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 and, consequently, […]
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.” […]
Note on Machine Phenomenology and the Politics of Sounds
The ontological question: What is sound? is typically inflected in a Platonic fashion. It asks after the unitary nature of audibilia. Main Kinds of Auditory Ontology Proximal – sounds are private, non-representational sensations or qualia Medial – ‘sounds are compressive waves in an elastic medium’ (Locke) Locative – sounds are ‘found where they are heard’ […]
Xeno-erotic 2 – The Dolls House
The Doll on a veranda, folded on a Barcelona chair, a gingham dress, the deserted shore, the recent upper layer of powdered bone, barely visible now. Sea shivers in dead air. He summons the courage to sit beside her, thinks of removing her shades to peer – into what? Somehow, he convinces himself of the […]
Excerpt: Disappearance and Assembly
It is easy to believe nobody built this degradable substrate with that small figurine encysted within, an unsung astronaut; that the condition did not apply or that the machine ‘so disconnected… never got the message.’[1] The pseudo bone increments again. She ascends, follows the hooded figure with the poppy along a drive winding towards the […]
