Chaosium

There may come a time when the impossible gives birth to the possible. But till that time this is my library of quirky and impossible objects, my wanderings into strange worlds of art and philosophy, politics and other sundry topics. I’ve always felt that the Real is something indirectly accessible and describable. The Country of the Mind is greater than the sum of our descriptive powers and changes each time we think we have it pinned down. The great artists, philosophers, and scientists have each in their own way explored the Real with differing yet equally valid tools and apparatuses. The Real is irreducible to any algorithm or set of descriptors, yet its affects can be translated into our limited powers of cognition. As the sciences delve into the macro/micro worlds of the Real they uncover more and more of the groundless grounds that are the base of our material existence. In our time and for the foreseeable future there will be no end to this search into the depths and heights of the Real. There is no totality, no big Other against this background only the impossible objects that emerge from our confrontations with this noneliminable realm of liminal darkness below our mind’s eye…

Latest Essays

1. Re-reading R. Scott Bakker: The Post-Intentional World

Table of Contents

Aesthetics, Literature, Art & Architecture
Speculative Philosophy ~ Current and Past
The Idealist Traditions and their Critics
New Materialisms
Object Oriented Ontologies & Medievalists
Information Theory & Online Life
Politics of Freedom, Justice, Resistance as Desire
Cynics, Pessimists, Nihilists ~ Beyond Nihilism?
Posthuman Blues & Transhumanist Accelerations
Utopias, Dystopias & the Dilemmas of Hope

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Aesthetics & Literature, Art and Architecture

• The Subject of Art
• J.G. Ballard: The Journey to Nowhere
• J.G. Ballard: The Fragile World
• J.G. Ballard: Icarus and the Dying Fall into Nothingness
• YA Dystopian Novels: Strange Tales of Youth
• Architecture for the 21st Century: Postmodernism and Beyond
• J.G. Ballard: The Calculus of Desire and Hope
• Ben Jeffery’s Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebeq and Depressive Realism
• David Foster Wallace: Waking to Darkness and Lightning
• David Foster Wallace: On David Lynch
• Dark Comedy: The Irony of the Banal; or, The Metamorphoschizolibidinal Machine
• Kurt Vonnegut: A Homage
• Stanislaw Lem: Liberal Utopics as the Last Commodity – Being Inc., Redivivus
• Benjamin Noys: Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend Shitfest; or, Satire as Anal/yse
• John Barth: Confronting the Dead Ends of Finitude
• Timothy Morton: The Aesthetic Dimension
• Plato’s Camera, Paul Bowles Travels, and Beauty and Truth: or, Art and Junk
• George Santayana on Lucretius

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Speculative Philosophy ~ Current and Past

• Artifacts of Missing Information; or, the Posthuman Blues
• Anti-Oedipus: The Black Book of Riddles
• Deleuze, Kant, and the Shock of Pure Difference in Art
• Speculations on the End of Time: Gratton, Harman, Barbour
• The Interrogation of the Real – Speculations on Realism and Materialism
• Lee Braver and Transgressive Realism
• François Laruelle: Radical Immanence and the Non-Philosopher
• Art of the Real
• The Poem of the Sea: Speculative Materialism and Realism
• The Nemocentric Vision
• Silver Linings in the Clouds: Depression as Time’s Cure
• The Mad Hatter’s Tool-Box: How the Fixit Man can Move Us Into an Uncertain Future
• Meillassoux on Alain Badiou’s Being and Event
• From Marx to Mao: 34 volumes of Valdimir Il’ich Lenin’s works…
• On re-reading Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: Part I
• On rereading After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux: Part II
• On rereading After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux: Part III
• On Re-reading After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux – Part IV (Interlude)
• On Re-reading After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux: – Part V
• On Re-reading After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux – Part VI
• On Re-reading After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux- Part VII
• Althusser’s Rain
• The Marxian Turn: A Renaissance in the Making?
• Peter Sloterdijk as Immunologist; or Bubble philosopher?
• Is the Sun an Autopoietic System?
• Randall Honold attacks E.O. Wilson as Epistemologist
• Paul Churchland: The Framework of the Mind
• The Secret Life of Modernity: The Case of Spinoza – Introduction
• Ars Industrialis: Bernard Stiegler on Anamnesis and Hypomnesis

