love, guilt, sin, or dependency from a safe conceptual distance. Instead, it treats them as forces that constitute subjectivity itself—forces that cannot be resolved without falsification.

At the center of the work is a sustained meditation on anxiety and writing: anxiety as the cost of becoming an “I,” writing as both an attempt to survive that cost and an act that inevitably compounds it. Drawing on psychoanalysis, theology, philosophy, and poetry, the book interrogates the fantasy of selfhood, the violence implicit in individuation, and the guilt bound up with asserting one’s own existence in relation to beloved others. Failure, in this sense, is not incompetence or lack of achievement; it is fidelity to experience that cannot be rendered coherent without betrayal.

One of the book’s defining refusals is its rejection of consolatory arcs. There is no recovery narrative, no redemptive closure, no stable vantage point from which the past can be mastered. Thought emerges from fracture rather than resolution; love wounds as much as it sustains; and writing appears as an ethically compromised practice—necessary, obsessive, and never innocent. Even insight is treated with suspicion, as something that risks hardening into false mastery.

Formally, "Annotations of a Failure" is as much about interruption as it is about speech. The annotative voice undermines the fantasy of transparency; the dramatic structure exposes the theatricality of confession; the oscillation between poetry and analysis resists genre as a means of containment. What remains is not clarity but proximity: to damaged attachment, to inherited guilt, to the unresolvable tensions between self-love and love of others.

This is a book for readers interested in experimental literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and hybrid forms that refuse to separate thinking from living. It does not ask to be consumed easily or admired from a distance. It asks instead to be endured, argued with, and inhabited as an annotation not only of failure, but of the conditions under which a self attempts, again and again, to speak the truth. The dialogue moves from the naming of failure and anxiety, through sin, self-division, love (philautia), and familial haunting, toward a final social confrontation with others and the world. (73 pp.)

Dramatis Personae:

Matt (Author) Mother (Deceased) R— (Brother) Annotation (The Annotator)

Table of Contents

Act I 7 Act II 18 Act III 23 Act IV 35 Act V 40 Act VI 49 Act VII 52 Act VIII 57 Act IX 61 Act X 64 Act XI 72