Who does not want this?

It is not a matter of self-destruction but a ratification of loss, of insurgent bodies marking time. Bataille terms this seething void “expenditure”. [2] It is not willed or desired but makes desire redundant; a viscid noise that purges bone of flesh and reveals the glamorous chrome terminator teeth adhering to “the lips of a severed head.”

Or, if we are to write of “desire”, it is self-cancelling, as Edia Connole puts it: “auto-annihilation, annihilation of the self/mind, ego death” in which the condition of the human is surpassed. The figure of Frank, willingly damned and shredded, mirroring the passion of the mystic Angela of Foligno: “There are times when such great anger ensues that I am scarcely able to stop myself from totally tearing myself apart. There are also times when I can’t hold myself back from striking myself in a horrible way, and sometimes my head and limbs are swollen.” [3]

There is nothing between Hell and mystic union. Indeed, for Bataille, that is a mirage of the cacophony of time, whose “imperative purity” we cannot feel or inhabit: “As the shockwave of jealousy ejects the universe’s lactescent debris from the crater of reason, transcendent matter loses the perfection of its inertia (design), and nature implodes into the spasms of its own laceration.” [4]

This rolling wave cannot be felt or given through some “categorical intuition”. “Ecstatic time is not able to find itself except in the vision of things that puerile hazard makes brusquely appear: cadavers, nudities, explosions, spilt blood, abysses, bursts of sun and of thunder” It can be understood only as a traumatic and empirical residue, like the desire to have nails or suns for skin.

“Catastrophe” is another name for disconnection. Angela’s need antecedes the posthuman scission. Yet disconnection is not the concept we sought in order to regiment the posthuman difference. It returns to a speculative void once we acknowledge the Shoggothic ruin of the concept of agency.[5]

There almost nothing we understand about being an agent beyond the chirurgic marks it leaves, like traces on a desolate planetoid. The space of feeling and erotic dislocation when we feel the insatiable urge to be eaten.

The agent is always less tangible than the body, which is itself a ruin or a chimera. According to Eugene Thacker in “Bataille/Body/Noise: Notes Towards a Techno-Erotics”, Bataille does not view the body as a phenomenological fullness behind discourse, but in terms of its deformations, ruptures, collisions.

Thacker cites the passage in Bataille’s Story of the Eye when Simone insert the eye of the priest Don Aminado into her vagina. The vision of the eye “gazing through tears of urine” implies a discrepant anatomy like one of Lovecraft’s monsters. The crossing of the eye with its hairy frame, is part of a “reconfiguration” of the body that he likens to Ballard’s concatenations of flesh and technique in Crash.[4] The body consists in its possibilities for “moving out of itself” for sumptuary destruction, wounding and transformation.

It follows that the body is not organic or inorganic, nor limited by gendered binaries, let alone the envelope of the flesh or the skin. It is a syntax within a field it cannot define. This erotics is, as Thacker argues, a techno-erotics that exhibits the affective capacity for derangement and xenomorphology: The egg throbs between Kane’s legs. Its tapered point irising, licks the base of his scrotum, releases oily gold vapour. He smells warm musk as segmented tendrils clasp his penis; inject into his anus, coil against tender rectal tissue.

Frank’s and Angela’s desires have nothing to do the retention of life and form, autopoiesis. Agency is a derivative of catastrophe time and does not travel well.

If the body consists in its affective graphism, the urge to become inhuman, to be ripped into, disconnected, is no longer a derivative but an empirical mark of a catastrophe that no longer belongs to any territory or domain. As Thacker observes of the noise music of Merzbow – though he might have spoken here of Ballard, or Xenakis:

The question of not being able to find the words, not being able to adequately describe an experience, reaches here (in an alliance with Bataille) its greatest tension in a medium marked by its non-visuality. Where or how is something called the experience of noise or eroticism marked off or delineated?[6]

The pornography of Bataille or Ballard’s Crash offer a corrosive substitute for a phenomenology or folk interpretation of the spectral matter body, pre-digested in a planetary matrix dense beyond imagining. The spectral phenomenology of noise is the “overflowing disintegration of music’s forms and contours” – the viscid anorganic displacement that leaves the tympanum torn on the bleak omphalos of LV-426. Kane feels like magma, a flow that obliterates him and pulls the world inside. His body bleeds through the new orifices that crown his nipples and wound chest and sides. His heart, now huge, bludgeons his ribs, inflaming the veined spire of the inseminator into a buttress whose crenelated tip warms to his eager mouth. A metachronal wave runs through the cilia of the surrounding flagellants.

The techno-erotics of noise is thus an aesthetics of unfurling catastrophe/disconnection. But disconnection no longer has a field. It is already an aesthetic operation without semantic content and thus inaccessible to desire. The urge to be posthuman is a fractured imperative that we can only hear as loss, raptured in poisons. Frank/Kane mumbles something out of earshot. Something anorganic, quivering like a crushed god in the reliquaries of an underground car park.

[1] Barker, Clive. “Hellraiser [DVD].” C. Figg (Producer). USA: New World Pictures (1987).

[2] Bataille, Georges. Visions of excess: Selected writings 1927-1939. Vol. 14. Manchester University Press, 1985: 118-119.

[3] Connole, Edia. “Seven Propositions On the Secret Kissing of Black Metal: OSKVLVM”.

[4] Land, Nick. The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. Routledge, 2002: 67-8.

[5] https://www.academia.edu/26504056/Dark_Posthumanism_-_Keynote_Lecture

[6] Thacker, Eugene. “Bataille/Body/Noise: Notes Towards a Techno-Erotics.” Merzbook: The Pleasuredome of Noise (1997): 61

In disturbing the principle of life, the doll acquires a transverse cosmological dimension that cannot be reduced to its image or by the pornographic gaze it seems to enlist. For Bellmer, this is allegorized by the second doll’s ball joint. In a surrealist conceit, he argues that this reconciles the principles of concentric motion (since the joint’s inner ball moves around its centre) with eccentric motion, which may always be transferred from the outside, thereby causing it to orbit around an alien centre.

Desire and gaze are extroverted by death – pulled inside-out. Extroversion is illustrated in a later essay where he writes of a man who takes pornographic photos of his female lover, much as Bellmer did with his collaborator and partner, Unica Zurn. The lover comes to identify with her buttocks, deifying them such that, in fantasy, he becomes that fetishized body part (Monnet 2010, 289)

Eventually they resembled her fleeting facial expressions, the blind smile of the two enormous, rounded eyes of that face, which opened like two hemispheres over her rectum. His desire was concentrated solely on that point and he exchanged the male Self with the female Other in order to sodomise his Self in the Other (Bellmer 2005, 125).

As he writes in his essay on the ‘Physical unconscious’, this mutable sexual object ‘resembles a sentence that seems to invite us to dismantle it into its component letters, so that its true meanings may be revealed anew through an endless stream of anagrams’ (133).

Anagrammatic desire, then, is not given subjectively or in intuition. It implies a speculative non-phenomenology of the body that, as George Bataille suggests, is comprehended not in subjective fullness but in deformations, ruptures and collisions. The operational biomorph explicates a non-local potential without depth; revealed, if at all, in the swarming space of dolls.

Bellmer, Hans. 2005. The Doll, tr. Malcom Green. London: Atlas Press.

Monnet, L., 2010. ‘Anatomy of Permutational Desire: Perversion in Hans Bellmer and Oshii Mamoru’. Mechademia, 5(1), pp.285-309.

The idea of the hyperagent originated as a thought experiment designed to explore how notions of agency, rationality and subjectivity paradigmatically applied to ‘plastic’ creatures like mammals or higher invertebrates, might carry over to posthuman successors with greatly enhanced levels of plasticity. By this I mean, creatures that can intervene in and alter their substrate to an arbitrary degree rather than to the more limited degrees furnished by learning, culture and existing technology.

The initial model of ‘hyperplastic’ agent was inspired by Steve Omohundro’s claims  regarding the capacity for rational deliberation that could be exhibited by a generally intelligent robot equipped with an high grade self-model that allows it to intervene and tinker in its own circuitry. It was then employed to refute Ray Brassier’s suggestion that Thomas Metzinger’s hypothetical ‘Nemocentric subject’ - lacking consciousness or selfhood - might nonetheless qualify as a Kantian agent, subject to shared norms and thus able to wield concepts through adherence to inferential proprieties (Roden 2014, 102; Brassier 2011; Omohundro 2008).

A number of future-oriented ethical-political projects stand by the assumption that capacities for rationality or consciousness are substrate invariant in a way that the Hyperplasticity Arguments appears to preclude.

For example, there is a line of reasoning quite common among the academic post-humanities which is most pithily exemplified in Andy Clark in Natural Born Cyborgs:

The promise, or perhaps threatened, transition to a world of wired humans and semi-intelligent gadgets is just one more move in an ancient game. We are already masters at incorporating nonbiological stuff and structure deep into our physical and cognitive routines. To appreciate this is to cease to believe in any post-human future and to resist the temptation to define ourselves in brutal opposition to the very worlds in which so many of us now live, love and work. (Clark 2003: 142)

As Stiegler argues in different vein, Clark claims that humans have always been technogenetic hybrids, our cognition outsourced to our environments and tools. If you hold the ‘parity principle’, some of our mental processes literally extend outside our skins and crania.

In summary, the Technogensis Argument goes: Since we (humans) have been incorporating non-biological stuff into our cognition over successive technological iterations without compromising our humanity, it follows that further iterations cannot compromise our humanity.

This is obviously an inductive argument rather than a valid deductive one. It could be refuted by a single contrary event of the kind that I call a ‘Disconnection’ (Roden 2012, 2014, 98-103).

Consider a radical instance of human-posthuman disconnection of the kind that Hyperagency poses (Roden 2014; Roden 2013).

Neorationalists regard the construction of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) as an extension of human social practices of deontic assessment, Sellarsian games of “giving and asking for reasons”.

This precludes that the arbitrary extension of intelligence would result in agents to which notions of a self-authoring rational subject of shared norms is inapplicable.

Consequently, if the recursive extension of our agency could produce agents that we could no longer evaluate as rule following rational agents, something seems wrong with the equivalence from the get go.

2. Speculative Plasticity

Rather than reviewing the detailed arguments for the incompatibility of hyperagency with consciousness or rationality in this post (These are set out in some detail in Roden 2014, Roden 2022 and Roden 2024) I want to anticipate their wider philosophical implications.

As already indicated, these range beyond the bio-ethical concerns of transhumanism, or speculative posthumanism, to issues of general ontology, epistemology and metaphysics. We can see why if we ask what it might mean for concepts of agency and subjectivity, etc. to be recognition-transcendent.

Consider the Observability Assumption enunciated in Donald Davidson’s essay “Rational Animals.” This states baldy:

“An observer can under favourable circumstances tell what beliefs, desires, and intentions an agent has.” (Davidson 2001b: 99)

The OA finds its home in a pragmatism for which psychological discourse is not be a folk theory about publicly unobservable or “inner” states of the mind/brain, but a social “craft” for evaluating rational agents, for example: undertaking radical interpretation in light of the principle of charity. This is the social nexus within which concepts of agency and subjectivity emerge. It follows that agency cannot be a recognition-transcendent concept. Agency occurs only where “we" can recognise it in principle. (We might also refer to this is a “local correlationism” for agency or agency anti-realism.)

If recognition is constitutive of agency we need to ask if there is a class of agents (the recognisers) by whose lights aspirants for recognition can qualify as agents. Brandom suggests that such beings would have to have a “First Class” intentionality as against the merely derivative intentionality of lesser agents unable to furnish the conditions of evaluation. This intentional aristocracy is characterised by the capacity for public language (Brandom 1994, 60; see Roden 2017). This is because attributing contents to fellow creatures requires a medium of expression whereby beliefs can be individuated regardless of their mental idiom. However, this attributional superpower is necessary for having beliefs. Belief is an alethic attitude to a proposition. Thus having beliefs, as Davidson argues, presupposes the concept of belief or an understanding of truth and falsity (Davidson 1984, 163). Otherwise put, there are no  true second class agents.

This relationship between other-understanding and discourse resonates in readings of Hegel for which the self-alienating, “self-othering” of thought must be inscribed in a form allowing reinscription and reconceptualisation (See Dollar 2020, loc 866). As Nathan Brown puts it in Rationalist Empiricism with reference to the opening of the Logic:

Hegel’s cogito is discursive. As I have noted, it is not explicitly discursive. The accompaniment of the saying of being, “thought is; thought exists,” goes unsaid, but it is implied through discourse. Thought must be articulated in order to be intelligible; language is the material existence of the being of thought. On this point, I agree with the emphasis upon discursive rationality in interpretations in interpretations of Hegel by both Jean Hyppolite and Robert Brandom (Brown 2021, 77).   

