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Blog post“IMAGINATION DEAD IMAGINE” (Samuel Beckett)
This is a response to a post by Anthony of the blog Time’s Flow Stemmed
I have never believed in the dividing of recent history up into “generations” or into “eras” or “ages”. These divisions have always seemed to come from people who saw themselves as central figures and key exemplars of a particular generation or epoch. From their point of view I would seem to be an “in-between” phenomenon, not exemplary enough, or an outdated late -
Blog postAs long as philosophy invents concepts, it constructs an infinitive and substantive language no one can speak without laughing. By recognizing the spaces and times conditioning the positions, it reconstructs, through these prepositions, a sayable language close to those real ones we speak … it invents fewer concepts than personages … wandering in the landscapes of the world … which all have in common vibrating between the person and the symbol, combining the singular with the universal (THE I
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Blog postCet article est le texte d’une conférence, prononcée il y a trois ans, avant la publication de la traduction française en octobre 2018.
Abstract: J’essaie de voir ANATEM en termes d’une tendance générale, qui inclurait la philosophie, la physique, et la science fiction. Étant donné que notre paradigme global ou notre image de pensée n’est plus le monisme (le Platonisme), comment pouvons-nous éviter la chute dans la d&eacut -
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Blog postAbstract: Thought does not only make use of images to give it concrete illustrations or applications, but is also organised in terms of certain overarching images that give form and plausibility to its exercise in a particular epoch.
There are two influential images of thought that have given rise to diverse contemporary metaphysical research programmes in Continental Philosophy: the quantum image and the performance image. Both of these are articulated in opposition to the dominance -
Blog postSummary of why I can’t write a summary of my year’s reading.
1) Calendrical depression: at the end of the old year one can observe, in the microcosm of academic and para-academic social networks, a flurry of blog posts, tweets, etc. summing up the year’s reading and/or writing. Retrospective balance-sheets of a microcosmic god.
(Reading: REVENANT GUN by Yoon Ha Lee, final instalment in the MACHINERIES OF EMPIRE trilogy, featuring calendrical control, divergence, warfare, and l -
Blog postFrom the back cover of Jean-François Lyotard’s le mur du pacifique, published in 1979:
« C’est un manuscrit français trouvé il y a quelque années dans la bibliothèque d’une université californienne.
L’auteur y esquisse une sorte de théorie-fiction politique :
– L’État occidental a toujours été depuis Rome un Empire ;
– Il est l’invention de proxénètes qui mettent en exploit -
Blog postI came across a couple of blog posts (1 and 2) devoted to « theory-fiction », and I thought it would be interesting to list some of my own recommendations. I felt that if I played this language game naively I might learn something about some things (myself included).
I don’t think that the concept of « theory-fiction » really exists, so it would probably be a mistake to talk about it over-theoretically. Nonetheless, it has evoked such a torr -
Blog postMany reviewer of EMPIRE OF SILENCE have remarked on the analogies with DUNE so I want to spell out those with BOOK OF THE NEW SUN. Intertextuality not originality is the question (and Wolfe’s saga itself borrows elements from LORD OF THE RINGS):
1) The Chantry/the torturers’ guild,
2) Hadrian kills a Sun to win the war/ Severian kills a Sun to bring the New Sun,
3) First person self-justifying narrator Hadrian/Severian,
4) Bildungsroman of protagonist fleeing a -
Blog postAbstract: Over the past fifty years we have seen diverse attempts to incorporate insights and clues present in quantum mechanics into wider philosophical visions and modes of thought. It is not necessary to construct a formal « metaphysics of quantum physics » to belong to this quantum turn.
Contemporary philosophers such as Karen Barad, Slavoj Zizek, Gilles Deleuze (and his epigone François Laruelle) prefer a more hermeneutic and heuristic informal approa -
Blog posthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology#Criticism
No mention is made of kvond’s contributions. See for example this synthetic post. Other early critics of OOO include Leon Niemoczynski, David Golumbia, Jason Hills, Glen Fuller, Jussi Parikka, and Adrian Romero Farias. Not to mention my own substantial texts, for example:
https://www.academia.edu/5286316/Pluralist_Thoughts_on_Graham_Harmans_Monist_Idealism
Pete Wolfendale, a late-comer to the critique of -
Blog postChristopher Ruocchio’s début science fiction epic is a very ambitious work and I have mixed feelings about it. I would give it a baseline 3,5/5 stars, upped to 4 for his handling of linguistic and cultural estrangement. I agree with many readers that the novel is very intertextual, containing many elements that parallel key features … Continue reading EMPIRE OF SILENCE: Memoirs of Hadrian Xenocide and Sun Killer
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Blog post« Pluri-reductionism » designates the recent attempts in Continental Philosophy to incorporate the insights of epistemological and ontological pluralism within a more manageable post-pluralist framework. The old reductionism cannot work, today the pluralist condition has become our common lot.
