The basic idea informing the plot of Eugene Linden’s paleontological thriller Deep Past (2019) is neatly summarized in this snatch of dialogue: “Ten thousand years ago humans were just as intelligent as we are today, but our material culture was almost non-existent. Evolution produced human intelligence in the blink of an eye; our material culture… Continue Reading Intelligence is always animal intelligence: on Eugene Linden’s Deep Past (2019)
Occupy Kant: remarks on racism and liberalism
(On Tuesday, September 1, 2020, Lucy Allais of University of California, San Diego and University of Witwatersrand gave a virtual talk, “Racism in the History of Philosophy: Read Kant’s Political Theory” as part of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory‘s Modern Critical Theory lecture series. The remarks below first appeared in Kritik.) The recurrent… Continue Reading Occupy Kant: remarks on racism and liberalism
Toward an American psychogeography (3): Zothique and the Zodiac Killer
Jean Baudrillard, in his philosophical travelogue America (1986), writes that “America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.” But we have only to turn to an American psychogeography to… Continue Reading Toward an American psychogeography (3): Zothique and the Zodiac Killer
Toward an American psychogeography (2): displacing Exham Priory
Necessarily, any American psychogeography will form a webwork of displacements. In such a psychogeography, there are displacements on top of displacements on top of displacements. This is because the formal structure of displacement is necessarily recursive. A structure is recursive when the shape of the whole structure recurs in the shape of its parts (e.g.,… Continue Reading Toward an American psychogeography (2): displacing Exham Priory
On the concept of pre-extinction
Typically, we think of extinction in terms of the death of the last individual member of the species facing extinction. A species goes extinct when there aren’t any more organisms belonging to it still walking around. What comes to mind is a short fragment by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Witness” (1967). In the fragment, Borges… Continue Reading On the concept of pre-extinction
Robert Aickman’s strange stories (1): “Meeting Mr. Millar”
Robert Aickman’s “strange stories” are epistemological in nature. Consistently, each story portrays an increasingly baffling series of events. The events rarely culminate in some horrifying revelation (comprehensible or otherwise). Instead, they end with the obstruction of all possible access to that which has occurred, why the events in question have taken place, and the general… Continue Reading Robert Aickman’s strange stories (1): “Meeting Mr. Millar”
On causal strangeways
Think of it like this. A causal strangeway describes the crooked or disjointed path by means of which causal effects spiral outward tumultuously from their plural points of origin, traversing ontological modes and orders without regard to adequation or proportion. Examples are endless. Seriously attempt to backtrace almost anything at all, and you’ll rapidly find… Continue Reading On causal strangeways
Ligotti ephemera: “Envoi” from Teatro Grottesco (Durtro Press, 2006)
This is a poem Ligotti published in the original 2006 edition of Teatro Grottesco, published by David Tibet‘s Durtro Press, which is now defunct. It does not appear in in the 2008/2010 edition of the same collection by Virgin Books, nor does it appear in his Death Poems (Bad Moon Press, 2013). “Envoi” Nothing is… Continue Reading Ligotti ephemera: “Envoi” from Teatro Grottesco (Durtro Press, 2006)
Notes on ecopessimism (1): decathexis as a mode of futural projection
(A slightly different version of this post was presented at the 2017 Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference “Out of Time,” on the panel “Collective Manifestations: Thinking Futures beyond the Dark Mountain.”) A preliminary clarification: climate change isn’t the problem. Instead, climate change is a symptom of a much deeper problem called the… Continue Reading Notes on ecopessimism (1): decathexis as a mode of futural projection
La comunidad de los espectros, I: Antropotecnia: Epilogue
My translation of Fabián Ludueña Romandini‘s monograph La comunidad de los espectros, I: Antropotecnia (The Community of Specters: Anthropotechnics) is in progress. I hope to have a completed draft by the end of AY 2019-2020. Here’s another excerpt. Epilogue (pp. 217-225) Zoopolitics: the Sixth Extinction and the spectral analytic “A zoo is a better window… Continue Reading La comunidad de los espectros, I: Antropotecnia: Epilogue