So if we push back, asking after this “We”, we are driven, it seems, to this discursive conception of a Geist piggybacking on the recursive structure of language.

This philosophy has been exquisitely elaborated in the work of Hegel, Davidson, Brandom and others. But if Hyperagents are possible in principle, it seems to fail insofar as it fails to saturate its own possibility space. For, as I have argued elsewhere, a hyperagent must elude recognition (Roden 2022 and 2024). Given its possibility, our agency concepts would be verification transcendent after all. Hyper-cognition would be have to be non-discursive, while hyper-subjectivity is conceivable only through apophatic hand-waving: “It’s subjectivity, Jim, but not as we know it.”

This implies a posthuman future unbound from a priori constraints on discourse. Plastic Philosophy would then offer insufficient resources for deliberation about the trajectory of current cognitive technologies. As already mooted, however, the speculative import of hyperagency extends beyond the confines of posthumanism into general epistemology and metaphysics.

3. The Extension Argument

Consider your favourite brew of Correlationism, Anti-realism or Idealism. For example: 1) an empirical realism for which the only entities to which we should be ontologically committed are objects of possible experience for finite subjects; 2) an anti-realism based on a semantic theory for which the truth aptness of a proposition depends on its truth conditions being recognisable for finite subjects; 3) a Hegelian/Lacanian materialism whereby matter is qualified as the real eluding the symbolic order that interpolates finite subjects, etc (See Dolar 2020; Everitt 2026).

A Hyperagent would not be any such subject (See Roden 2024, 2022, 2014, 98-103). It could not be conscious as we understand the term or have the intentional contents or deontic attitudes that plausibly underwrite language and the symbolic order.

This possibility of radically alien forms of agency, thought and subjectivity brings to mind Meillassoux’s claim for the contingency of the correlation. Our worlds could be structured otherwise (See Zantvoort 2015). Maybe in radically alien ways. However, the situation is more complicated. Hyperagency is not simply an alternative way of structuring the world but a possible future of existing life and agency that could occur by successive improvements in plasticity which carry it forth to whatever critical point Hyperagency arises.

Suppose a technical recipe for turning a merely plastic agent or subject into a hyperagent or hyper-subject by graduated enhancement. It might include some kind of mutant copying process whereby replicas of an initial agent is furnished with added plasticity over many generations. The time scale is clearly irrelevant as long as as one copy can attain the threshold of this new phase of matter. Call this the Extension Assumption (EA).

The EA assumes that, however alien the hyperagent would have to be, it is a demonstrable outcome or successor form of familiar agency or subjectivity. It implies that just as, with Spinoza, we don’t know what a body can do. We also don’t know what a subject is or can do either! Thus we cannot seriously claim to delineate the space of reasons or the thinkable.

Thus if hyperagency is possible, it is a possibility inhering in existing agents. Hyperagency is necessarily inscrutable but it is also a radical inflection of the agency and subjectivity we think we understand. Thus it is a possibility of agency and subjectivity that idealist epistemology cannot articulate through dialectical elaboration. Given the principled possibility of hyperagency, all epistemologies requiring the constitutive activity of a non-hypersubject are incomplete. Idealists might disallow Hyperagency, but unless this move is motivated it amounts to a form of the metaphysical dogmatism such positions were originally developed to foreclose; a dogmatism that discounts modes of existence simply on the grounds that their possibility would vitiate some or other favoured account of reality.

The EA furnishes an argument for the insufficiency of plastic philosophy and perhaps for an anti-idealism unbounded by conditions of appearance and intelligibility.

References:

Brandom, Robert. Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive     Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Brown, N., 2021. Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique. Fordham Univ Press.

Davidson, D. 1984. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Dolar, Mladen. 2020. “What’s the Matter?” Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism. Ed. by Russel Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. pp. 31–49.

Everitt, K., 2026. “The Ontological Dignity of Indeterminacy: Reimagining Nature and the Atom.” International Journal of Social Imaginaries, 1(aop), pp.1-14.

Omohundro, S. M. 2008.“The Basic AI Drives”. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications 171: 483.

Roden, D., 2013. “The Disconnection Thesis.” In The Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment (pp. 281-298). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Roden, David. 2017. “On Reason and Spectral Machines: Robert Brandom and Bounded Posthumanism.” In Philosophy After Nature, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn. Rowman & Littlefield International.

Roden, David. 2022. “The Filter Problem for Posthuman Bioethics: The Case of Hyperagency.” In Bioethics and the Posthumanities, edited by Danielle Sands, 116–128. London and New York: Routledge, 2022.

Roden, David. 2024. “Nietzschean Hyperagents.” In Nietzsche, Critical Posthumanism, and Transhumanism, edited by Aura Schussler. Trivent, 202

Zantvoort, B., 2015. Speculating on the Absolute: on Hegel and Meillassoux. Speculations VI, pp.79-120.

The Book of Questions

In the empty night hours, I can still walk through the streets. Dawn may surprise me on a bench in Garay Park, thinking (trying to think) of the passage in the Asrar Nama where it says that the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the Rending of the Veil. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Zahir’

Graphisms

You find maps of all cities on café menus, on the grimy wallpaper of a popular chop house, sketched in cursives and spirals of smoke; constellated among stars or set-theoretical abstractions, in the mud under the shattered masonry of a tobacco warehouse.

Under this demolished warehouse, by the weed choked peripheral canal of ζ, the map of its alter-city ψ is traversed by verminous black insects. Their carapaces are inscribed with interior labyrinths satirizing the thin mountain air and monumental absences of ζ.

You hold the abscessed paw of an indigent priest crouched on a straw mat by the pretentious entrance of a downtown store. Its pale skin seamed with dust and grease and purple erotic sores. You abuse yourself by licking the sores. The nerve damage induced by the Order’s arcane poisons amplifies sensation, frees thought of all but the litany of the One. The Rose. When you are gone, the priest rubs his ejaculate discretely into its palm.

His stump holds an olfactory map of sunken cities decaying in the wetlands of the Moon. They waft through your memory, carried on the perfume of his unwashed body.

You proceed westward along a boulevard into the ζ sunset. Its buildings, sheer sides in a burning ravine.

The Cities of Hell are more poetically diverse than those of the living; each represented as a numbered aleph in the margins of certain philosophical treatises. Variant glyphs are found in geographies, bestiaries, histories, and theologies; in sagas where tragic heroes battle chthonic monsters and their febrile yearning for sex with forbidden species.

The Philosopher writes, ‘The indiscernible is brought under a name, which is dispersed like the anagram of the name of a god.’

In the massive scriptorial palaces that lie off the Boulevard, you discover maps of cities whose names even djinn dare not utter. Once read, they are inscribed in a single memory that taunts you with a forgotten ideal: a black walled garden, its heavy perfume dragging you down under infernal stars.

Such lacunae plague the dreams and days of all citizens, foreign or native to ζ.

The topography, style and even nomenclature varies with the city mapped. Lacking a common standard – like a marble block composing a unit length – to attest their correctness, the difference between the real and the fabulous correlatives of maps eludes you, just as the Philosopher predicted in his mature writings.

            However, such positions need to go further and provide explanations for the emergence of mental properties in a non-mental world or (if they are deflationary) for the emergence of systems that can attribute such psychological states. This is because they must deny that such powers emerge “spookily” – i.e. in ways that are recalcitrant to explanation. This point is recognized, for example, by the Deleuzian philosopher of science Manuel DeLanda who proposes that any explanation of emergent behaviour in a given system should have a mechanistic component framed in terms of its constituents and the ecological relations they enter into: for example, a system of chemical reactants far from equilibrium, or a population of individuals in a pre-state society.[2][3] Spooky or strong emergence would de-fang the decentering effect by allowing subjectivity to jump fully formed out of the slime even where these attributes do not form part of the prior furniture of the world.

            Naturalists, materialists and posthumanists should, then, require that our theories of intentionality and subjectcivity be compatible with some gradualist explanation of the development of intentional systems from non-intentional ones, subjects from non-subjects, etc..

[1] Nayar, Pramod K. Posthumanism. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.

[2] Manuel DeLanda, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011): 13-15.

[3] In DeLanda’s account the second component corresponds to the Deleuzian Idea: the specification of singularities reflecting that same system’s tendency to slip into distinctive portions of its state space.

Image credit: Siegmar Zacharias, Slime Dynamics, Performance at MDT Stockholm, 2017.

Xenophilia

• This is the text of a presentation given remotely May 3 2019 at the conference A Sad & Lonely Constellation: Navigating the Antinomies of Technological Hope at the Caffè Letterario in Milan. Its prospectus is “to navigate through the thick swarm of hopes surrounding the body of Artificial Intelligence as it accelerates towards us.”

Subtraction

Contemporary posthumanisms can be understood as operations of subtraction(McNulty 2013, 32-3). Each suspends or ‘unbinds’ some epistemological and ethical privilege attaching to the human: whether as a vital embodied subject or the free rational subject of post-Kantian thought. However, each posthumanism combines a subtractive or abstractive epistemology with an erotics of alienation, a xenophilic urge to splice a future that does not simply reproduce the present but is – in some still unimaginable way – disconnected from it.

I start from the assumption that this subtractive orientation alone cannot explain the orientation of the posthuman to the future. To understand the posthuman we must understand the erotic or ‘desiring’ aspect that enjoins this production of the new (Roden 2018).

The Filter Problem

Posthumanism confronts the space of technically possible histories whereby posthuman ‘wide’ descendants of humans might emerge (Roden 2014, 53). However, each version of posthumanism has proprietary filters which restrict our consideration to certain portions of that space. [1]

For left-accelerationism (ACC) and Xenofeminism (XF), the idea of sapience or rational autonomy limits posthuman agents to those whose agency and capacities for conception and deliberation are discursive and social (Hester 2019). For a species egalitarian critical posthumanism., on the other hand, it is the capacity for duration and suffering that warrants serious ethical status (Braidotti 2006).

Yet each has unbound, ‘extremophile’ tendencies that dispense with such filters. Nick Land’s unconditional acceleration makes no distinction between sapient or non-sapient forms by which hyper-capitalism might be freed from any organic or embodied substrate (Land 2017).

More pertinently perhaps, I’ve argued independently that the filters fail to constrain the future. They fail to provide an epistemic grip on this time horizon. The sapience restriction, for example, assumes that serious agents participate in shared linguistic and inferential functions. Yet, the best account of such a functionalism is demonstratively incomplete – it assumes an interpreting agent capable of imputing normative statuses in order to explain rational subjectivity. Unfortunately, this doubles subjectivity in such a way as to unbind it, leaving the constraints on agency unbound. ‘[In] principle interpretability is ill-defined unless we have some conception of what is doing the interpreting’ (Roden 2014, 128; Roden 2017).

The epistemic frailty of the anthropocentric filters implies that such posthumanisms tend towards the unqualified excision of the human, even when sheathed, mantis-like, in a neorationalist carapace or under the friendly smile of the species egalitarian.

Excision Ethics

Such excision necessitates a relationship to time or to futurity. In ACC, Prometheanism and XF this derives from their polemical and programmatic character. The Outside remains to be engineered or solicited before it can be encountered. Xenophilia is not only desire for the other, but a desire to become other; to burn away the present with new forms of production, reproduction or affiliation. To enter a different order of being.

Thus insofar as Xenophilia is satisfied it cannot be. Insofar as Xenophilia is, it cannot be satisfied.

Xenophilia is doubly unconditional. Lacking satisfaction conditions, it 1) does not represent a goal state and 2) cannot oppose a present state on the grounds that it fails to realize those goals.

Finally, if per impossibile, the posthumanist could envisage satisfaction conditions of her desire she would no longer be motivated by xenophilia. Xenophilic futurity need not be posed as radically incomprehensible but its adequate conceptualization must await the event of its construction or disconnection.

How, then, does Xenophilia derive its character as a xenophilic or alienating vector of change if not from its content?

Alien Encounters

One model for Xenophilia is the fascination or allure of the alien expressed in Weird literature. As Mark Fisher claims, the ‘weird’ represents an intrusion of an alien biology or logic into a nominally human world – Lovecraft’s darkling New England or the looking-glass USA of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation (Fisher 2017, Loc 61). Amy Ireland emphasizes that this enclosure can be described in Kantian terms as a subject that regulates and smooths the data input from an inhuman Outside, but which is perpetually threatened its unformed monstrosity (Ireland 2016; 2019).[2]

But while the epistemology of the Weird may work as philosophical recuperation of authors like Lovecraft, it does not account for the X of Xenophilia.[3]

Weird Aesthetics purports be about the X but Xenophilia is not about anything. Thus the manifest content of the Weird text, with its Kantian integument, is a misreading of its own genesis.[4] It is an effect of xeno-desire that, in its narrowly Kantian form, is incapable of addressing its disconnective syntax: If the Outside can intrude in the Inside, the Inside cannot have been all it was cracked up to be. Rather the X is presaged by the incremental dereliction of an Inside that never had a stable, independent being.

