An informative piece, HERE. I’m becoming more and more excited about the election as time goes by (unfortunately, I will be out of Egypt on a brief vacation that was scheduled before I realized when the election would be, and then I will be visiting family in theU.S. and Canada at the time of the [...]

doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com

For some reason I made this... — ... (read more)

www.bogost.com

Robert Hood, “Chase” (1994). I was at a Toronto club that Hood d.j.’ed in 1998, and was completely unaware at the time of who he was. I’ve always regretted not knowing in advance, but he was amazing anyway.

doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com

Way back during the first week of January, I was in Ghana attending the 6th African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) Conference, listening to international development evaluators from around the world talk about ‘Rights and Responsibilities in Development Evaluation’. The event was … Continue reading →

andreling.wordpress.com

Peter Gratton has more information about Bradley’s death, HERE. My sense from meeting him once was that he was a rather exceptional person and thinker. He was the kind of person who sticks with you after even one meeting, and I’ve remembered that meeting quite a few times over the past 18 months.

doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com

It’s well known that techno music grew out of funk. If you listen to the earliest Juan Atkins recordings, you can easily hear it. Atkins in around 1983 sounds like funk on a skipping record player, repeating the same bars over and over again. A couple of years ago, I suddenly felt like dipping back [...]

doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com

Just saw Steven Shaviro mention this on Facebook, and then went to the Philosophy Department website at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, which seems to confirm that Professor Bradley died on May 17. I only met Bradley once, at the Claremont conference in December 2010. He left quite an impression, with his colorful personality (I [...]

doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com

Presidential campaign posters are everywhere, Egyptians are listening and talking politics, and it’s all quite moving. I was just told at a luncheon that the results of the absentee ballots were announced today (why do that prior to the general election?), and the person at my lunch table said that Aboul Fotouh and Moussa did [...]

doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com

This is the terrible news from back home: “Dr. James Bradley, head of the Faculty of Arts’ philosophy department, passed away on Thursday May 17, 2012 after a long illness.  Originally from Liverpool, Dr. Bradley was educated at Cambridge University where he received his PhD in 1983. He was a Humboldt Fellow in philosophy at [...]

philosophyinatimeoferror.wordpress.com

In response to my earlier post entitled Speculative Realism, the Commons, and Politics, a friendly poster asks, Could the facing of “problems” be the universal here; a transcendent situation? Furthermore part of this situation is that where one group sees a problem another group sees no problem. Ethics and politics are the contingent discourses that [...]

larvalsubjects.wordpress.com

I don’t know if Amazon has chosen us as the book of the month or something, and I am sure the price will jump up in the next few days, but you can pre-order Laruelle and Non-Philosophy for £4.99 right … Continue reading →

speculativeheresy.wordpress.com

In my last post (objects, matter and relational forms) I made a case for the reality of objects as relational forms composed of other objects. The extension of object-hood to objects composed of humans, such as families, raised a number … Continue reading →

andreling.wordpress.com

Jeffrey J. Cohen’s edited collection on nonhumans is now out with Punctum Books and looks fantastic! I can’t wait to read this. Animal, Mineral, Vegetable examines what happens when we cease to assume that only humans exert agency. Through a careful examination of medieval, early modern and contemporary lifeworlds, these essays collectively argue against ecological [...]

larvalsubjects.wordpress.com

A tiny note on first class air travel — I fly a bajillion miles a year and as such I have access to the first class cabin on almost every flight, which makes me a lucky bastard as much as a privileged one. I thought I'd share, from a plane of course, just one humbling notes on modern first class travel just to assure the purported-rabble that things up front aren't gilded so much as smeared [...]

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At first it looked like it might be cancelled due to flight itinerary issues, but now the fourth Brazil lecture, in eco-city Curitiba, is back on. More details soon, but it will fall in the August 8-16 range somewhere.

doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com

This is the headline, from the NY Times: “G.O.P. ‘Super PAC’ Weighs Hard-Line Attack on Obama” And you first think, “uh-oh, we know these guys are capable of anything.” But then you read quotes like this: “The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former [...]

doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com

I’ve now read Tristan Garcia’s essay distinguishing his own position from Meinong’s (and to a lesser extent from mine). It’s a wonderful essay, lucid as usual. If you’re comfortable in French, you can find the essay publicly available HERE. If you want to hear Garcia deliver the lecture in person at the marvelous seminar series [...]

doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com

Over at This Cage is Worms Cameron has a nice post responding to my recent post on ontology and politics and articulating his own meditations on the political within a speculative realist framework.  I truly wish that I had a better answer to the question of the political, but there are a couple of reasons [...]

larvalsubjects.wordpress.com

The lecture date in Oslo is now more or less finalized: the Museum of Contemporary Art on August 19.

doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com

A new book in software studies — My next book is even stranger than my last. It's an entire book, 65,000+ words worth, about a single-line Commodore 64 BASIC program that is inscribed in the book's title, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. And if that isn't strange enough, I wrote the book with nine other collaborators (Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. [...]

www.bogost.com

” Everything Is Not Connected:” audio of Graham Harman’s keynote at transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2 February 2012 The idea that everything is interconnected has become a staple of intellectual life. As a related phenomenon, “contextualisation” is now the method of first resort throughout the humanities. This lecture opposes the general trend [...]

anthem-group.net

Peter Gratton of Philosophy in a Time of Error has a written a great review of Hasana Sharp’s Spinoza and the Politics of Naturalization. This sounds like an important book and will be among those I read for my research this summer. Thanks for the heads up Peter!

larvalsubjects.wordpress.com

#1 most emailed article: Can a nine year old be a psychopath? #3 most emailed article: Capitalists and Other Psychopaths. Combining them, I guess, and you get warning signs for psychopathology such as your child reading Ayn Rand, refusing to do a lemonade stand since the “opportunity costs are too high,” and preferring cash gifts over [...]

philosophyinatimeoferror.wordpress.com

Is on the Society and Space open site here. (It’s a longer review–near 3,000 words): What Sharp argues for is a “politics of renaturalization”. This surely is her most controversial claim, given the ways in which, throughout the era of the regimes of the biopolitical, nature has been used as the nom de guerre of the [...]

philosophyinatimeoferror.wordpress.com

A couple months ago I wrote a post on Marx’s triad of production, consumption, and distribution.. When investigating “societies”, is in terms of production. Not only must societies be produced (they don’t come ready-made), but social subjects must be produced (beings that identify themselves as members of the assemblage and who are identified as members [...]

larvalsubjects.wordpress.com

A question for authors... — I'll admit it, I don't usually read my book royalty reports. Sometimes I look at the total sales, but the rest is too complex and detailed to bother with. I deposit the checks. But today I received one and noticed something that I'd never really thought about before. A bit of background. Most book contracts are insanely complicated in their specification of royalt [...]

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Somewhere or other Latour makes the remark that we’ll never do better than a politician.  Here it’s important to remember that for Latour– as for myself –every entity is a “politician”.  Latour isn’t referring solely to those persons that we call “politicians”, but to all entities that exist.  And if Latour claims that we’ll never [...]

larvalsubjects.wordpress.com

Independent Colleges Dublin presents Professor Levi R. Bryant (Collin College, Texas, USA) ‘Two Ontologies: Posthumanism and Lacan’s Graph of Sexuation’ With responses from Paul J. Ennis and Michael O’Rourke 2pm-4pm, Tuesday July 3 2012, Independent Colleges Dublin, 60-63 Dawson Street, … Continue reading →

speculativeheresy.wordpress.com

I’m in the middle of grading, so my remarks here will be brief.  I wanted, however, to draw attention to Christian Thorne’s recent post “To the Political Ontologists“.  Thorne raises an important set of questions, but I worry that he’s confusing distinct issues.  At the beginning of his post he writes: The political ontologists have [...]

larvalsubjects.wordpress.com

Independent Colleges Dublin presentsProfessor Levi R. Bryant (Collin College, Texas, USA)‘Two Ontologies: Posthumanism and Lacan’s Graph of Sexuation’With responses from Paul J. Ennis and Michael O’Rourke2pm-4pm, Tuesday July 3 2012, Independent Colleges Dublin, 60-63 Dawson Street, Dublin 2Abstract: Initially it would seem that Lacan and posthumanism make uncomfortable bedfellows. Posthumani [...]

anotherheideggerblog.blogspot.com

From this moment forward I’m going to make a concerted effort to abandon the terms “society” and “culture”, replacing “society” instead with “hominid ecology” (unless I or someone else comes up with a better term that contains the term “ecology” in it).  There are a few reasons for such a move.  First, as Latour has [...]

larvalsubjects.wordpress.com

This is absolutely amazing.  Based on Tammy Lu’s cover art for The Democracy of Objects, choreographer Masha Gurina has composed a dance.  Here are the sketches.  Absolutely gorgeous!  What a wonderful example of the phenomenon of translation!

larvalsubjects.wordpress.com

One of my worries about the new turn towards realism is that it will end up washing away all of the valuable social critiques that arose out of Marxist thought, the early Frankfurt school, structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, queer, and race theory.  In particular, I worry that situating these discussions abstractly as debates between monolithic positions [...]

larvalsubjects.wordpress.com

Response to "Aliens, but definitely not as we know them" — I received a great email response to my recent New Scientist column on alien phenomenology. I thought I'd share a part of it anonymously just because it felt so shareworthy. Rocks are rocks. They are rocks in relation to humans, and they are rocks in relation to birds and they are rocks in relation to anything else that turns up such [...]

