Your new book, Snuff Memories, is about to come out. How did this work come about? Snuff Memories has its immediate genesis in a prose piece ‘In the Country of the Broken’, published in Gary Shipley’s journal, gobbet back in 2017. But I guess it goes deeper than that for me. I’ve always had a […]
Tag: Erotic
Titane (2021)
Julia Ducournau’s Titane repeatedly bruises and shocks the viewer with the reversible relationship between sensuality, intimacy and untrammelled violence; a slippage concretized in the primped high-performance cars on whose streamlined bodies its central character, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), writhes erotically at the motor show where she works as a dancer. While our digital devices, with their […]
Erotic Subtraction and Death
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 […]
The Death of Posthuman Life: a brief philosophical introduction to Snuff Memories
My first book, Posthuman Life: philosophy at the edge of the human, bequeathed several unresolved philosophical problems, above all the ethical impasse concisely expressed in Amy Ireland’s review of my new book, Snuff Memories: “The posthuman cannot be known before it is produced—so to know it, we must produce it.” Slightly less concisely, the decision […]
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 […]
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.” […]
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 […]
Getting into Death
Ironic, but one of the most intimate actsof our body is death.So beautiful appeared my death – knowing who then I would kiss,I died a thousand times before I died.‘Die before you die,’ said the Prophet Muhammad.Have wings that feared ever touched the Sun?I was born when all I once feared – I could love. […]
partial sexbot superthread
Are there any lefties out there that want to debate #sexbots arguing that it’s a form of slavery? — ◉ (@brightabyss) October 19, 2018 Buying and selling a rubberized doll with mechanical parts isn’t slavery, I would say. Buying and selling a human is slavery, on the other hand. Can only humans be slaves? — […]
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