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New Materialisms

• The New Materialsm
• Lucretius and The Making of Modernity
• Meillassoux and Neo-Materialism: Berlin Lecture
• Visionary Materialism: Entheogens, Magic, and the Sciences
• Jane Bennett: The Force of Materiality
• Rosi Braidotti: Nomadic Ethics and Subjectivity
• Meillassoux, Brassier, Laruelle and Gnosticism?
• Steven Shaviro: New Materialism and Whitehead
• Reading Karen Barad’s Interview in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies
• Plato’s Camera, Paul Bowles Travels, and Beauty and Truth: or, Art and Junk
• Brandom and Brassier: Hegel Redivivus
• Ray Brassier on Laruelle: Objects Thinking; or The Transcendental Cut
• Ray Brassier as Idealist?
• Ray Brassier Interview on After Nature
• Ray Brassier: On Transcendental Realism
• Ray Brassier: Death, Cosmic Schizophrenia, and Nick Land’s Accelerationism
• Ray Brassier: Nick Land and the Art of Truth
• Epistemic Naturalism: Quine, Goldman, Kuhn, and Brassier
• The Rise of Science and the Mathematization of Reality: Competing Views
• Adrian Johnston: On Hume’s Revenge; or, Meillassoux’s Virtual God?
• Questioning Meillassoux
• Base Materialism: Bataille, Land, and Harry Potter
• Steven Shaviro: New Materialism and Whitehead
• Louis Althusser: Aleatory Materialism
• Reading Karen Barad’s Interview in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies
• On reading Manuel DeLanda interview in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies
• Joshua Simon on Neo-Materialism
• Rosi Braidotti: The Feminist Turn in New Materialism
• Quentin Meillassoux: Benefit and Alterity – Dark Materialism

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The Idealist Traditions and their Critics

• A Short History of Modernity: The Dark Shadows of Instrumental Reason – Voluntarism and Utilitarianism
• Absolute Recoil: Slavoj Zizek and the Foundations of Dialectical Materialism
• Brandom and Brassier: Hegel Redivivus
• Pete Wolfendale: The Deontologist as Transcendental Realist
• Peter Gratton and Post-deconstructive Realism
• Daniel Sacilotto on Representationalism
• Beyond Representation: Plato, Deleuze and the Simulacra
• Deleuze: A Short History of the Human
• Whitehead’s Speculative Philosophy: Speculum of Experience
• Alfred North Whitehead: The Publicity of the World
• Alfred North Whitehead: The Philosophy of Organism
• Heidegger, Poetic Dwelling and escaping the literal-minded gnosis…
• An Imbecile’s Guide to Zizek
• The Right Questions
• The Subtle Art
• On Lacan as Philosopher
• Slavoj Zizek: Another World is Possible
• On Cinema from Geert Lovink Interview
• The Madness of Philosophers
• What is the Parallax View?
• On The Fichtean Wager
• The Answer of the Real
• Slavoj Zizek and Graham Harman: On withdrawal…
• The Thin Red Line
• The Place of Blindness
• Two Lacan’s – Radical/Conservative
• Slavoj Zizek on Violence
• Description without Place
• The Obscene Machine
• Neo-noir, Slavoj Zizek and Social Critique
• On the Communist Idea
• Why a return to Plato?
• Contingency and Ontological Incompleteness
• E.M. Cioran and Slavoj Zizek: A Difficult Gnosis
• Rocketman Lives; or, How I discovered the Transcendental Materialist
• We need useless theory more than ever today…
• Augur, Prophet, or Charlatan?
• A Year of Living Dangerously
• Living in the End Times
• Further Adventures of Slavoj (The Rocketman) Zizek: How I entered the whirling abyss…
• Zizek and Sloterdijk
• A Response to a Zizekian question … Berardi and others…
• Zizek on Kant and Hegel: the Grotesque, Macabre, and The Ugly
• Notes on Adrian Johnston’s – Zizek’s Ontology
• Zizek, Badiou, Kotsko: The Revolutionary Sociopath
• A Short Note on Zizek
• Zizek’s Agon: The Failure of Things
• Zizek on Speculative Realism: Thinking the Real
• Meillassoux, Zizek, and the Hermetic Arts
• On Belief – Zizek’s Atheism of the Void

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Object Oriented Ontologies & Medievalists