Thanatos and Abjection

That desire (for the unrecognizable) is also the desire to be un-recognized. The ‘I’ that aches to become a thing and, in consequence, is already a thing.

Consequently, xenophilia is formally analogous to Thanatos [the death drive] since this, as we know, is not a desire for death but life, or rather the mutant potential implicated in the existence of an organism. Life is the gradient of our dying. So Thanatos is the condition of desire as such: “the purposelessness which compels all purpose” as Brassier memorably puts it (Brassier 2007, 236). But it is a condition opposed to itself, to the stable content or purpose of its offspring.

This transcendental of desire may manifest itself through the fetishist ideation of death, mutilation, extreme tissue damage, no less than through the images of the Weird text. But paraphilia or thanatropy – whether the desire to ‘be’ a dying sex-object or Brassier’s strange ache for cosmic extinction – is eviscerated and without object. There is nothing it is to be a corpse; not even a stellar corpse.[5] Death is no more ontologically unitary than undeath.

This is not to criticize or censor erotic fantasies of for objecthood, pain, death and abjection, etc. On the contrary, such ideations enact xenophilia and consequently provide fertile zones of transformation and experimentation. Xenophilia, then, is expressed through multiple contents or ideas, but does not have a distinguishing representational content on the side of the subject which determines its aim. Rather desire for the alien is an alien. It is alien desire.

The Alien Within

Or, it is the alien (process/event) to which categories do not apply. It has no discursive content or aim. It has no phenomenal character and consequently isn’t a candidate for non-conceptual content as this is normally conceived.

It is (in) the nameless, dark affects which punctuate improvisation, rage, agitation or other fluid, open action (Roden 2019, 521). It is (in) the unaccountable stirring of the paraphiliac. Yet if Xeno-desire is, in some sense, already the alien, why does it not furnish itself with its object? Why does it never rest, satisfied with itself? Why does it burn?

I think this is can only be because the X is never identical to its itself. It is fundamentally disseminative, plural, disconnective. Not a state of mind, or of any-thing, but a structural failure of presence: ‘a differential function without an ontological basis’ (Derrida 1984, 16). Yet, it is not for all that reducible to an abstract structure. It is always embodied and machined; which is why it can elicit affects and assemble bodies and thus can be addressed or invoked, as we might a demon.

There are no pure xenophilic contents. Rather its contents are only vehicles enacting and replicating and invoking its demon spawn.

Insofar as there is a xenophilic subject, he/she/it is already the broken thing in question.

References:

Braidotti, R. 2006. “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible”. In Deleuze and Philosophy, C. Boundas (ed.), 133–59. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Brassier, Ray, 2007. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Derrida, Jacques. ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendez-vous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’, translated by I.E. Harvey and Avital Ronell, Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature, edited by J.H. Smith and W. Kerrigan, Baltimore MD, 1984, pp. 1-32.

Fisher, M., 2017. The weird and the Eerie. Watkins Media Limited.

Hester, H., 2019. ‘SAPIENCE+ CARE: reason and responsibility in posthuman politics’. Angelaki, 24(1), pp. 67-80.

Ireland, Amy. 2016. “Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde.” In Aesthetics After Finitude. Edited by Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson, and Amy Ireland, 217–228. Melbourne: Re.Press.

Ireland, Amy. 2019. ‘”Alien Rhythms’, https://zinzrinz.blogspot.com/2019/04/alien-rhythms.html (Accessed 2 May 2019).

Land, N. 2017. ‘A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism’, https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/ (Accessed May 3 2019).

Miéville, C., 2012. On Monsters: Or, Nine or More (Monstrous) Not Cannies. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 23(3 (86), pp.377-392.

Roden, David. 2013. “Nature’s Dark Domain: An Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology”. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 72: 169–88.

Roden, David (2014), Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. London: Routledge.

Roden. 2016. ‘Letters from the Ocean Terminus’, Dis Magazine. http://dismagazine.com/discussion/81950/letters-from-the-ocean-terminus-david-roden/

Roden, David. 2017. ‘On Reason and Spectral Machines: Robert Brandom and Bounded Posthumanism’, in Philosophy After Nature edited by Rosie Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn, London: Roman and Littlefield, pp. 99-119.

Roden, David. 2017. ‘On Reason and Spectral Machines: Robert Brandom and Bounded Posthumanism’, in Philosophy After Nature edited by Rosie Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn, London: Roman and Littlefield, pp. 99-119.

Roden, D., 2018. ‘Disconnection at the limit: posthumanism, deconstruction and non-philosophy’, Symposia Melitensia, 14, pp.19-34.

Roden, D., 2019. Promethean and Posthuman Freedom: Brassier on Improvisation and Time. Performance Philosophy, 4(2), pp.510-527.

[1] Posthumanism, xenofeminism (XF), left/right accelerationism (ACC), inhumanism and non-humanism testify to a desire to escape contemporary conditions of production, gender and agency: whether by pursuing post-capitalist hyper-production, an egalitarianism that sees the cultivated life of the human (bios) as but one form of living matter (zoe), XF’s multiplication of sexualities and genders (‘Let a hundred sexes bloom’) or a future posthuman disconnection from the human socius.

[2] As Ireland notes, this incursion is often fictionally represented through the trope of the Zone – a place where our laws of time and space or biological evolution are somehow in abeyance or subject to a different logic that warps and transforms those who enter into its boundaries (Ireland 2019).

[3] The Weird text either represents a punctate encounter with the Outside or documents that record credibly record such incursions such as Lovecraft’s Necronomicon or the archives of the punctilious empiricists and bureaucrats of the Area X trilogy and Solaris. Iconic encounters might include the meeting between Wells’ Time Traveler and the tentacled creature on the shore of a ocean under the swollen red sun of Earth’s distant future, or Johansen’s encounter with the eponymous ocean dwelling god in Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, rising from his tomb in the lost city of R’lyeh – encounters that physically and psychically degrade their human subjects (Fisher 2017, Loc 124).

[4] We might seek the authentic correlates of weird aesthetics in works of dense and radically corporeal avant-garde music, performance or plastic art whose matter seems to defy the analytical or regulative power of the imagination: e.g. the work Xenakis, Merzbow, Raffaello Sanzio, Bacon or Berlinde De Bruyckere. Yet such estrangement is relative to a cultural, not a categorical framework. These works defy habits of interpretation or analytical listening, but their very existence is not a testament to the Outside referenced by Ireland or Fisher. Their syntactic density is of this world but, like Kant’s sublime, allegorizes the Outside by alerting us to the frailty of our perception of objects.

[5] Even if one can imagine undergoing the death virtually, the simulation is not the thought that correlates with its simulated.

The blindness of the mind to its true nature is also exhibited among unimpaired agents. We regularly assume that we are authoritative about the reasons for our choices. Yet studies into the phenomenon of “choice blindness” by Petter Johansson and Lars Hall suggest that humans can be gulled into attributing reasons to themselves that they did not have. In one case, subjects in a supermarket were asked to rate jams and teas, following which they were apparently presented with samples of the tea or jam they had chosen earlier and asked to explain their choice. In manipulated trials the samples were sneakily switched with samples of different products. Remarkably, less than a half the experimental participants noticed the switch, despite striking differences between the substituted pairs of flavours. The remainder sought retrospective justifications for choices they had not made.

Lars and Hall have been able to exhibit choice blindness in moral reasoning. In another experiment, subjects were asked to rate their agreement with controversial moral claims in a survey form. Unbeknownst to the experimental subjects, the pages with the original rated statements were switched for subtly altered sentences expressing contrary moral claims. However, when asked to review and discuss their rating, a majority of experimental subjects confabulated reasons for moral positions opposing the ones that had earlier embraced.[4]

Phenomena such as choice blindness and anosognosia suggest that our insight into subjectivity depends on a fallible process of self-interpretation that is subjectively “transparent” and immediate only because we are not aware that it is a process at all. Thomas Metzinger calls this constraint “autoepistemic closure.” By virtue of it, the vivid world “out there” and our vital, rich “inner” life appear not to be models or interpretations only because we are not aware of concocting them.[5]

Metzinger argues that phenomenology is systematically misleading about what phenomenology really is because it needs to be. A system that modeled itself and attempted to model that modeling process in turn (and so on) would require infinite representational resources. Phenomenological darkness thus prevents the self-interpreter from becoming entangled “in endless internal loops of higher-order self-modeling.”[6] It is thus reasonable to argue that the anti-reductionist intuition that subjective experience is inexplicable in terms of non-subjective physical or computational processes is an artifact of this phenomenological darkness.[7]

[1] David Roden, “Nature’s Dark Domain: an Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology.” Royal Institute Of Philosophy Supplement 72 (2013), 169-188.

[2] R. Scott Bakker. “Back to Square One: Towards a Post-Intentional Future”. http://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/back-to-square-one-toward-a-post-intentional-future (accessed January 8, 2015).

[3].Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2004), 429-436.

[4] Lars Hall, Petter Johansson, and David de Léon. “Recomposing the will: Distributed motivation and computer-media

ted Extrospection,” in Decomposing the Will, 298-324 (New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press, 2013), 303-4.

[5] Metzinger, Being-No-One, 57.

[6] Metzinger, Being-No-One, 338.

[7] Metzinger, Being-No-One, 436.

Introduction:

The question: What is sound? is typically inflected in a Platonic fashion. It asks after the unitary nature or ‘essence’ of audibilia. The philosophy of sound cannot avoid passing through this defile, but there are reasons for thinking it may have no principled answer; that, moreover, a technological prosthesis to our experience of sound (sound art in the broadest terms) can help us see our way to this aporetic conclusion: That there is an unavoidable disunity of the sonorous which expresses the disunity or groundlessness of Being as such.

1. Main Kinds of Auditory Ontology

Proximal – sounds are private, non-representational sensations or qualia

Medial – ‘sounds are compressive waves in an elastic medium’ (Locke)

Locative – sounds are ‘found where they are heard’

• Locative property theories – Sounds as properties of sounding objects

• Located Event theories – sounds are events in sounding objects/or disturbances of a medium in sounding objects (Located Event Theory – LET)

Each of these accounts can defended on the grounds that it captures certain intuitive beliefs about sounds or features of our auditory phenomenology:

Proximal theories comport with the idea that phenomenal properties of sounds – how they appear to humans – are essential. If there were no particulars exhibiting these idiosyncratic qualities, there would be no sounds. But the best candidate for the bearers of such qualities are auditory sensations or representations. Sonorous properties that we hear in sounds, it seems, may be ontologically dependent on human auditory perspectives.

A thought experiment to support the proximal approach: Imagine creatures whose sensory systems were responsive to features that medial and locative theories identify as sounds but which do not experience them as sounds. Perhaps some creatures see compressions waves or vibrations, while others feel them in a tactile way.

According to Proximal theories, such creatures would not experience sound at all. They would have distinctive ways of tracking the events that we hear as sound.

Medial theories capture the intuition that if there were no compression waves in elastic media there would be no sounds. For example, if all that existed were atoms floating in a vacuum, there would be no sounds However, medial theories seem less able to address the locatedness of sound and can be integrated into Located Event theories (O’Callaghan 2007, 26).

Locative Theories comport well with another feature of auditory phenomenology – namely, that sounds provide distinctive information about sounding objects and seem to be located where we hear them.

So for locative theories sounds are not in the head or mind and not in media, but occur in places.

Located Event theories are particularly sensitive to the temporal character of sounds. For the LET, sounds are transient particulars with specific temporal profiles (envelopes). The properties of sounds (high low, soft loud) are grounds for assigning them to objects or places (O’Callaghan 2007, 17-19). They are properties of auditory events rather than the auditory particulars themselves.

The idiosyncratic nature of auditory properties can be integrated into this view by treating phenomenal properties of auditory events as accidental and related to a human auditory perspective, while their physical properties are essential (Casati and Dokic 2005a, p. 179). Such accidental properties supervene on base physical properties of sound but are not identified with the dispositions to produce them. For this account sounds are non-phenomenal but some of their accidental properties phenomenal.