www.bogost.com

Quentin Meillassoux will be giving a lecture this Sunday in New York entitled “The Coup de dés, or the Materialist Divinization of the Hypothesis” to celebrate the launch of the English translation of The Number and the Siren. The location … Continue reading →

speculativeheresy.wordpress.com

Excerpts from Lucy Kimbell‘s forthcoming interview (in Design and Culture) with Graham Harman: Objects are the anti-reductive principle par excellence. They exist midway between their tiny components and their palpable external effects. In this way they resist reduction both downwards and upwards– neither undermined nor overmined, neither undercut nor “overcut,” to coin another new term. [.. [...]

anthem-group.net

François Laruelle Public Lecture May 9th, 2012, London Professor François Laruelle will give a public lecture entitled, ‘Towards a Philosophy Deemed “Contemporary”‘, on May 9th 2012. This will take place as an evening lecture 6-8pm, on May 9th in Swedenborg … Continue reading →

speculativeheresy.wordpress.com

Objects are relational forms. What does this mean? Objects are made up of other objects. However, they are not merely a bundle or heap of other objects. They are, rather, fundamentally produced through the continuous interactions of these other objects … Continue reading →

andreling.wordpress.com

Reblogged from Knowledge Ecology: Full conference schedule HERE.

anthem-group.net

This year, quite to my excitement, I was asked to participate in Sight and Sound magazine’s once-per-decade poll of film critics to determine “The Ten Greatest Films of All Time.” (Previous decades’ results can be found here). Making lists of this sort is always somewhat arbitrary. I added to the arbitrariness by saying only one [...]

www.shaviro.com

Can be found here.Sample: For Virilio what is at stake in all this is the excluded logic of the universal or, better yet, the Catholic. The instant is the enemy of the universal in that it promotes disintegration through individualism (in a broad sense), and in doing so denigrates the collective. At times, Virilio comes across as a prophet who has arrived with a message from the future only to fi [...]

anotherheideggerblog.blogspot.com

D. Scott Williamson's "impossible" adaptation — In the fifth chapter of Racing the Beam, Nick and I discuss Howard Scott Warshaw's popular Atari game Yars' Revenge. The game is often called Atari's most successful original game for the Atari 2600, but in fact it was originally meant to be an adaptation of Star Castle, a then-popular vector-graphics game by Cinematronics. But, because of the [...]

www.bogost.com

Passoth, J., B. Peuker & M. Schillmeier (Eds) (2012) Agency without Actors? Rethinking Collective Action. London/New York: Routledge Contents: Note on Contributors 1. Introduction Part 1: Events, Suggestions, Accounts 2. Suggestion and Satisfaction: On the Actual Occasion of Agency by Paul Stronge and Mike Michael 3. Science, Cosmopolitics and the Question of Agency: Kant’s Critique [...]

anthem-group.net

Jimmy Maher's Platform Study of the Commodore Amiga — I'm very happy to announce the publication of the latest book in the Platform Studies series, Jimmy Maher's The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga. It's a terrific book about this influential multimedia microcomputer. As someone who never had an Amiga in the 80s and 90s, but who was often surrounded by them, I can vouch for the effectiv [...]

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Alexander R. Galloway has prepared a translation of one of Laruelle’s shorter, aphoristic texts entitled “Theorems on the Good News” [warning pdf]. I’ll be using this for the Laruelle eSeminar when we talk about religion, but for those who don’t … Continue reading →

speculativeheresy.wordpress.com

...might be more interesting than my human ones — Yesterday I participated in a panel on the life and work of Alan Turing, for whom 2012 marks a centennial. As you'd probably expect, the discussion included conversation about artificial intelligence, what counts as "intelligence," and when AI is "good enough." The Turing Test, of course, is famous for reframing "thinking machines" as imitati [...]

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Watch video: “Ecological Crises, Digital Humanities and New Political Assemblies,” Azim Premji University, 23 March 2012 Watch video: “Reenacting Science,” Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, 20 February 2012 Watch video: “From Critique to Composition,” Dublin City University, 17 February 2012

anthem-group.net

I just realised that I hadn't done any self-publicising for my article 'Vital New Matters: The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender' which appeared several months ago in the first issue of the online journal, Religion and Gender.  The article is available here through Open Access and as a pdf download. 

paganmetaphysics.blogspot.com

Reblogged from Speculative Heresy: Excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at this symposium on 15-16 October, 2012. Also a reminder that the Millennium conference’s call for papers is over in a week. Be sure to submit an abstract soon if you’d like to participate. ********** Invitation to a Symposium, Faculty of the Social Sciences, [...]

anthem-group.net

Three links — There's been a small flurry of discussion about the New Aesthetic lately, several takes on which have connected it to object-oriented ontology. If you don't know what "the New Aesthetic" is not to worry, the articles linked here explain it in addition to arguing for (or against) its relationship to OOO. First, Greg Borenstein's response to Bruce Sterling's New Aesthetic essay, [...]

www.bogost.com