1. In her two-poem collection, Apostasy, Katy Mongeau narrates the desire to both kill and be killed within a world fruiting death in every leaf. The poetic subject is fractured because overwhelmed and broken by a lust that refracts it into nonhuman things: Me: convulsing, lust-fucking the mud, Sun, and consuming myself, dead rotten. Flower […]
Tag: Ballard
Fragment on Biomorphic Posthumanism
Biomorphs are always speculative or ‘critical bodies’, experiments in unliving. Posthumanism, unbound, provides a speculative deployment of life without limiting it with any vitalist distinction between life and matter or mechanism. It is a conceptual abattoir. Perhaps, some will remark that my use of ‘speculation’ here is disturbingly reminiscent of its financial sense. Perhaps […]
Hanover Talk: Biomorphic Horror
Philosophical posthumanisms oppose anthropocentrism – the presumption that reality must be thought about from a human perspective. But what remains of embodiment in post-anthropocentric thought? Should it retain a place for the body or the aesthetic as distinctive ways of encountering reality? If not, how can it adequately describe of our ‘posthuman predicament’ as bodies […]
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 […]
exo scars
A hermetic suburb ringed by derelict overpasses. The low sun etching grainy pebbledash and plaster. Internal walls pucker grey-veined “new flesh”. Pink sporocarps in tenement halls, tumescent foam mattresses fruit delicate engines over stained concrete. Roaches juiced with bone or collagen radii. Hear them pine, their agony. It makes you want to hurt them some […]
The Ontological Catastrophe in Ballard, Brassier and Cronenberg
David Roden – The Noise of the Future: Against Posthuman Ethics from Sonic Acts on Vimeo. A bit Dalek like from a hard night bopping in the Paradiso club, but I remain standing and more or less self-aware throughout. The paper considers Ballard, Brassier and Cronenberg in the light of posthuman theory.
Philosophical Catastrophism: Posthumanism as Speculative Aesthetics
Philosophical Catastrophism: Posthumanism as Speculative Aesthetics Traven lost within the blocks With the exhaustion of his supplies, Traven remained within the perimeter of the blocks almost continuously, conserving what strength remained to him to walk slowly down their empty corridors. The infection in his right foot made it difficult for him to replenish his […]
Ballarday – time music and the parody of crystals
I was raised in an amorphous outer-London suburb which, it has always seemed to me, could wrap a world in its condescension. This non-place, which J G Ballard explores in works such as Vermillion Sands, the Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, was more familiar than anything real. It formed the grammar of feeling and, for a time, a solitude beyond rage. […]
Pornography and Resurrection
Ballard’s novella Myths of the Near Future [formulates] a deranged ‘metametaphorics’ for which pornography and a kind of autistic bricolage function as the privileged figures of knowledge. Myths relates the epidemiology of a mysterious schizoid condition that appears to emenate from the abandoned Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. When its protaganist, the Orphic architect Roger […]
enemyindustry 