The problem with this supervenience view, roughly, is that it divides hearing into property and event hearing and thus doesn’t capture the way auditory properties – such as envelope in timbre – just are their temporal development over their duration (Roden 2010, 147). A sounds envelope is an essential physical property of the sound, analogous to spatial shape (Roden 2010, 148).

• Ontology and Sound art

3. Can sound art help us do auditory ontology?

Against: The ontology of sound aims to see how our theoretical claims regarding sound hanging together. Sound art does not provide us with extra theoretical claims but novel auditory experiences. Hence sound art doesn’t add anything relevant to the ontology of sound.

For: Theoretical claims about sound are ultimately responsive to the range of auditory experiences as well as scientific theories of sound under reflective equilibrium (which is why LET seems to trump medial theories while accommodating them in certain respects). The wider that range, the more accurately our concepts of sound reflect the diversity of audition.

By adding novel auditory experiences (machining phenomenology) sound art adds to the range of theoretical claims that ontology has to work with and thus help refine it. To take a relatively simple example, the synthesizer envelop control helps us to understand sonic timbre as a partly temporal feature of the sound’s duration; thus as composed by primary rather than secondary properties (Roden 2010, 147-8).

4. Slack Metaphysics and the Aesthetic Edge

A more radical proposal for the priority of auditory aesthetics:

Maybe there is no single truth or essence of sound that a final and complete auditory ontology will produce. Likewise, there is no essence to the entities apt for our aesthetic interest in sound.

If we take these assumptions together machining phenomenology is not a matter of providing a wider corpus of evidence with which to refine our philosophical accounts of the nature of sound. Machines produce new auditory natures. Sound is not one because Being is not one.

Examples of slack metaphysics:

• Casati and Dokic’s event theory identifies sounds with generative processes in sounding objects. But where is the process? If the process depends on a wider system like a musician or a digital audio system, does it extend into the containing system? This seems to be true of algorithmically produced sound which depends entirely on the input from the computer to the speaker via the DAC.

• But this has the peculiar consequence that, in such cases, algorithmic processes do not merely produce sounds but are parts of some sounds.

• As opposed to Casati and Docik’s LET theory, Casey O’Callaghan’s 2007 relational event theory identifies sounds with disturbances of a medium in sounding objects. The theories have different consequences for where we place sounds and when. But these implications do not seem important – they are differences that make no difference.

• Maybe, then, sound is metaphysically indeterminate. That is, the indeterminacy of what and where sound is not a matter of it being indeterminately represented but a matter of not being determinately any one kind of thing.

Conclusion

If sound is not one (isn’t a plurality united by an essence) then auditory art and technology are means of liberating the multiplicity of sound through the production of new auditory species or natures. Auditory technics is auditory ontology, to the degree that the production of auditory species (whether or not this is due to human agency) extends what sound can be. In this way, auditory technics and ontology is more like politics, extending possibilities of being, than it is a science.

References

Casati, Roberto, and Dokic, Jérôme. 2005a. Sounds. Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sounds. Accessed 5 September 2005.

Casati, Robert, and Dokic, Jérôme. 2005b. la philosophie du son,

http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr

. Accessed 3June 2005.

O’Callaghan, C., 2007. Sounds: A philosophical theory. Oxford University Press.

Roden, D., 2010. Sonic art and the nature of sonic events. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1(1), pp.141-156.

Press was wearing a habitual, plain black combat sleeve with a green cloak but held a conspicuously shiny chain to the Jackals’ diamond collar.

Fragonards and shredders and underdogs beetled around her feet, cutely petitioning inappropriate target solutions. Kill-Listers, like Kino, treated the central hub as a mosh pit. Too many cocks and mouths under their purple combat gloves while their skin buds replicated the over-sexed Incel remixes Bel had detested as they danced, drank and fought.

Elle, glued into her acceleration couch, wondered how she could leverage their mission to dog-murder, assuming some solid political rationale. Press –suspiciously cheery in the Jackal’s presence - indiscreetly caught it, vibing back that she’d be contractually ‘deconstructed’ and nobody wished to discover what that piece of legalese entailed. The dogsbody whose name was ‘Ibnis’, just watched the Kill Listers with undisguised hunger, but like Kino, treated her with exaggerated deference. On meeting her at the ramp, he had had experimented with a courtly greeting in an archaic Planetary she had never known, or had forgotten during Re-Ed.

The Penelope’s Dark Envelopes were convecting rust-coloured fountains of dust, excrement, trash, and the ubiquitous robins… drowning the incel roar coming from the passenger sections. Blast-off was a glitchy flicker bath of endless, sunkissed beaches, tourist seasons on imaginary planets mocked up on xombie media while Dark Energy sumps de-tuned their acceleration. But outside the Well, the walls displayed a deceptively stately panorama over Olympus Sinthomes: adjacencies, spars canopies, transail grids wheeled in red glare as one of the Struves pinked above @Immerzeit’s dirt umber curve. A studious calm descended on the Kill-Listers.

The Red Desert’ assembles in layers: loping bass alternates between octaves, raspy continuants top and bottom of the register, randomized clicks over a percussive loop; a susurrus of far off industry, a cataract softened.

A woman’s voice, calmly narrates the indices of her decline in barely accented Danish English:

I find myself feeling like decades have passed

I’m an old woman now and I have lost my attraction

I’m tortured by a feeling of drowning

Under you, under society, politics

The decay of nature

My lack of interest[1]

Puce Mary (aka Frederikke Hoffmeier) speaking, like Poe’s Valdemar, from a point beyond life – if life can be said to have a beyond or a within.

Or if, like Poe’s protagonist, she is hypnotized into a semblance of existence. She does not spare herself or us. She afflicts her afterlife, hurting within us and for us; as noise layers in the track afford the tinnitus to come.

The album from which the ‘Red Desert’ is the fifth track is titled ‘The Drought’ – as it happens the name of one of J G Ballard 60’s disaster novels. As in Ballard’s work, this pre-emption of catastrophe implies both a burgeoning complicity with inhuman forces and a posture of subtraction.

The subtraction of human bonds and of any claim to have a name creates the space for it to begin. Hers is a movement of withdrawal repeated over several tracks – from bodies, from the normativity of the sexual, from any contract or concern with the soi disant ‘human’.

To all intents and purposes, it begins lyrically. An inner life is contraposed with the inert realm of a dead, dying nature. As Hoffmeier says:

I feel my eyes tearing up

What should I do with them?

Should I watch?

I can’t look at the sea for long

I’ll lose interest in what’s happening on land

Even in Hell one retains a seed of self-recognition for it is a condition of your suffering. Thus in the hollowness of this reduced state, drowning amid the drought, Hoffmeier enunciates a last, desperate thirst for authenticity:

I want to look at something real

To hear a human voice

And trust that it comes from a human voice

To trust that it comes from a human

Who was made like me

Hoffmeier evinces uncertainty about the origin of the voice, due perhaps to its dubious production methods and the problematic identification of a body. If both voice and body are in doubt, this extends surely to the listener who only hears this plaint towards the end as a loop, sinking into a blizzard of static:

To touch a pair of lips

And at the same time know

That it was a pair of lips

To watch everything is so deceptive

To listen is also deceptive. The position of spectator or subject assigns no privileged relation to the supposed human vocal organs behind a pair of lips. The voice does not come from a pair of lips, but a processed sound file, mimetized in its repetition as the track ends and fades.

In memorializing her last, flagging passion, the narrator marks the lyrical subjectivity she alludes to without perseverance. There can be no lyric after nature. She cannot persevere when the voice and nature are equally negated, even if this suspense is the defining allegorical power of lyric. A self-authenticating power of self-relinquishment (de Man). This is not only of the body disconnected from its sexual allure, but of the epistemology of the human itself. At this stage we must ask for whom or what is Hoffmeier’s narrator memorializing? Who will listen, after Nature?

On another track, ‘The Transformation’, the narrator is anatomized and minutely scrutinized by one she no longer recognizes in turn: ‘a monster, like you, is beyond my understanding’ – one who searches for the vices deep inside her ‘like a scientist looking for a mysterious phenomenon’.

At the end of the track the negation becomes virulent and everything decays, transforms ‘Now you have neither shape nor size’. Things have become wayward and estranged from their qualities. She can only communicate this dissipated condition through contradiction:

He pulls his hand out of his pocket

But that is not a hand

And that is not a pocket

I pull a hair out of my mouth

But that is not a hair

And that is not my mouth

The epistemological spiral ramifies. Her body, yours, mine, opaque. Our innerness dark of and with possibility. We can no longer trust our voices; that lyrical substance between the self-authenticating ‘I’ and its supposed natural frame.

In the Drought, everything’s sourceless. Why do we even speak of sound sources?

Yet what remains isn’t vacant, but a kind of churning incipience, a violent ascesis between process and event. The voice does not know itself, cannot trust its mouth to speak, suspecting its latent monstrousness.

‘Do you think it is waiting for someone?’ asks the Psychopomp. The wings flap slow and soft against blotchy cement, ultrablack crescents, intersecting at mid points, their horns curving to dirty floor and tiled ceiling. They have closed around the two symmetric sides of human beef in a cartoonish parody of digestion. Each side headless, limbless, anonymous, and just as succulent.

She thinks of the severed head of the Baptist presented to Salome in that late painting, gaping in horror or a last cooling kiss, shrouded on the gold in a greasy midnight of hair.

The composition recalls, above all, Bacon’s ‘Figure With Meat’ but absent the Papal figure screaming between its racks. Meat here is the lost, destituted in literal mise en abyme.

The Patriarch’s bare thighs clench hard around the woman’s refrigerated loin. ‘Do you think it is waiting for something?’ asks the Psychopomp.

‘Each visitation is a personal matter,’ he enunciates with the confidence of the true believer, but his eyes are querulous and needy, as if he seeks her confirmation. She smiles and nods unconvincingly.

A long slit was opened in the meathead woman’s midriff and belly where offal was taken for pies and pâtés. A see-through plastic auto-asphyxia bag with string fastener rests like a puddle between her preposthumous mastectomy scars. The Psychopomp momentarily pictures Bacon’s empurpled Pope as an alien maggot bursting from her ablated chest cavity.

‘You won’t die today,’ she reassures him. ‘I have a good instinct for these things.’ His testicles shrink ecstatically against the chill.

‘I’m Angel food. We all are.’ He groans, rallying.

‘Warmed in the grace of Their vast indifference,’ she responds; slyly quoting his Credo.

Biomorphic Horror. With an effort, Dr Nathan looked away from Catherine Austin as she picked at her finger quicks. Unsure whether she was listening to him, he continued: ‘Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life – not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horror of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures – in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.’ J G Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

This passage from Ballard’s montage novel, the Atrocity Exhibition, condenses the dystopian visions of texts like Crash, High Rise or the ‘Terminal Beach’. The human body and the human subject, it suggests, will be technologically co-opted; our most intimate moments detached from lived encounters to become replicable media objects or conceptual abstracta. In the Introduction to the French edition of Crash, he claims that this novel’s constant juxtaposition of wounded bodies and fetishized automobiles is intended to convey the danger of a perversion of the body’s ‘intimate time and space’ (Ballard 1995, 12). In such passages, Ballard writes as a traditional humanist, lamenting processes of mediatisation and abstraction that will allow us, as he remarks in a 1979 interview, to ‘explore extensively’ the psychopathology of our lives (Ballard and Sellars 2012, 128).

Ballard was consistently prescient. As he anticipated some thirty years ago, a ubiquitous social media complex farms our estranged acts of self-exhibition, notional violence or casual scapegoating while we browse the net for garden furniture sex toys or cosmetics. Yet, as a number of his readers have noted, this moralist cedes to a ‘posthumanist Ballard’ – one more disturbing for being more epistemologically consistent than either the seer or the social critic.

As Jean Baudrillard argues, the possibility of a systematic perversion and generalization of violence explored in Crash overrides the order of socialized desire that furnishes the norms of the dystopian moralist (Baudrillard 1994, 113). The most radical aspect of Crash is that its fetishistic acts of wounding and self-immolation are not aleatory, but programmed and significant; albeit in a manner that, like Capital, is constantly mutable (Brassier 2004). Its acts of semiurgic violence have a circulating, symbolic meaning that pivots on the conceptual auto-disaster which its central character, Vaughan, stages during his failed attempt to ram Elizabeth Taylor’s limousine near a London airport flyover.

This Zero-Event plays a role rather like the null or empty set – Ø – in the mathematical ontology of Alain Badiou. Vaughan’s ‘Heathrow Fail’ is a fertilizing event marking the empty place of the ‘unique vehicle collision . . . that would transform all our dreams and fantasies’ (Ballard 1995: 130; Badiou 2007).  