• Levi R. Bryant: Powers, Dispositions and the Analytical Debate
• Levi R. Bryant: Machines, Materialism and Onto-Cartography
• Allure is the Engine of Creation for Objects
• Objects Thinking; or The Transcendental Cut
• The Carnality of Objects
• Levi R. Bryant and Borromean Critical Theory
• Levi R. Bryant: First Impressions on Onto-Cartography
• Notes on Levi R. Bryant’s Onto-Cartography: Chapter One
• Eileen Joy and the Joys of Reading
• Graham Harman: Allure is the Engine of Creation for Objects
• Timothy Morton – Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality
• Post-Nihilistic Practice: Levi R. Bryant and Arran James
• Bryant, Spinoza, Negri: The Foundations of Materialist Thought

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Information Theory & Online Life

• The Onlife Initiative: Luciano Floridi and ICT Philosophy
• “Captive Cyberspace is Conquering its Victor”: Onlife and the Spectacle Society
• Multiagent Systems: Plato’s Chariot, AI, and Self in Information Philosophy
• The Cognitariat: Pawns in a Game of Code
• The Sentient City: Corporate Governance and Innovation
• Smart Cities of the Future: Infosphere, Inforgs, and Technoutopianism
• Beyond Cyberutopianism: Networks, Communications, and the Informational Slums of Tomorrow
• The Fourth Estate: InfoSphere, Technocapitalism, and the Eclipse of the Human
• R.S. Bakker: Is Philosophy Dead?
• Techno-Futurism: Noise, Dissonance, and the Global Avante Garde
• Hypermodern Times: Gilles Lipovetsky

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Politics of Freedom, Justice, Resistance as Desire

• Control Society: The History, Logic, and Methodologies of Control
• Radical Thought in Italy
• Franco Berardi: Panic Society and the Semiopath
• Franco “Bifo” Berardi: precarious rhapsody
• Douglas Rushkoff: Life, Inc. – The Logic of Corporatism Quote
• The New Cold War: Global Competition for Natural Resources
• Panda Bear Democracy
• Mencius Moldbug: A Short Lesson from a Sith Lord
• You’ve got to be kidding? Neoreactionary Soup and The Fall of Man
• Mckenzie Wark: The Spectacle of Disintegration
• Libertarian Municipalism – Murray Bookchin and Social Ecology
• Jodi Dean: The Communist Horizon a first look…
• Stephen Jay Gould – The Political Side of Science
• Niklas Luhmann: Communications and Society

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Cynics, Pessimists, Nihilists ~ Beyond Nihilism?

• Nick Land: On Time – Teleoplexy & Templexity
• Abject Strangeness: to seek strange truths in undiscovered lands…
• E.M. Cioran on Borges
• E.M. Cioran – The Irreparable Uniqueness Of Things
• E.M. Cioran: The Delusions of our Sadness
• E.M. Cioran’s Revenge: The Triumph of Failure
• “All created things are impermanent.”
• Welcome to the paradise of tears…
• The Fragility of Objects: After Edward Hopper
• The Last Magic Show
• Silver Linings in the Clouds: Depression as Time’s Cure
• City of Ruins
• Is Philosophy Dead?
• The Nemocentric Vision: Thomas Ligotti
• Nick Land On The Dark Enlightenment
• Nick Land: The Master of the Infernal Wisdom
• Nick Land: The Collapse of Almost Everything
• Libidinal Materialism: Nick Land’s Philosophy of Desire
• Nick Land: Mandelbrot and the gibberings of the Lobotomy Ward
• Nick Land: Death is Immense
• Nick Land: The Sponge that absorbed God
• Nick Land: Shuggoth’s Revenge
• Nocturnal Matterings
• Disciple of the Dog; or, How a Cynic Bites his own Ass
• We the dead…. thoughts on Nicola Masciandaro’s A Note on Cosmic Pessimism
• Thomas Ligotti: Speculations in Black
• The Miserablist: Thomas Ligotti’s Puppet Philosophy
• Epicure of Pessimism: The Horror of Thomas Ligotti – Part I
• Epicure of Pessimism: The Horror of Thomas Ligotti – Part II
• Thomas Ligotti: Epicure of Pessimism – Part III
• Saturn and Melancholy: The Force of the Matter
• Schellingian Thoughts; or Nightspore’s travails
• H.P. Lovecraft: Aesthete of Cosmic Fear
• Slime Dynamics: The Metaphysics and Extinction as Openess
• Transcendental Paranoia; or, the Mad Speculations of an Absolute Inhumanist
• Dark Comedy: The Irony of the Banal; or, The Metamorphoschizolibidinal Machine
• Dark Vitalism and Lovecraft’s Philosophy of Nature

