(Reblogged from Identities Journal Lockdown series # 30) Can we afford us any longer? Bodies hurt too much. Their pleasures are less trauma than a geologic diarrhoea. It’s shameful a vaulting planetary economy still uses us – like discovering a cache of unused condoms under pristine sand. No wonder we dream disconnection, communism, or apocalypse; […]
Alexander Wilson on Nonhuman Aesthetics and Disconnection
Alexander Wilson’s paper ‘What Aesthetics Tells us About Posthumans’ (WA) provides a synopsis of a challenging account of aesthetics developed at greater length in his new book Aesthesis and Perceptronium (AP). This is nothing less than an aesthetics generalized beyond the human phenomenology cited in philosophies of aesthetic judgement. I’m currently working through AP, […]
Theory Fiction, Mad Black Deleuzeanism and the Posthuman Void
Currently on strike! but over at the OU I was moderating an MA forum on styles of philosophy, so decided to go for broke with a post on ‘Theory Fiction, Mad Black Deleuzeanism and the Posthuman Void’. God knows what my poor students will make of it, but sometimes you just have to go for […]
Puce Mary: The Red Desert
The Red Desert’ assembles in layers: loping bass alternates between octaves, raspy continuants top and bottom of the register, randomized clicks over a percussive loop; a susurrus of far off industry, or a cataract softened. A woman’s voice, calmly narrates the indices of her decline in barely accented Danish English: I find myself feeling like […]
On re-discovering the Analytic-Continental Divide
I’m currently in London following a three-day deep dive into continental philosophy at the Society of European Philosophy/Forum of European Philosophy Joint conference at Royal Holloway University in Egham (The text of my paper is available here). The quality of both panels and keynotes was extremely high, with some particularly impeccable scholarship on display. Adrian […]
Transgression as Erotic Technology
Over on Facebook my friend Chaim Mendel posted up a disarmingly good question about the relationship between desire and transgression which has been nagging me a lot recently: Why is the forbidden so erotic? what is it about transgression that is so central to the nature of desire? Transgression or perversion isn’t only an erotic […]
Subtractive-Catastrophic Xenophilia
Introduction Subtractive ontologies – like those of Alain Badiou or Quentin Meillassoux – hold that Being is inaccessible to thought or experience. Rather, Being is indexed for thought by a hole in thought; an opening onto an Outside uncorrelated with thought or subjectivity. I will argue that posthumanist ontologies are, likewise, subtractive operations […]
Posthumanism and Subtraction
In Being and Event Badiou proposes to unbind Being from Leibniz’s dictum that ‘What is not a being is not a being’ (2006, 53). Where traditional thought sees beings as wholes, Badiou argues that the whole is derived from an operation, a ‘count’ applied to an inconsistent (non-unitary) multiplicity that cannot be described by ontology […]
Cronenberg’s Videodrome: the Catastrophe of Desire
My first viewing of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) was shattering. I was upended by its dislocated narrative rather than the body horror of its denouement, – where image extrudes into reality and bodies develop erogenous control surfaces or explode into cancerous larvae. I could not see how this unreality emerged from the film it initially […]
XENOPHILIA
* This is the text of a presentation given remotely May 3 2019 at the conference A Sad & Lonely Constellation: Navigating the Antinomies of Technological Hope at the Caffè Letterario in Milan. Its prospectus is “to navigate through the thick swarm of hopes surrounding the body of Artificial Intelligence as it accelerates towards us.” […]