It codes the abstract being of a transformative event by notating it as a pure absence (Ballard 1995 130).

Ballard’s posthumanist body, then, is non-specific and unbounded – or, as others might say, a ‘subtractive body’. Its fetishised juxtapositions with technique are interchangeable within a ramifying media landscape that exercises a kind of counter-normativity.

It is posthuman insofar as this implies an unbound rejection of all models privileging human life, consciousness or understanding. It answers to no traditional culture or standard beyond a susceptibility to  disproportionate carnage. Like the synthetic polymers used for culturing stem cells for blood and bone marrow, it is heavy with void. One of its avatars might be the suburban cancer patient who inexplicably parades her eroded body before a fugitive psychiatrist in a section of the first chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition, sub-headed ‘neoplasm’ – a strangely adventitious synonym of the ontologically insurgent ‘new flesh’ of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome:

Her handsome face, veiled by the laced curtains, resembled that of a skull. All day she would pace around the small bedroom. At the end of the second month, when the doctor’s visits became more frequent, she undressed by the window, exposing her emaciated body through the veiled curtains. Each day, as he watched from the cubular room, he saw different aspects of her eroded body, the black breasts reminding him of the eyes of the bomber pilot, the abdominal scars like the radiation burns of the young woman. After her death he followed the funeral cars among the reservoirs in the white Pontiac (Ballard 1993, 7).

To be sure, this zero-body or biomorph – with its recapitulation of an empty desire and being – is not the only, or most widely used, conception of embodiment among what are sometimes called the ‘Posthumanities’. However, I want to explore the ways in which it incises the posthumanist discourse around embodiment and life. For it seems to me that the biomorph may provide a rigorous operational aesthetic for posthumanism.

Against it, we can counterpose a more developed and grounded conception of post-organic life arising out of the posthumanist rejection of human/nonhuman dualisms. The “vital” or “intensive” posthumanisms of Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Cary Wolfe and others, appeal to a decentered but fluidly embodied subjectivity that may not be personal and whose existence is not a privileged relation to Being; which, nonetheless, remains constitutively open to other bodies and relations.

Unlike the biomorph, this body has a less problematic relation to Nature – here conceived of as a field of evolving, self-organising systems without transcendent organising principles – rather than a region split off from culture or mind (Delanda 2004, 58; 2006). It isn’t a thing, if by this we understand a passive object of knowledge but an unfolding power or tendency in matter which express a kind of nonhuman agency, desire or conatus (Braidotti 2018: 4). This agency is always produced through multiple connections that ramify like the branches of a mycelium – ‘differenciating’ in time, as Deleuze has it, generating new objects or species through local engines of differences or intensity (May 2004, 71; Deleuze 1991, 207).

This posthuman body is not the stable protagonist of moral theory, nor the province of a species but an ethically involved ‘line of flight’ constituted ‘in and by multiplicity’ – by ‘multiple belongings’ (Braidotti 2013).  Braidotti refers to it with the ancient Greek term for non-human/non-political life (zoe) – as opposed to bios, the cultivated life the human citizen. Zoe marks the sociable tendency of living matter to affiliate with other living systems and to form new functional assemblages:

‘Life’, far from being codified as the exclusive property or unalienable right of one species, the human, over all others or of being sacralised as a pre-established given, is posited as process, interactive and open ended. This vitalist approach to living matter displaces the boundary between the portion of life – both organic and discursive – that has traditionally been reserved for anthropos, that is to say bios, and the wider scope of animal and nonhuman life also known as zoe (Braidotti 2012: 60).

This critique of anthropocentricism and speciesism appears to necessitate vitalism because its subject must remain radically nonexclusive and open to connection with others. That is, no non-arbitrary bound – whether culture on the one hand, or the physical on the other – can be applied to the field of zoe. Its raison l’être is precisely to operate (transversely) across such boundaries.

The zoe-body is a plausible avatar of what I call ‘unbounded posthumanism’ since its agency, as we have seen, is irreducible to any human concept of intentional systems or localised bodies. Indeed, both it and the biomorphic body are unbounded, distinguished only by the greater ontological specificity of zoe. This is evident in the ways that the zoe-body remains wedded to a regional psychology and phenomenology of human life.

And this, I suggest, is a problem for those who aim to follow posthumanist philosophy to its speculative limit. This critical point is articulated by the French speculative realist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in his essay “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition” where he suggests that there is something paradoxical about a so-called critique of humanism that deflates “the primacy of the rational subject” only to inflate “another type of subjectivity (will, life, habit, contraction of duration)” (Meillassoux 2016, Kindle Locations 2903-2908).

By contrast, the biomorph has no special pertinence to life or duration, indeed no discernible pulse or joy beyond the generic openness to mutation, plasticity, coupling and perversion. Like Hans Bellmer’s biomorphic dolls, it is an obscene semblance where permutations, such as Ballard’s crash-bodies, map and spawn the irregional void of posthuman perversion. Like the scarred cancer patient, it is as much a body in withdrawal as a hungry cyborg, delicately staging its crepuscular tactics of disintegration or erasure.

Its emptiness and lack of ontological footing also follows from the generic character of the posthuman as a repudiation of anthropocentric bounds.

This is one of two operations that inform that speculative posthumanism that I develop in Posthuman Life.

As unbound, the posthuman body or subject is maximally denuded of subjective content. This abstraction takes posthumanism to the limit by effectively bracketing substantive theories of the subject or agent.

The second, complimentary operation, I call ‘disconnection’. In Posthuman Life this was presented as an ontological schema which recursively defined hypothetical technical descendants of current humans as ‘posthuman’ in terms of their agential independence from human social-technical life (Roden 2012; 2014).

However, this ‘thick’ characterization of the posthuman as a self-determining refugee from the human system of means and ends (whether AI, cyborg, or artificial life form, or something entirely irreducible to these science fiction images) still leans on the bios – an idea of an agent as a self-maintaining system – as a kind of machine-animal, as Pete Wolfendale has suggested (Wolfendale 2018). And this ontology, however abstract and permissive, is also thrown into question by unbinding since, at its limit, expanding the autonomy or plasticity of organisms and machines gives us an agent that, paradoxically, is not recognizable as such: a being I refer to as a ‘hyperplastic’.

To compress my argument wildly, a hyperplastic can’t be recognised as an agent because it is able to intervene in its own substrate to an arbitrary degree without losing this capacity for self-intervention. For such creatures, there would be little point interpreting themselves or other hyperplastics in terms of intentions or desires because any such mental states could be unpredictably deleted by a future intervention. Even Braidotti’s Spinozist idea of a conatus, whereby a being expresses its tendency to persist, would be inappropriate here since such tendencies could always be cancelled or overwritten at any point and thus cease ever to have been (See Roden 2025 for a fuller discussion of hyperagency.)

The notional end point of life is thus plane of abstract horror, as beyond death as it is beyond life. It is irrelevant whether hyperplasticity is possible in worlds like ours since its point is to map the implications of concepts of agency and vitality to the point at which their incoherence and lack of definition is manifest. In this, Unbound Posthumanism is akin to Deconstruction and other forms of what Drucilla Cornell calls ‘philosophies of the limit.’ Far from hazarding a positive ontological thesis, it strips away the bindings that clothe reality in conceptual form, peeling away its human face. layer by layer. What remains is something other than a World, something more or less than philosophy; an encounter with a remainder or non-meaning that philosophy cannot recognise or conceptualise.

Disconnection, then, can no longer be conceived as a positive ontological schema but must be rethought as a generic operation whereby the human is evacuated. As such, it is less philosophical than aesthetic or, better, de-constructive – a work of speculative engineering or existential ultraphysics. This is not to say that we can or should articulate it within a posthuman aesthetics – there is no more a posthuman aesthetics than there is a posthuman ethics. There is only unbinding, and disconnection recursively explored through our perverse derangements of bodies.  Posthumanism as a perverse “counter-aesthetics” operating through the formation of flesh-media biomorphs (See Colebrook 2012, 38).

Bibliography

Badiou, A., 2007. Being and Event. A&C Black.

Ballard, J.G. 2014, The Complete Short Stories Volume II, London: Fourth Estate.

Ballard, J G. 1995. Crash. London: Vintage

Ballard, J.G. and Sellars, Simon 2012. Extreme Metaphors. HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Bakker, R.S., 2009. Neuropath. Macmillan.

Brandom, R. 1994. Making it Explicit: Reasoning, representing, and discursive commitment. Harvard university press.

Brassier, R., 2004. ‘Nihil unbound: remarks on subtractive ontology and thinking capitalism’, in Hallward, P (ed.), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the future of philosophy, pp.50-58.

Brassier, R., 2007. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Brassier, R., 2011a. “Concepts and objects”. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, re. press. pp.47-65.

Brassier, R. 2011b. “The View from Nowhere”. Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture 17: 7–23.

Browning, M., 2007. David Cronenberg: author or film-maker? Bristol: Intellect Books.

Bersani, Leo.1986. The Freudian Body: psychoanalysis and art. New York: Columbia University Press

Braidotti, R., 2006. Transpositions: On nomadic ethics. Cambridge: Polity.

Braidotti, R., 2013. The Posthuman, electronic book. Cambridge: Polity.

Braidotti, R., 2018. ‘A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities’. Theory, Culture & Society, p.0263276418771486.

Browning, M., 2007. David Cronenberg: author or film-maker? Bristol: Intellect Books.

Colebrook, C. 2012a. “A Globe of One’s Own: In Praise of the Flat Earth”. Substance: A Review of Theory & Literary Criticism 41(1): 30–9.

DeLanda, M.2004., Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, London: Continuum.

DeLanda, M. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books.

Hallward, P. ed., 2004. Think again: Alain Badiou and the future of philosophy. A&C Black.

Johnston, A., 2008. “Phantom of consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian transcendental idealism”. Continental Philosophy Review, 41(3), pp.345-366.

May, Todd. 2004, ‘Badious and Deleuze on the One and the Many’, in Hallward, P. ed Think again: Alain Badiou and the future of philosophy. A&C Black., pp. 67-76.

McNulty, T., 2013. ‘The New Man’s Fetish’. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 51(S1), pp.17-39.

McNulty, T., 2015. ‘Speculative Fetishism’. Konturen, 8, pp.99-132.

Meillassoux, Quentin, 2016. “Iteration, reiteration, repetition: a speculative analysis of the meaningless sign”, in Malik, S. and Avanessian, A. eds., Genealogies of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity Since Structuralism, electronic book. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Roden, David 2013. “Nature’s Dark Domain: An Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology”. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 72: 169–88.

Roden, David. 2014. Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. London: Routledge.

Roden. 2016. ‘Letters from the Ocean Terminus’, Dis Magazine. http://dismagazine.com/discussion/81950/letters-from-the-ocean-terminus-david-roden/

Roden, David. 2017. ‘On Reason and Spectral Machines: Robert Brandom and Bounded Posthumanism’, in Philosophy After Nature edited by Rosie Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn, London: Roman and Littlefield, pp. 99-119.

Roden, David. 2025. “Nietzschean Hyperagents”. In Nietzsche, Critical Posthumanism, and Transhumanism. Edited by Aura Schussler, 159-171. Trivent.

Wolfendale, Peter. 2018. ‘Rationalist Inhumanism’, in Braidotti, R. and Hlavajova, M., Posthuman glossary. London: Bloomsbury Academic

The Death of Posthuman Life: an introduction to Snuff Memories

https://schismpress.tumblr.com/schism

My first book, Posthuman Life: philosophy at the edge of the human, bequeathed several philosophical problems, above all the ethical aporia concisely expressed in Amy Ireland’s review of my 2021 book, Snuff Memories: “The posthuman cannot be known before it is produced—so to know it, we must produce it.”

The antecedent to this claim arises from the methodology of Unbound Posthumanism explored in Posthuman Life and in later essays. As we can recognise, a speculative posthumanist epistemology questions the epistemic privilege Western philosophies have traditionally attached to human subjectivity and thought. For the posthumanist, as for the methodological naturalist, there can be no secure privilege attached to first person claims about the structure of Consciousness, Time, Embodiment, and Intentionality or to Idealist assumptions concerning the correlation between Thought and Being.

From which follows that there can be no secure a priori insight into the scope of posthuman agency or life either. The author-subject of Posthumanism necessarily eludes its text. This applies whether we view the posthuman as description of our cultural or ontological condition, or whether we consider it ‘speculatively’ as a metaphysical hypothesis about powerful technically produced non-human agents, as was the case in Posthuman Life.

