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 […]
Tag: Aesthetics
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 […]
Slime Dynamics
Slime Dynamics from Leicht Schiff on Vimeo. “You don’t have to think with Kant. Think with your cunt, or if you can’t do that think through saliva.” This dance event, conceived by choreographer and philosopher Siegmar Zacharias, shares its name and a number of themes with a wonderful 24 hour art event where I participated at […]
Blade Runner 2049 – first thoughts
I’m still cobbling together thoughts about Blade Runner 2049. At a cinematic level, I appreciated its measured pace. It has an understated melancholy that one often projects onto characters in Dick’s novels. Its architecture of ruination provided a formal theatrical, even operatic, counterpoint to the isolation and brokenness of its protagonists. There were performances to […]
