Tag: Aesthetics

Experiments in Unliving: Biomorphism and the Insufficiency of Philosophy

This is the third, possibly the last, of an informal series of posts considering the relationship between unbound posthumanism and the Non-Philosophy of François Laruelle. Here, rather than vaingloriously attempting to criticize Laruelle’s work, I simply attempt to note some contrasts and affinities. To summarise: the positions or projects are akin insofar as they question the […]

Against Non-Philosophical Humanism

  My account of unbound posthumanism (See Roden 2018 and here) draws some  methodological inspiration from François Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy, though its point of departure and orientation is distinct. For Laruelle, all philosophies are like hallucinations that hallucinate their reality or truth (Laruelle 2011, 16). This principle of ‘philosophical sufficiency’ guarantees that whatever scheme for carving […]

Disappearance and Assembly – extract

‘Disappearance and Assembly’ is now published open access in Springer’s Nanoethics journal as part of the BrisSynBio Art-Science Dossier   Meshes Of The Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943) from SeriousFeather on Vimeo. It is easy to believe nobody built this degradable substrate with that small figurine encysted within, an unsung astronaut, that the condition did not […]

Predictive Coding and Brassier’s Freedom

I’m currently revisiting earlier work on Brassier’s (20b13a) short text on improvisation with a view to using the Predictive Coding (PC) account of cognition and agency as framework for understanding the role of improvisation and similar performance in our cognitive economy. The key take home that paper, I think, is its picture of a not-necessarily-human […]

The Doll Hospital: Between Laruelle and Badiou, Vitalism and Anti-Vitalism

I’ve been thinking through the relationship between a maximally Unbounded Posthumanism that relinquishes any constraints on what subjects, worlds or agents are or ought to be and artistic production by considering its analogs in contemporary French thought: particularly the work of Badiou and Laruelle (See also Roden 2018). One way in which Unbound Posthumanism can […]

The Biomorphic Horror of Everyday Life

This paper has been written for the Philosophy, Art and Society: Body as Medium event in the Watershed Media Center, Bristol June 16 2018 It explores the idea of the ‘biomorph’ as a perverse ‘non-philosophical’ solution to the aporias of speculative posthumanism through the work of J G Ballard, Hans Bellmer and Gary J Shipley. […]

Bellmer in Doll Space: A Note

Perversion defers all conceptual or affective satisfaction; proliferating desire in ways that cannot answer to any settled ecology or ethics. Hans Bellmer’s dolls afford a kind of plastic algorithm for this infinite potentiation  – in particular his celebrated second doll, equipped with its articulating ball joint. In one of the texts from his 1934 book […]

Framing and the Ontology of the Art Work: Kendall Walton and Jacques Derrida

In his 1977 paper “Categories of Art” Kendall Walton argues that aesthetic categories like “piano music” or “bust” determine how an audience ascribes aesthetic significance to the non-aesthetic properties of the work such as their shape, matter or sound. Walton calls the perceptible properties that determine whether it belongs to a given category of artwork […]

Claire Colebrook on Art and Catastrophe

Here, one of my favourite critical theorists/philosophers Claire Colebrook talks about the role of art in thinking and imagining the end of the world. The bottom line, for her, is that only a certain idea of art as decoupled from our immediate practices and functions, that which always relates to other worlds, allows us to […]