The ‘experience’ of the posthuman is that of generalized opacity or phenomenological darkness – not merely regarding our token desires, experiences, or thoughts but a propos the fields of desire, thought and agency. As I put it to Bogna Konior in an interview for the journal Oraxiom: ‘It’s not merely that we act without having unmediated access to action, but that the very space of that mediation (interpretation) isn’t given either, and quite possibly alien.’

It follows that this ‘dark’ posthumanist theory can only imply its xenophilic, alienating commitment to our deracination – it cannot affirm or state it as such. Nonetheless, this non-affirmative desire traverses a ghostly, biomorphic body, a doll-body complicit – like those of Ballard’s crash fetishists – in its own dismemberment. The body persists but as a memory or diagram rather than a vital fullness.

Unbound posthumanism thus has no model of experience familiar from traditional aesthetics. The aesthetic is not discernible within unbound discourse because traditional accounts of subjectivity or embodiment are suspended. Posthumanism explores the possibility space of subjectivity through performance—mutating and experimenting with biomorphs, rather than by inference or dialectics.

Snuff Memories, which might be termed a novel of speculative eroticism, effectuates this subtractive desire, a desire nonetheless distended by the pervasive magnetism of things-to-come and their iterated catastrophes: not only personal death, but ecological death, the death of the Sun and (extending this Platonic motif) of all Solar Transcendence.

This book is a montage of texts, genres and perspectives – alternating between the subtractive eroticism of death-driven biomorphic bodies and the disindividuating mesh of all the alienating ‘moral powers’ haunting its ancient, demon-haunted Cosmos (technological, alien, theological). Konior summarises this better than I can in her cover blurb:

Unveiling like a tableau of ancient gods and deathly orgies, where “the universe is composed out of windowless monads each locked away and screaming,” this evocative novel is better called a theoretical installation. Each fragment documenting an erotic way to lose one’s humanity, this is a collection of nightmarish yet utopian miniature visions of sex, death, transformation, and pain, where human bodies are stretched beyond their capacity into mythical realms.

It is just a given that death and pain are what its characters ultimately crave, just as xenophilia is the libidinal presupposition of any posthumanism. Neither they nor I give explanation or apology for this. Its narrator, a hermaphroditic Wellsian Time Pilot, addresses its prime political operator, the Cabalist saying “Like you, I would die but cannot. Not in a way that might satisfy you.”

Later he reminisces about her dystopian project: “You told us the sun will strangle itself with or without our help – But, no matter, let’s help.”

So, does Snuff Memories resolve the ethical impasse of Speculative Posthumanism with which I began? Clearly not! To expand on Ireland’s earlier formulation: “The posthuman cannot be known before it is produced—so to know it, we must produce it. And until we really are swept up in these disorienting forces—merciless, murderous, erotic perhaps—we have literature.”

Literature does not comfort or resolve the real; it exacerbates and translates it. To be sure, one might view SM as a hyperstitional romance, operating as a kind of ward or apotropaic against the forces it invokes, but here one cannot avoid complicity, or, I hope, a certain febrile pleasure.

In her two-poem collection, Apostasy, Katy Mongeau relates the desire of a female body to both kill and be killed within a world fruiting death in every leaf. Its subject is fractured because overwhelmed and broken by a lust that refracts it into nonhuman things:

Me: convulsing, lust-fucking the mud,

Sun, and consuming myself, dead rotten

Flower bud.

Tell them I’m lost, the end, an artifact. Tell them

Hello

From down here, puddled-cradled

And pushed against the whole of my master:

The ground and all that goes with it.

Drunk, then swallowed, then drunk.

A wraith and other misplaced objects I choke on.

(Mongeau 2020, 36)

A sublime viciousness bites back like a snake as she celebrates her lover burning alive in a field where the flowers are ‘reeking of the come that makes them’. The line between masochism and sadism becoming irrelevant when every skin is ripe with the desire to be meat and lovers wake exhausted from dreams of self-immolation:

We were tying each other to the horse

night after night

in hopes it might catch fire in our sleep,

and we’d wake

having already been dragged through the city,

burned,

for everyone to see.

What else have I lit on fire

more vain

than myself?

(Mongeau 2020, 22-23)

These passages reveal two points where posthumanism and the erotics of death converge. First, the questioning of anthropocentric privilege implied in Mongeau’s narrator becoming-thing or artifact antecedes death, evoking a masochistic, ecstatic shattering of self.

The erotic desire for death or self-shattering can be identified through its imagery and metaphorical figures. In Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye self-shattering is figured in the destruction of the form-bestowing ‘Apollonian eye’ or head by arbitrary Dionysian forces: for example, the deliquescent head of the female motorcyclist Bataille’s lovers negligently run over early in the novel (Byrne 2013, 99-101).

Despite this vivid imagery, though, death lust remains logically problematic – and this brings us to a difficult but revealing second intersection between eroticism and the Posthuman. If we assume, falsely, that erotic desire aims at a subjectively experienceable condition the desire to end subjectivity vitiates its own aim. A necro fetishist may imagine being a corpse, but a feeling corpse is no corpse.

Mongeau’s narrator’s desire for self-shattering is consequently a self-shattering desire without-object that can be, perhaps, narrated, not described. Hence her rhetorical question: what could be vainer than a self that wills its death?

Whatever this ‘death’ is, it is not death. In epistemic terms, it is subtracted,[1] an empty sign whose referent - real or otherwise - cannot be determined within the discourse on erotic pleasure.

This issue is not merely literary. It concerns the inconceivability of the content rather than the unreality of the desire, which may be real enough. Autoassassinophiliacs attest the desire to die and act on this desire, in some cases, dying for it (Downing 2004).

Subtraction is a procedure whereby a cognitively inaccessible reality is (however paradoxically) invoked via the conditions of its inaccessibility – as with our demonstration, earlier, that the occurrence of ‘death’ in ‘death-lust’ does not refer to any literal referent.

In Alain Badiou’s ontological writings – where subtraction is explored most rigorously - it is pursued in tandem with a rationalist conception of ontology as the pure mathematics of multiplicity - specifically Set Theory. Thus Being - considered as the unpresentable precondition of presentation - is ‘no thing’ in that it is not ‘a being.’ It can be ‘thought’ only through its symptoms, the blank spaces furrowed by the articulatory power of mathematical discourse (Badiou 2006, 23). Among these symptoms is the demonstrable existence of the generic set that - while adjoinable to an ordinary situation - is anonymous and unspecifiable within it by a comprehending property, instantiating only the generic property of belonging to it alone.

We might also compare this lacunary ontology to Derrida’s differance, which implies not a particular structure or conceptual framework, but an opening of any structure upon its Outside, a dissemination which no system can ultimately arrest or put out of play.

The subtraction of death from death-lust is also consonant with a Lacanian account where a divided subjectivity is constituted by this failure to knit consistently. To illustrate: suppose a principled killer decides to respect the autoassassinophile as an end in herself by agreeing to kill her. Both Killer and Autoassassinophile violate the principle that autonomy should be cultivated, since they extinguish it in the name of autonomy (14). This example supports Alenka Zupančič’s contention that Kantian morality is, at core, radically uncoupled from the good (Zupančič 2000, 94). According to Zupančič, it is around such minuses or voids that the ‘surplus enjoyment’ of sexual transgression circulates – a pleasure bound up with a disturbing pathology, along with the radical absence of any ‘moral law’ or God deciding our guilt or goodness.

In what follows I will not question the psychological relationship between void and surplus. Its reality is a lived fact. What is at issue is the philosophical currency of this ‘minus’ and our conception of the operation of desire in posthumanism more generally.

I have argued that posthumanism in its ‘speculative’ forms is subtractive because it must bracket its own claims to reflective self-knowledge along with any ethical privileging of the human. The posthuman subject is subtracted from posthumanist theory; we can only evaluate ‘the posthuman’ pre-emptively in encountering or producing a Posthuman Nature.

We cannot, for example, articulate a posthumanist ethics of care since it impossible to specify which beings (generalised over Posthuman Possibility Space) merit or prompt care (MacCormack 2020.) The posthuman ‘encounter’ thus lacks a conceptual determinacy that could distinguish the good posthuman difference from the purported perversity or ‘evil’ of techno-capitalist rupture, say (Roden 2020.)

A subtractive posthumanism is thus actuated by an empty eros or xenophilia (Roden 2019). A posthuman ‘nature’ is not thinkable philosophically but must be produced through the ‘biomorphic’ derangements and deformations characteristic of technical modernity itself (Roden 2020). It is only under technical modernity, after all, that the posthuman arises as an issue for embodied life.

The issue that concerns me here is the philosophical status of both minuses and what they tell us about the xenophilia that actuates both Death Lust and Posthuman Lust. For in subtractive posthumanism not only is the object (posthuman nature) negated; so is its role in constituting the division of the subject. What is subtracted is not enjoyment but its imaginary transcendental surplus - the ‘meta-level’ whereby the divided subject of enjoyment is generated by understanding itself as a subject divided (See Roden 2025, section 5).[i]

There are, to be sure, generative processes presupposed by posthumanism – ramifying socio-technical changes which re-form bodies, societies and ecologies, but these are inherently asubjective and counter-final (Roden 2025). Thus, both the empty, little ‘death’ of death-lust and posthumanist xenophilia furnish surplus enjoyment without surplus meaning. Both are non-dialectical, though undoubtedly transformative, and affective.

It is tempting to revert to Bataille’s metaphysics of transgression here by explaining posthuman xenophilia and death-lust alike in terms of an atelic and undirected ‘base’ matter which can never be spiritualized; that overturns the integrity of all bodies. This is the posthuman predicament of a life entangled and adapting, for better or worse, to divergent, counter-final process of technical and ecological change (Colebrook 2012, 37; Roden 2014, 186; 150-165; Braidotti 2013, 42; 2019, 41).

Transgression, as noted already, is an affect consequent on the violation of norms or their collapse – for example, norms stipulating that the integrity of masculine body should not be ‘destroyed’ through anal intercourse (Waldby 1995, 272). The invulnerability of a certain ideal male body incites transgression because of the excessive pleasure involved in breaching those imaginary boundaries. Anecdotally, I recall getting a lot of erotic pleasure from seeing Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976) because of the way this gay male director was able to represent male bodies as sensually porous, inviting penetration (literally, in the denouement) in a manner more usually associated with the sexualised feminine. This evocation of erotic extremity was both surprising to me (at the time, a young, nominally heterosexual male) but deep, intense and affirming.

As Romana Byrne points out (in her book Aesthetic Sexuality: A literary History of Sadomasochism) this operation does not correspond to a metaphysical dualism since prohibitive discontinuity and transgressive continuity are both generated in the material realm (Byrne 2013, 99). However, this implies that transgression – so far as it occurs – is primarily an aesthetic phenomenon. Moreover, lacking a reflective or transcendental account of subjectivity, we have no access to a comprehensive aesthetic theory. Any identification of the posthuman or erotic void, here, with transgression or pleasure seem adventitious and premature, even if our aims remain primarily aesthetic.

Since we are bound to a certain non-philosophical procedure here by our relinquishment of a priori constructions of the subject, it is more helpful to multiply our original examples and consider a posthuman eroticism where death and the posthuman nature overlap as congruent voids to which the biomorphic body is exposed by the operations of modernity. As I’ve argued elsewhere, J G Ballard’s seminal novel Crash is structured around such a void – that of the impossible auto-collision foreclosed by the inevitable failure of its shamanic hero, Vaughan, to collide with Elisabeth Taylor at the opening of the novel (Roden 2002). This idealized crash gives meaning to all the ‘little crashes’ and collisions between ruptured flesh and fractured industrial objects littering the novel’s urban landscapes. It is, again, easy, too easy, to retrofit a transcendental necessity here – a cyborgian subjectivity constituted the exigencies of mechanized death rather than sex, and that is pretty much how I initially read Ballard’s text.

However, in the light of subtractive posthumanism we can read this not as an example of how subjects are ‘constituted by lack’ but, rather, of how the deracinative processes of modernity and posthuman becoming alike must be evoked through a strategy of subtraction. Moreover, while both the novel and David Cronenberg film adaptation have been viewed as transgressive in popular media, its circulation of bodies and artifacts operate according to codes internal to the worlds they depict. There are aesthetic pleasures to be found in both works, but they are evoked by irony and estrangement and, particularly in Cronenberg’s case, the conjunction of industrial vistas and elegantly eroticized death.

Xenophilia, in other words, is an aesthetic or literary representation of a process of ramifying change that has little of the Spirit about it and for which transgression plays no constitutive role. For this reason, perhaps, the most appropriate artistic evocation of the posthuman is the most affectless, the most removed from any reference to bodily passion – hence the deathliest, the most committed to the extirpation of authorized gendered conjunctions. No wonder, then, that death – death subtracted, death under erasure – is the terminus of cyborgian desire. This is all that is left once the authorized pleasures of the body are discounted.

