Reorienting ‘idle-talk’ Death is repulsion for the living. This is the case even when the insuperability of death is accepted as natural, therefore ineluctable, insuperable. Ironically, to have being we must be in something and yet the being-in of death includes in– with reference to the not. Acceptance of inevitabilities does not provide us with…
Read MoreOn the insuperableness of death…according to Heidegger—part I
My uncle is dying. He has, in his final days of life, become only marginally responsive to stimulus from the comprehending and comprehended beings active still in the world. He will be pacified, as much as is possible, with potent drugs to alleviate the agony of his dying from a complex illness. He hasn’t the…
Read MoreWhat is ‘We’?
I suppose this piece is in some way a continuation of my essay on definition. Not really, but actually. I deal again here with a form of categorisation. I explore how ‘we’ designates ourselves and all of the duplicities a we embodies. Yet somewhat oddly there is a short hand around the nuances and complexities…
Read MoreThe New Conspiracy Visibility
Disclaimer First off, I want it to be clear that I am not an advocate of conspiratorial worldviews. When I say they are ‘real’ I mean to suggest that they are an object-event (a phenomenon which we can point at) which is happening. The subscribers of these worldviews, by subscribing to them, give them this…
Read MoreAffecting a Speculative Definition of Humanity (Part II)
Perceptive-objects Gradations of intensity differentiate one object from another. To illustrate this Garcia talks about scales of comprehension. We can better comprehend other objects because of certain functions of perception unique to us. This is a different intensity of comprehension from the room’s comprehension of us, which is a matter of containment. The room’s comprehension…
Read MoreAffecting a Speculative Definition of Humanity (part 1)
Definition-objects In this two part essay I want to interrogate how objects contribute to defining humanity? According to Tristan Garcia in his comprehensive and unique Form and Object (2014), ‘Present day humanity’s relations to animals and to artefacts makes us hopelessly attempt to prove what humanity is as an object’ (238). The ‘hopeless’ is indicative…
Read MoreClimate Emergency+Corona Emergency=Chronic Emergencies
In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (2020), Swedish academic Andreas Malm explains how the primary catalyst of the pandemic is the deforestation of wildlife habitats. Deforestation has squeezed the once yawning gap between wildlife habitats and human civilisation, paving the way for pathogens to embed themselves in human societies. Malm’s…
Read MoreCOVID AND WORLD RISK SOCIETY
WHAT IS WORLD RISK SOCIETY? World Risk Society (1999) is a book of sociological theory written by German academic Ulrich Beck. Written at the dawn of the new Millennium, it has been an influential text, being regularly referred to by theorists working in environmentalism and ecological philosophy (Morton). I even suspect his language is used…
Read MoreGetting a little help “phasing” in & out of things with ‘Everything’
In my previous post I explained a little about Tim Morton’s term phasing, which is a sort of abstract toggle function we can utilize whilst going-about-our-business, to create our own context explosions. Understanding context explosions enables us to think more about the potential trajectory of something, anything, everything. Only a few days after my previous…
Read MorePhasing in & out of Subscendent Wholes
My dissertation has been handed in & now I am flooded with mild anxiety. It hadn’t really occurred to me that most people write about authors long deceased. John Wedgewood Clarke is very much alive and active; as are the sources I cite, in large part. Only Heidegger & Derek Parfit are the exceptions. This…
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