This post proposes a typology of the new forms of reduction that acknowledge diversity, plurality, multiplicity, difference, but that try to provide systematic guidelines f -
Blog postThis novel is difficult to situate within the categories of today’s science fiction and within Simak’s oeuvre. It belongs to the genre of science fantasy, in that the fantastical beings, powers, and events receive a (sort of) scientific explanation. There is also an outrageous sense of humour that we associate more with Robert Sheckley or … Continue reading MAGIC IS SCIENCE FROM A PREVIOUS UNIVERSE: On Clifford Simak’s THE GOBLIN RESERVATION
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Blog postJe viens de terminer la lecture de ROSEWATER, un roman de science fiction passionnant écrit par Tade Thompson, publié l’année dernière (en anglais). C’est un livre captivant, et je le recommande vivement.
Dans un futur proche (2066): un mystérieux “bio-dôme”, d’origine extraterrestre, occupe le centre de la ville de Rosewater au Nigeria. Il est entouré d’une barrière que personne ne peut franchir. Une fois par an, une petite ouver -
Blog postI have just finished reading ROSEWATER, an excellent science fiction novel written by Tade Thompson, published last year. It is a compelling read, and I highly recommend it.
In a near future (2066) a mysterious “biodome” of alien origin occupies the center of the city of Rosewater in Nigeria, a space which none can enter. Once a year a small opening or “pore” appears and people in proximity around it are healed of their illnesses (good, usually) or “reconstructed” along other lines (b -
Blog postThis is the perfect crime fiction with clones in space. Told with an economy of means at a galloping pace, it is impossible to put down. There is just enough world-building to get on with the story, and the diverse details we learn on the fly, from surprising turns of events and multiple flashbacks, all converge on the character-driven dénouement.
The novel constitutes a very interesting thought experiment concerning all the variations that cloning plus hacking (both genetic an -
Blog postA bitter-sweet tale focused on the conflicting demands of conjugal love and of passionate vocation. Love is not only an emotion but also a set of life choices together. To be faithful to love is to be faithful to those choices, not always to be faithful to our image of love.
Mary Robinette Kowal manages to convey a lot of emotional complexity in such a short space. Elma, an aging astronaut, in fact the first lady astronaut on Mars, lives in a human settlement on Mars with her elderly -
Blog postREVENANT GUN is the third volume in Yoon Ha Lee’s THE MACHINERIES OF EMPIRE sf trilogy. It is a fitting final episode in the military space opera that began so impressively with NINEFOX GAMBIT, and continued in the less impressive but still engrossing second volume RAVEN STRATAGEM.
The story arc comes to a strong end, and the reading experience is full of the poetry, the sense of wonder, the humour, the sexual attraction, the political and strategic complexity that we have come to exp -
Blog postI really enjoyed the new Avengers film, although I couldn’t understand why I did. I felt manipulated by the technical perfection of the movie despite its absolute lack of ideas and of real stakes. I used to like the comic book version because Thanos was unique among super-villains in having an explicit philosophical position: Nihilism. … Continue reading AVENGERS INFINITY WAR: Calculation, Manipulation, Montage, Nihilism
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Blog postFor those interested in Philip K Dick Evan Lampe’s “Philip K. Dick Book Club” (a rubric on his American Writers podcast) is an amazing resource, together with his blog Philip K. Dick Review, and his book PHILIP K DICK AND THE WORLD WE LIVE IN.
The title of Lampe’s book on P. K. DICK expresses the essence of his approach. He does not indulge in starry-eyed adulation of an oracle or in pseudo-mystical escapism. For Evan Lampe Dick’s stories and novels are about our world of global capit
Books By Terence Blake
Reset Modernity! (The MIT Press)
May 27, 2016
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