Ballard’s most extreme works – the internally consistent tableau of Crash or the Atrocity Exhibition would also qualify for these post-transgressive spaces. Likewise, we might look to the ‘concept horror’ of Gary J Shipley as an invocation of unnameable processes of derangement that sunder not only bodies but the very logical grammar of thought.

While there is a lot of mutating, altered flesh in works like The Unyielding or Warewolff! and a lot of morbid pleasure to be had from Shipley’s linguistic brio, such passions as can be discerned are of an obdurate and alien matter. The Unyielding, for example, memorializes the mutation of an entire family into a pornographically arresting variant of death – or rather unlife – following the initial refusal of a dead mother to yield to organic decay.

The ‘take home’ is that both literature of extreme eroticism and the posthuman intersect around a void that is neither Death (in its empirical sense) nor even an expression of divided subjectivity – but which afford apertures onto a nonhuman Outside, onto processes which have little reference to the Spirit of Transcendental Humanism (See Roden 2025). These figures of death are productively entangled in the inhuman in ways that evoke and disclose our own intimate and fatal entanglement with that Outside.

References:

Badiou, A. 2006. Being and Event, translated by Oliver Feltham, London: Continuum.

Barthes, Roland. 1987. ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’. Story of the Eye, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 119-127.

Ballard, J. G. 1993. The Atrocity Exhibition (annotated), London: Flamingo, 1993.

Ballard, J. G. 1995. Crash, London: Vintage.

Bataille, Georges. 1987. Story of the Eye, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Brassier, R., 2007. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Byrne, R., 2013. Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Downing, L., 2004. On the limits of sexual ethics: The phenomenology of autassassinophilia. Sexuality and Culture, 8(1), pp.3-17.

Goggin, W.E., 2018. Hegel and Bataille on Sacrifice. Hegel Bulletin, 39(2), pp.236-259.

MacCormack, P., 2020. ‘Embracing Death, Opening the World’. Australian Feminist Studies, pp.1-15.

Mongeau, Katy. 2020. Apostasy. Brooklyn: Black Sun Lit.

Radnik, B., 2017. The absolute plasticity of Hegel’s absolutes. Crisis and critique, 4(1), pp.352-375.

Roden, David (2002), ‘Cyborgian Subjects and the Auto-Destruction of Metaphor’, in Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material, Jane Arthurs and Iain Grant (eds), (Bristol: Intellect Books), pp. 89-100.

Roden, David (2012) ‘The Disconnection Thesis’, in The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment, A. Eden, J. Søraker, J. Moor & E. Steinhart (eds), 281–98. London: Springer.

Roden, David (2013) ‘Nature’s Dark Domain: An Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 72: 169–88.

Roden, David. 2014. Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. London: Routledge.

Roden, David. 2017. ‘On Reason and Spectral Machines’: Robert Brandom and Bounded Posthumanism, in Rosi Braidotti Rick Dolphijn (eds) Philosophy After Nature. London - New York: Rowman & Littlefield International: pp. 99-119.

Roden, David. 2019. ‘Subtractive-Catastrophic Xenophilia,’ Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1-2 (Summer - Winter 2019): 40-46.Vartabedian, B., 2018. Multiplicity and Ontology in Deleuze and Badiou. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Roden, David (2025). ‘The Good, The Bad and the Grimdark: Why Technological Mastery Precludes Collective Self-Mastery.’ Technophany 2 (1).

Shipley, Gary J. 2017a. Warewolff! London: Hexus Press.

Shipley, Gary J. 2017b. The Unyielding. Portland: Eraserhead Press.

Tofts, Darren. 2008. ‘Interiors’, in Armand, L., Lewty, J. and Mitchell, A. eds. Pornotopias: Image, Apocalypse, Desire. Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Filozofická Fakulta.

Waldby, C., 1995. Boundary erotics and refigurations of the heterosexual male body. Sexy bodies: The strange carnalities of feminism, pp.266-77

Zupančič, A., 2000. Ethics of the real: Kant, Lacan. Verso.

[1] In contemporary epistemology, subtraction is a procedure whereby a cognitively inaccessible reality is thought via its conditions of inaccessibility – as with our demonstration, earlier, that the occurrence of ‘death’ in ‘death-lust’ does not pick out its literal referent.

[i] One way to understand this non-dialectical ‘minus’ is via the theme of plasticity in contemporary Hegelianism and Posthumanism. One the one hand we can understand the disputed meta-level as an open engagement with reality that reproduces itself in a ‘continuous dynamic movement’ (Radnik 2017, 374).

However, this structure only inheres in self-consciousness or spirit if it is recursively self-sustaining. That is, if enhancing subjectivity gives more of the same. Even a ‘hyperplastic’ agent with no limit to its self-transformative powers would belong to this field of absolute subjectivity or ‘Spirit’. But this is precisely what a subtractive posthumanism questions! To cut a long story short, I have argued that none of the features of subjectivity or mind are attributable to a hyperplastic entity. This limit agent is one we could no longer interpret as agent. Just like the eroticism of corpse-being, subjectivity-as-plasticity it does not cohere on its own terms.

“Catastrophe is the past coming apart. Anastrophe is the future coming together.”
Sadie Plant and Nick Land. “Cyberpositive,” in: #Accelerate, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Arvanessian, London: Urbanomic, 2014, pp. 303–14.

“The future, always so clear to me, has become like a black highway at night. We were in uncharted territory now... making up history as we went along.”
Sarah Connor, Terminator 2: Judgement Day

“This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood. The violent scene that upsets him, and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later, happened on the main jetty at Orly, the Paris airport, sometime before the outbreak of World War III.”
Chris Marker, La Jetée.


Anastrophe is the inversion of order; here the order of time; no longer flowing rationally and consecutively from the past to a future that we might have some agency in creating but disrupted by a future that that cannot be anticipated or controlled by those who purport to “make it up”. This figure of inversion is a thread linking the work of Nick Land, Sadie Plant and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in the 1990’s, posthumanist theorists and writers such as Amy Ireland, Bogna Konior and myself, and by dramatic or fictional works such as James Cameron’s 1991 Terminator 2 and Chris Marker’s brilliant 1962 ScFi documentary, La Jetée.

It also links the four songs in this album: three of which are settings of my 2016 theory fiction, “Letters from the Ocean Terminus” – described as “a series of overlapping fragments from disruptive futures; a theory-fiction that explores routes out of the present as aberrant transformations and terraforming desires”. The last sets the first part of Amy Ireland’s “Black Circuits”: which emplots the emergence of planetary AI as time sorcery: the spectral invocation of the Demon, Babalon, Mother of Abominations, the amorphous, “Alien Other” fated to destroy the masculine order of rational time and stable subjectivity.

What kind of subjects can inhabit a temporality that emerges from our parasitic dependence on technologies too ramifying to be reincorporated into politics or the “human security apparatus”? Perhaps only one with a perverse, xenophilic desire to become “a vehicle of abstraction” for nothing; forcing a headlong death drive into a posthumanist event horizon where death itself will be erased and where life will be overwritten by our “inconceivable children.”

Links:

www.e-flux.com/journal/80/100016/black-circuit-code-for-the-numbers-to-come/

dismagazine.com/discussion/81950/letters-from-the-ocean-terminus-david-roden/#:~:text=Letters%20from%20the%20Ocean%20Terminus%20is%20a%20series%20of%20overlapping,Beyond%2C%20darkness

credits

released June 13, 2025

In his Nautilus article ‘The Universe Knows Right from Wrong’, Philipp Goff argues that panpsychism – the metaphysical thesis that the intrinsic properties of reality are properties of consciousness or ‘feels’ (or proto-phenomena, or proto-feels) provides a metaphysical ground for objective truth about value. He argues that panpsychism affords an explanation for our ability to discern objective norms that is superior to Platonic and Aristotelian competitors.

Firstly, Platonism requires transcendent norms or norm grounding properties with no instantiation in space-time. As Goff puts it:

“How is it that we creatures in space and time are able to access transcendent moral entities and gain moral knowledge? Plato thought that before birth we resided in the world of “the Forms,” together with numbers, universals, and goodness itself. It would be nice not to have to go to these lengths to explain our moral knowledge.”

While Platonism seems ill-adapted to explain our ability to access objective norms, it is better placed to explain their necessity, since a Platonic moral order need not depend on how our universe is configured and which physical laws or constants hold in it. The same, according to Goff, cannot be said for the other live candidate for accounting for the objectivity of value facts: namely, Aristotelianism.  Aristotelianism grounds moral properties in the goal-directed natures of living beings. It is because animals are organised to seek pleasure and avoid pain that hedonic principles that pleasure is a good and pain is bad obtain for them.

A problem with the Aristotelian view I address in Ch6 of Posthuman Life is not so much its commitment to objective teleology as to intrinsic teleology: a teleology hinging on the essential natures of the items which bear the relevant purposes or norm grounding properties. One can postulate an objective teleology without essences that is massively contextual; contingent on the ways in which living entities are arranged in relation to other entities and their environment at a juncture in natural or bio-technological history (Roden 2014, 131-36).

However, both essentialist and anti-essentialist accounts of objective teleology have the drawback, for Goff, of failing to account for the necessity of moral laws:

“Aristotelian approaches to ethics are also still popular. But the problem for neo-Aristotelians, or indeed anyone who tries to ground moral truth in the natural world, is that moral truths, like mathematical truths, are necessarily true, which means that it’s impossible for them to be false. No matter how the universe had turned out, two plus two would equal four and it would have been wrong to torture people for fun. We cannot account for necessary truths in terms of things that could have been different. To take Aristotle’s view: We might have evolved to have natures directed toward cruelty. In such a counterfactual scenario, we would have moral grounds for cruelty, which runs counter to our deepest moral convictions. Any view which tries to ground moral truth in things that might have been different is going to face a similar problem. There will be some counterfactual scenario in which the putative ground of morality is absent or points us toward evil rather than the good.”

How, does panpsychism incorporate necessity while retaining immanence and thus an explanation of our ability to access moral knowledge?

Well, we have to assume that conscious states are intrinsically goal directed. Goff uses the examples of pleasure and pain here. Pleasure is objectively and intrinsically good. Pain is objectively and intrinsically bad. Thus both provide a metaphysical ground for normative hedonism. As it stands this doesn’t explain how other kinds of norms that Goff cites are immanent in consciousness – e.g. epistemic norms. But we can allow pleasure and pain to serve as proof of concept for now.

How do we build necessity into this picture. To move rather summarily, Goff argues for a container view of reality (according to which reality is independent of its contingent manifestations) as opposed to a collection view (according to which reality just is the contingent ways it manifests). Thus if reality is pure consciousness then there can be phenomenological laws applying with necessity across all its manifestations (e.g. pain is necessarily nasty):

“On a non-panpsychist form of the container view, Reality is a general form of being, which can manifest as either mental or non-mental entities. On a panpsychist version of the container view, Reality can be thought of as pure, undifferentiated consciousness, while particular manifestations of Reality are specific forms of that pure and undifferentiated consciousness.

The mere fact that I am a manifestation of Reality doesn’t entail that I have cognitive access to the essential nature of Reality. But if Reality is itself a very general form of consciousness, and my consciousness is a specific form of that general form of consciousness, it follows that Reality is present within my consciousness. This allows us to begin to make sense of how I might have intuitive access to the goal-directed nature of Reality.”

I think this a pretty ingenious move to reconcile access and immanence, on the one hand, with necessity, on the other. And while I’ve never espoused panpsychism, preferring more deflationary and reductive accounts of consciousness, I’m going to run with this view for the purposes of argument and speculation. My issue here is not whether the theory is metaphysically adequate, but whether it is epistemically adequate to the access problem.

I think the issue can be couched neatly in terms of my Dark Phenomenology Thesis: namely, the view that having a conscious state does not heap epistemic entitlements upon its possessor (Roden 2013). Evan Thomson summarises my view fairly and concisely here:

“David Roden argues that phenomenology should be retained only as a descriptive, empirical method for providing data about experience. This method must be recognized as limited, because it cannot penetrate “dark phenomena” that are not available to introspection or reflective intuition, such as very fine-grained perceptual discriminations of shades of colour that cannot be held in memory, or the deep structure of temporal experience”.

