Two forms of sacrifice We are all familiar with how sacrifice (or immolation, which I will use superfluously for the sheer sonic joy of it) works: someone or something is relinquished in exchange for another thing which is usually not beneficial to the immolated thing but of great value to those who turn it into…
Read MoreStratified replies #1
What follows is practice in formulating an aesthetic method for packaging my thinking process, which is informed by my current peripatetic reading. I tend to read something and consider how it might be the gambit for a potential essay. It is then dumped on a pile of other such ideas, because I don’t have time…
Read MoreHallucinating insuperable signifiers—part II
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 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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