What is it like to be a bat blind brain?

From: Roden, David. 2015a. “Aliens Under the Skin: Serial Killing and the Seduction of Our Common Inhumanity”, in Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology, Edia Connole & Gary J. Shipley (eds). Schism Press. Phenomenology is, as I have argued elsewhere, striated with “darkness” – experiencing it only affords a partial and very fallible insight into its […]

Iain Grant on "The Great Cake of Being"

A wonderful presentation by Iain Hamilton Grant which takes flight from the Kantian principle that we can only understand something if we can synthesise it. This is not a problem in geology or chemistry when we are dealing with the synthesis of particulars from other material components. But what are its implications for our understanding […]

Objective Ecological Value

In order to construct an anthropologically unbounded account of posthumans, we need a psychology-free account of value. There may, after all, be many possible posthuman psychologies but we don’t know about any of them to date. However, the theory requires posthumans to be autonomous systems of a special kind: Functionally Autonomous Systems (see below). I […]

After Nature Interview with Ray Brassier

Here

Agent Swarm on Machine and Mechanism

Over at Agent Swarm Terrance Blake has a succinct and remarkably clear post on the distinction between the machinic and the mechanical in Deleuze and Guatarri’s work.

Martin Hägglund on Derrida, Trace and Life

  In “The Trace of Time and the Death of Life: Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida” Martin Hägglund gives a brilliantly clear exposition of Derrida’s trace as a relationship that undermines both the continuity and punctate discreteness of time and poses an “arche-materiality” of time against a vitalistic/continuist conception of temporality. The trace-structure is the minimal form […]

Accelerationism and Posthumanism

I’ve just been listening to Ray Brassier’s presentation on Nick Land’s work at the recent Accelerationism conference at Goldsmiths, University of London with an appropriately night-black, supercharging Lavazza in hand. Here, Ray patiently anatomizes tensions within Land’s ‘thanatropic’ politics. This advocates intensifying the deracinating power of Capital to generate pure, unbound intensities beyond the scope of […]

Thoughts on Flat Ontology

The term ‘flat ontology’ was coined by Manuel DeLanda in his book Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Flat ontologies are opposed there to hierarchical ontologies in which the structure and evolution of reality is explained by transcendent organizing principles such essences, organizing categories or natural state.