The Inhuman (a quick read)

Originally posted on Toy Philosophy:
Last year, I was asked by friends to distill the thesis of the labor of the inhuman in two or three pages. This post is the product of my attempt at capturing the main points. I should add that I have now some critical objections about this piece but that…

Memories of the Body

Aesthetically, this sequence recalls an avant-garde cinema where speech floats; freed from an expository role. One thinks of the literary allusions in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (Kasdan 1976) or perhaps Chris Marker’s La Jetée: still images linked by a reflective narration. Reflection and momentum has been restored. The future has been put out of the loop, for now. As […]

Posthumanism and Art Seminar, Open School East

  Here‘s the audio for a fizzy discussion on posthumanism in the arts I participated in at the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London. We talked monsters, posthuman urbanism, science fiction, the speculative/critical divide in posthumanism, whether immersive media and technological arts might help us overcome entrenched dualisms in western thought and political implications (if any) […]

Art and Posthumanism

This is an abstract for a presentation that I will be giving in a roundtable discussion on posthumanism and aesthetics with Debra Benita Shaw and Stefan Sorgner at the University of East London on May 18 2015. Further details will be made available. Posthumanism can be critical or speculative. These positions converge in opposing human-centred […]

The Robo Menace to our Morals

  Eric Schwitzgebel has a typically clear-eyed, challenging post on the implications of (real) artificial intelligence for our moral systems over here at the Splintered Mind. The take home idea is that our moral systems (consequentialist, deontologistical, virtue-ethical, whatever) are adapted for creatures like us. The weird artificial agents that might result from future iterations of AI […]

Goodbye Mytilini

Stopped over in Athens Airport trying to digest three days at the Posthuman Politics conference at Mytilini, Lesbos, 25-28 September. It was an intense experience on so many levels and utterly worthwhile. My work has veered into some relentlessly abstract places recently, because someone has to … But having the privilege of attending Jaime del […]

Kevin LaGrandeur on Posthumanism and Transhumanism

Kevin has provided a typically engaging gloss on the difference between posthumanism and transhumanism over at the IEET site. I don’t fundamentally disagree with his account of transhumanism (though I think he needs to emphasize its fundamentally normative character) but the account of posthumanism he gives here has some shortcomings: Two significant differences between transhumanism and […]

Conferences in September

I’ll be attending conferences at either end of our continent in September: Philosophy After Nature, University of Utrecht, 3-5 September Posthuman Politics, 25th until the 28th of September 2014, University of the Aegean, Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, Geography Building – University Campus. I’m presenting the same paper at both. Here’s the abstract, though the […]

Anita Mason's Confusion of Genre

Anita Mason has a contribution to the long running genre debate here at the Guardian entitled “Genre fiction radiates from a literary centre”. I think her attempt to constitute this supposed center self-deconstructs spectacularly, but in a manner that is instructive and worth teasing apart. This metaphorical representation of the literary as the universal and […]

No Future? Catherine Malabou on the Humanities

Catherine Malabou has an intriguing piece on the vexed question of the relationship between the “humanities” and science in the journal Transeuropeennes here. It is dominated by a clear and subtle reading of Kant, Foucault and Derrida’s discussion of the meaning of Enlightenment and modernity. Malabou argues that the latter thinkers attempt to escape Kantian assumptions about […]