The sea, the sea (Θάλαττα! θάλαττα! Although Rachel Carson is known primarily for her revolutionary monograph, Silent Spring (1962), often credited with stimulating the early environmental movement, she also produced three volumes of nature writing about the sea before this: Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea… Continue Reading Rachel Carson’s dark anthropocentrism
Tag: the inhuman
Intelligence is always animal intelligence: on Eugene Linden’s Deep Past (2019)
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)
The left hand of all creation: how to repurpose whole worlds
“The world is an asymmetrical place full of asymmetrical beings.” – Frank Close In the following series of interrelated posts, I sketch out in preliminary fashion the theoretical framework of an ontological program of strong redescription. Redescription refers to one mode of interacting with, repurposing, and using the various objects that constitute our world. One… Continue Reading The left hand of all creation: how to repurpose whole worlds
The left hand of all creation (5): Postface on chirality
Günther Anders’ philosophy of technology (as developed most fully in his two-volume monograph Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen [The Obsolescence of the Human] [1956, 1980]) has yet to be translated in full, but it’s nevertheless a productive exercise to read its title against Anders’ own intentions – that is to say, the obsolescence of the human… Continue Reading The left hand of all creation (5): Postface on chirality
The left hand of all creation (1): The sinister pathway of the object
Objects act. But what is an object? The concept has a long and varied career. As a word, it comes from the Latin noun obiectum, referring generically to a tangible thing that’s perceptible by the mind or the senses, to “something that occurs in front of,” or, more abstractly, to “that which is placed before”… Continue Reading The left hand of all creation (1): The sinister pathway of the object
Forensic reason
Ordinarily, we aren’t very clear about what we’re talking about when we talk about reason. Hence, rationality in particular gets invoked in largely economic terms (e.g., to behave rationally is to maximize economic self-interest). Hence, reasonability gets used interchangeably with plausibility, albeit with slightly more normative force than the latter term. Hence, reasonableness gets praised… Continue Reading Forensic reason
Astronoetic pessimism and the posthuman: Prometheus and Alien: Covenant as philosophy
Introduction Refer to part one (“Introducing astronoetic cinema”) for the necessary context in which I discuss these two films. In preface, I will note that the critical and popular reception of both films isn’t particularly positive. In part, this is because both suffer from some issues of casting and pacing. However, both films also speak… Continue Reading Astronoetic pessimism and the posthuman: Prometheus and Alien: Covenant as philosophy
Introducing astronoetic cinema
Astronautics and astronoetics Philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s posthumously published Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (1997, The Fullness of the Stars) introduces a novel distinction. On the one hand, there is “astronautics,” referring both to the pursuit of knowledge of the human by extending its purview to the extraterrestrial and to technical applications of that knowledge in the… Continue Reading Introducing astronoetic cinema