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Posthuman Blues & Transhumanist Accelerations

• Posthumanism 101: Non-Fiction and Fiction
• Linda Negata: The Bohr Maker – A Posthuman Fable
• William Gibson: The Peripheral – A Tale of Time
• Utopia or Hell: The Future as Posthuman Game Strategy
• David Roden on Posthuman Life
• David Roden’s: Speculative Posthumanism & the Future of Humanity (Part 2)
• David Roden’s: Speculative Posthumanism & the Future of Humanity (Part 3)
• David Roden’s: Speculative Posthumanism & the Future of Humanity (Part 4)
• David Roden’s: Speculative Posthumanism & the Future of Humanity (Part 4.2)
• David Roden’s: Speculative Posthumanism & the Future of Humanity (Part 5)
• David Roden’s: Speculative Posthumanism & the Future of Humanity (Part 6)
• David Roden’s: Speculative Posthumanism & the Future of Humanity (Part 7)
• David Roden’s: Speculative Posthumanism & the Future of Humanity (Part 8)
• The Global Cyberwar: The Alogrithms of Intelligent Malware
• Posthuman Economics: The Empire of Capital
• Romancing the Machine: Intelligence, Myth, and the Singularity
• Benjamin Noys on Accelerationism & Counter-Accelerationism
• Accelerationism, Boredom and the Trauma of Futurity
• Machinic Life: The Replicants are (among) Us
• Speculative Posthumanism: R. Scott Bakker, Mark Fisher and David Roden
• Posthuman Accelerationism
• Posthuman Economics: The Empire of Capital
• Reza Negarestani: Navigating the Game of Truths
• Accelerationism: The New Prometheans – Cyberlude
• Accelerationism: The New Prometheans – Part One
• Accelerationism: The New Prometheans – Part Two: Section One
• Accelerationism: The New Prometheans – Part Two: Section Two
• The Mutant Prophet of Inhuman Accelerationism: Nick Land and his Legacy
• Nick Land and Teleoplexy – The Schizoanalysis of Acceleration
• Accelerationism: Ray Brassier as Promethean Philosopher
• Jetpack Communism: The New Left Accelerationism
• Steven Shaviro: Accelerationist Aesthetics
• Ray Brassier: Death, Cosmic Schizophrenia, and Nick Land’s Accelerationism
• Technogenesis: The Emergence of Machinic Sapiens or Homo Cyborgensis?
• Posthuman Anxiety: Were we ever human?
• ACCELERATIONISM: A symposium on tendencies in capitalism
• The Age of Speed: Accelerationism, Politics, and the Future Present
• Accelerationism: The New Prometheans – Automate Architecture
• Accelerationism: The New Prometheans – Red Stack Attack!
• Retro-Fitting Accelerationism: A Short History to Nowhere?
• The Machinic World (D&G): Organic Machines at the Edge of Time
• The Bionic Horizon: The Law of Acceleration
• Benedict Singleton: The Accelerationist Cosmism of Nikolai Fedorov
• Science Fiction, Technology, and Accelerationist Politics: Final Thoughts on an Williams and Srnicek’s Manifesto
• no boredom – Arran James on Mark Fisher and Accelerationism beyond Boredom

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Utopias, Dystopias & the Dilemmas of Hope

• Technocapitalism: Creativity, Governance, and Neo-Imperialism
• The Prison House of Capital: Walter Benjamin and Philip K. Dick?
• Hope and the Dystopic Impulse
• The e(U)topian impulse
• Dystopian Machines: Karel Capek – R.U.R.
• Surveillance: Virtual Identity and the Control Society
• Bipolar Worlds: Dystopia or Apocalypse, or the Tension Between?
• Utopian Speculation: Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown
• Dubai – City-State of the Future: Globalism, Plutocracy and Social Exclusion
• Dystopian Machines: Karel Capek – R.U.R.
• Cities Under Siege by Stephan Graham: Dystopian Thoughts on Control Society
• The Global Cartoon: Empire in the 21st Century
• Fredric Jameson: The Utopic/Dystopic Imagination
• Bipolar Worlds: Dystopia or Apocalypse, or the Tension Between?
• Technoscience and Expressionism
• Positing Futurity: The Possibilities of Utopology

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