During on Speculative Aesthetics and Weird Co-existence

From an insomniac moment re-reading my notes for Elie During‘s challenging and thought provoking keynote paper: “Weird Coexistence or What Speculative Aesthetics Could Be” [Hotel air conditioning in England has its not-so-speculative noise aesthetic btw] at the 10th SEP-FEP conference, Regents University, London. Speculative Realism [SR] expresses a somewhat elusive taste for estrangement and the […]

More Radical Aliens

In Posthuman Life I define the posthuman in terms of the disconnection thesis (DT). One of the advantages of DT is that it allows us to understand human-posthuman differences without being committed to a “human essence” that posthumans will lack. Rather, we understand the human (or WH, the “wide human”) as an assemblage of biological […]

Metaphor at the Edge of the Human

Billions of years in the future, The Time Traveler stands before a black ocean, under a bloated sun. The shore is scaled with lichen and flecked with snow. The crab things and giant insects that menaced him on his visit millions of years in its past are gone. Apart from the lapping of dark waves, everything […]

Dark Posthumanism I: summer's ice

I’m ending an all too brief sojourn in Western Crete, just as Greece seems set to become Europe’s new experiment in post-democratic capitalism – its very own Interzone. Many, if not most, economists claim that the conditions cannot be met and that attempting to do so will shred Greece’s economic, social, educational and cultural life as much […]

Françoise Balibar: Nature is Only There Once

Françoise Balibar, Professor Emeritus of physics at the Université Denis Diderot, Paris VII gave a wonderful keynote on final day of the Philosophy After Nature conference in Utrecht whose title was drawn from Ernst Mach’s aphorism Die Natur ist nur einmal da (Nature is there only once). Here she discussed the philosophical implications of failures of univocity […]

The Condition of the Digital Image

There’s a very interesting and instructive conversation between Daniel Rourke and new media artist Hito Steyerl at Rhizome. Reading Steyerl’s remarks on Renais’ and Marker’s migration from Celluloid to Web I imagined them  evoking perplexity and amusement in cold degenerate matter storage long after the death of our sun.

Epic Object-Oriented Flame War!

  There’s an epic flame war over at Three Pound Brain in response to Scott Bakker’s discussion of Levi Bryant’s Object Oriented Ontology. I’m sitting this one out like my hero Custard the Cat. In part because, I’m just too busy and in part cos’ I don’t want to distract Scott from the trudge to […]