Even supposing Goff’s container panpsychism, there’s no reason to think that because consciousness is present in us that we are any more able to discern its underlying, invariant nature than we can discern the nature of nucleons from the fact that nucleons are present within our constituent atoms. There may be – of phenomenological necessity – no limits to the complexity and refinement of our phenomenological states in the noumenal depths of Goff's undifferentiated consciousness. This may extend also to their dispositional properties or powers. Merely having a particular structure of awareness need tell us little about its essential possibilities, or what other kinds of consciousness may be out there in the possibility space of nonhuman, alien or posthuman phenomenology.

I think this possibility of a dark phenomenal reality is replete with the kinds of possibilities that appeal to decadent souls. For example, hedonism might be false and superficial (as Nietzsche regularly jibed) but because the intrinsic normativity of the ultimate undifferentiated consciousness is different from the ones it only appears to have in its finite manifestations. Perhaps the universe wants to suffer and extinguish itself, while torturing the creatures that compose it in ever more refined ways (as in Thomas Ligotti's story 'Nethescurial' and Roden 2020a) – that at least seems consistent with the dynamic that abounds in human, if not cosmic, history. I think also here of the poetic world conjured by Katy Mongeau in her collection Apostasy, which I’ve reviewed here. As I write:

“The two poems in this collection celebrate a world corrupt in every leaf, every body rotting, and delectating over it. The narrator of the titular first poem writes 'I am cross/and locking eyes with evil/learning how even the lamb may be wicked' A sublime viciousness bites her back like a snake or celebrates her lover burning alive in a field where the flowers are 'reeking of the come that makes them' The line between masochism and sadism becoming irrelevant when every skin is ripe with the desire for, or to become, meat and lovers wake roasted from dreams of being hitched to burning horses.”

Why isn’t Mongeau’s poetic world-as-torture-garden a more reliable indicator of the inherent teleology of a fundamentally demonic undifferentiated consciousness than the claims of the orthodox hedonist? If we accept the dark phenomenology thesis, there are no obvious grounds for preferring the latter. Why, in other words, isn't Goff's position a philosophical apologia for pandemonism?

Roden, D., 2013. Nature's Dark Domain: an Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 72, pp.169-188.

Roden, David. 2014. Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. London: Routledge.

Roden, David. 2019. ‘Subtractive-Catastrophic Xenophilia,’ Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1-2 (Summer - Winter 2019): 40-46.

Roden, D. 2020a. ‘Sub Rosa’. Plutonics XIII: A Journal for Non-Standard Theory, pp. 43-47.

Roden, d. 2020b. ‘Posthuman: Critical, Speculative, Biomorphic, in Mads Rosendhal Thomsen and Joseph Wamburg (eds)The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, Bloomsbury Academic: London, pp. 81-94.

In the old warehouse the Meat await embarkation wrapped in strips of white gauze leaving their mouths, genitals, and buttocks exposed. The warehouse is divided into small wood and chipboard cubicles. M and N sit within one of these imbibing Weil and Bataille with tinctures of inhumanism. ‘The Good is the absence of attachment. The Intolerable is its precursor.’ M alludes to the ‘baroque of the flesh,’ ‘the chess of the wind’.

N confesses to attachments to ideas. to self, to intellect. They drink a local distillate their minders served to relax them ahead of the voyage. ‘Meat is free to claim to be anything, but the unbounded is not negativity or freedom’ she tells him.

Somehow the formula fails to reconcile N to the death of nature. A few days previously, M vomited after they tried to fuck at a cheap flop near the Port. She said they are rotting, insidious machines and it is too late for anything to be saved. N could only agree.

The Minders leave plastic refuse bags for their money, passports, and clothing. These will be disposed of in an oven after they have departed for the Island. There are some thirty in this consignment, sitting quietly in their cubicles, talking in small groups. A few kneel on the hard stone slabs holding their bodies like abstract emblems of grief.

***

Brother’s tamarind rod thuds into N’s lower back. The pain tells him his acceptance is insubstantial. He has misread himself. He is guilty of life.

He attempts a pose he learned from his Yoga teacher while a student in London, straightening his back with his feet parallel and arms at his sides.

The second impact, on upper vertebrae and shoulder blades, shocks the breath out of him. He drops, assuming a brace position, but Brother pulls him open by ears and knees, droning a mucoid machine song in time to the basal oscillation of the engines.

Even without the wire gag and metal skewers in his cheeks, there’d be nothing for Brother to tell him. There would be nothing for N to answer. They are occupants of a terminal universe.

N looks up at Brother’s huge, deformed face, bulging and infected around cylindrical inserts, black eyes imprisoned behind extensive scars. Brother gently unwinds his gauze as if to bathe a child. N inverts the brace, assuming a naked crab posture on elbows and knees and thrusts his erect cock to the hard blue firmament of the Hatchway, where two curious sailors observe from on high.

Brother uncoils and flexes his own metal studded cock. Yellow pus weeps between its intricately carved segments.

Sister enters the Hold accompanied by her guide; a naked, constantly starving child with a mummified tongue wired over its distended belly. Her mouth and eyes are sutured closed.

As Brother sings his adenoidal dirges, Sister applies lubricant to N’s painful stiff and starts to rub him in firm confident strokes. N widens his legs in acceptance, choking back tears as her fingers lap at his prostate.

Three rows down-grid, M removes her gauze in an overt display to which Brother responds predictably, striking her large breasts, splitting her full lips, leaving a patchwork of red and purple contusions.

M masturbates violently while Brother hits her, bruising legs, feet, and face, gazing at N beatifically as his sticky cum spurts on his hairy thighs.

By night ring-shaped arc lamps irradiate the hold. There is neither darkness nor any possibility of sleep. Nor any use for it.

The arcs leave leave lurid yellow phosphors swirling like decaying galaxies whenever N tries to close his eyes.

By day, sailors lean over the hatchway coughing tobacco and blood-flecked snot onto their faces. Otherwise, the Meat are left to their introspections and inspections.

As the Freighter moves South, they become quiescent in the basting heat, moving only occasionally to drink from their common bucket, to urinate fitfully, or pass diarrhetic shit in the toilet at the periphery of the Hold.

P and O pass out during the fourth inspection. Brother removes their bodies from the Hold. They are not seen again.

By the fifth day, M contracts a fever. She receives no medical care, though there are antibiotics, painkillers, and other rudimentary medications on the vessel.

I just had an enjoyable watch of Philip Goff’s interview with the philosopher, Michelle Lui about her work on the ‘Revelation Argument’ for anti-physicalism on his YouTube channel. The nub of the Revelation Argument, as I understand it, will be familiar to most readers, (especially if Michelle’s XPhi work is right about the ways in which Revelation coincides with our ordinary concept of consciousness!)

It goes something like this: In having or feeling conscious experiences we have a direct ‘revelation’ of their nature. If experiences were of a physical nature we would understand that nature merely by having them. But, clearly, we don’t. Therefore the nature of experiences is nonphysical.

We can set this out as a consequential deductive argument based on Philip’s reconstruction during the interview:

Revelation Argument for Anti-Physicalism

1. We grasp the nature/essence of feelings just by attending to them introspectively (Revelation Thesis).

2. If feelings had a physical nature we would grasp this through attending to them introspectively (1).

3. (But) We don’t know anything of a physical nature through attending to feelings introspectively.

Conclusion: Feelings do not have a physical nature (2, 3, Modus Tollens)

I.e. feelings are nonphysical and thus Physicalism is false!

There are ways in which we could raise doubts about all three. For example, we could argue that subjective feelings or qualia, etc. are something like modes of presentation of physical states of our nervous system produced by some reliable internal scanning mechanism (Roden 2013, 176).

These don’t provide discursive or propositional knowledge, but, as Lui emphasises using the example of her experience of being stung by a jellyfish while snorkelling, the kind of knowledge at issue here is non-propositional. The best we can come up with when asked what something is like often is to allude to some internal demonstrative - it is like this.

It can be objected, as Diane Raffman has done, that the internal scanner idea has a problem where perceptual experiences or qualities - microtonal differences, say - are so refined that they exceed our capacity to recognise them across temporally disparate instances. Phenomenology cannot supervene on the accessibility of physical states to recognitional concepts where those recognitional concepts clearly don’t function. We don’t have those concepts, simply, but (or so it seems) we have the phenomenology.

However, we can also object to Revelation itself. Maybe having an experience gives us very little sense of what it is, or of what an experience or feelings is in general.

Even if this is a counter-intuitive position it is one argued for by Illusionists such as my former OU colleague, Keith Frankish, and I have defended a related position that I refer to as the Dark Phenomenology Thesis. Dark Phenomenology is the contrary of Revelation. It says that merely having consciousness or conscious experiences or feelings tells us little about their nature.

Now we need to take care here, for as Philip and Michelle point out, no Revelationist is going to claim that we grasp everything about the content or nature of every experience. Experiments in change blindness, choice blindness or the existence of incredibly refined and complex perceptual contents (complex musical experiences like listening to Xenakis’ Concret Ph don’t provide a detailed phenomenal statistical knowledge of the density of its sound grains, for example) tell against that. Perhaps, as Ned Block argues, there is a ‘phenomenal overflow’ of conscious contents that eludes the attentional or introspective powers of the experiencing subject.

Philip phrases the Revelation thesis like this: ‘insofar as we grasp what it is like or how it feels, to that extent we grasp the essence [of an experience]”

So even if our experience has its lacunae, those contents that we do grasp through attention and introspection give us the essence of what the experience is.

Or as Philip puts it: ‘insofar as we grasp what it is like or how it feels, to that extent we grasp the essence [of an experience]”

So much hinges on whether the contents of attention or introspection that we are aware of are disjoint from those that are too complex or refined for attentional or introspective availability. By saying that content X is ‘disjoint’ from Y I mean, such that the content X plays no part in the nature of content Y. If - as I argued in my 2013 paper - ‘Nature’s Dark Domain’ - disjointness fails generally, then so does Revelation.

Now, it seems highly implausible to claim that all contents that elude attention or recognition are involved in the contents that don’t. But we don’t need to claim anything quite so radical.

We just need to find one kind of phenomenologically ‘intuition transcendent’ content or structure that is essential to every other content.

I think a good candidate is the temporal structure of experience: encapsulated in Kant’s claim that ‘Time is the form of inner sense.;

On the one hand, the idea that our experience happens in time, that there is dynamic flow of sensation and thought and feeling, is as intuitively appealing as Revelation itself. Experience certainly seems temporal at every grain. If so, disjointness fails for temporality because it is part of the essence of all sensations, from the most fleeting to the most sustained, from the most complex to the most simple. If the structure and nature of this temporality is not ‘revealed’ in the special sense required by the Revelation Thesis then nothing about subjective experience is revealed because every aspects of subjective experience occurs in time. It is constitutively temporal.

Ok, but maybe our experience of the temporality of experience conjoint but does not present a problem for the revelationist because it too is revealed. Conjointness is only a problem for the Revelationist if all purportedly revealed contents are intrinsically defined by something that isn’t!

However, I think it is possible to show that temporality is anything but revealed. For sure we have classic philosophical treatments of phenomenological temporality in the Continental tradition, from Husserl, through to Heidegger, through to Derrida and Deleuze. But all of these (despite their profound differences) converge on the fundamentally lacunary or absential nature of temporal change. To summarise an argument I have made elsewhere (Roden 2006, 2013). Suppose the temporal gradation of experience is something like a continuum, with each moment of experience transforming into a new one without any gaps between the phases. Then every content experience has infinite complexity and overflows attentional or introspective availability. Revelation Fails. Suppose there are gaps between moments of experience in which we are not aware of anything, including, presumably, the existence of said lacunae? Then clearly Revelation fails because these absences are also conjoint with every content and are not introspectively or attentionally accessible. Again, Revelation fails. Finally, one might oppose this argument by suggesting that experience is - despite appearances - non-temporal. Perhaps all there are are undivided and unchanging nows. This presentist thesis gives us another purported essence of experience. But it still has to account for the illusion of subjective dynamism. If subjective experience seems dynamic but isn’t then, by hypothesis, the present of presentism is entirely inaccessible and universally conjoint. So, again, Revelation fails.

In conclusion, Revelation depends on us being able to pose a cordon sanitaire between the intuitively accessible and the intuitively inaccessible content. But (as argued in more detail in Roden 2006 and 2013) this hygienic precaution collapses in the case of temporality. Even Presentism - as an alternative to the dynamism of most phenomenological accounts - presents the phenomenologist with a new form of universally conjoint phenomenological darkness.

References

Roden, D., 2006. Naturalising deconstruction. Continental Philosophy Review, 38(1), pp.71-88.

Roden, D. (2013) ‘Nature’s Dark Domain: an Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 72, pp. 169–188. doi:10.1017/S135824611300009X.