Spinal Catastrophism

Author: Thomas Moynihan
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029638
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
The historical continuity of spinal catastrophism, traced across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology. Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, André Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal. Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and “organic memory” that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from “railway spine” to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought. Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history.

Spinal Catastrophism

Author: Thomas Moynihan
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029565
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Dialectic of Pop

Author: Agnes Gayraud
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029603
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 481

Book Description
A philosophical exploration of pop music that reveals a rich, self-reflexive art form with unsuspected depths. In the first major philosophical treatise on the subject, Agnès Gayraud explores all the paradoxes of pop—its inauthentic authenticity, its mass production of emotion and personal resonance, its repetitive novelty, its precision engineering of seduction—and calls for pop (in its broadest sense, encompassing all genres of popular recorded music) to be recognized as a modern, technologically mediated art form to rank alongside cinema and photography. In a thoroughgoing engagement with Adorno's fierce critique of "standardized light popular music," Dialectic of Pop tracks the transformations of the pop form and its audience over the course of the twentieth century, from Hillbilly to Beyoncé, from Lead Belly to Drake. Inseparable from the materiality of its technical media, indifferent and intractable to the perspectives of high culture, pop subverts notions of authenticity and inauthenticity, original and copy, aura and commodity, medium and message. Gayraud demonstrates that, far from being the artless and trivial mass-produced pabulum denigrated by Adorno, pop is a rich, self-reflexive artform that recognises its own contradictions, incorporates its own productive negativity, and often flourishes by thinking "against itself." Dialectic of Pop sings the praises of pop as a constitutively impure form resulting from the encounter between industrial production and the human predilection for song, and diagnoses the prospects for twenty-first century pop as it continues to adapt to ever-changing technological mediations.

Evolution of a Taboo

Author: Max D. Price
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0197543278
Category : SOCIAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
"From their domestication to their taboo, the role of pigs in the ancient Near East is one of the most complicated topics in archaeology. Rejecting monocausal explanations, this book adopts an evolutionary approach and uses zooarchaeology and texts to unravel the cultural significance of swine from the Paleolithic to today. Five major themes emerge: The domestication of the pig from wild boar in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, the unique roles that pigs developed in agricultural economies before and after the development of complex societies, the raising of swine in cities, the shifting ritual roles of pigs, and the formation and development of the pork taboo in Judaism and, later, Islam. The development of this taboo has inspired much academic debate. I argue that the well-known taboo described in Leviticus reflects the intention of the Biblical writers to develop an image of a glorious pastoral ancestry for a heroic Israelite past, something they achieved by tying together existing food traditions. These included a taboo on pigs, which was developed early in the Iron Age during conflicts between Israelites and Philistines and was revitalized by the Biblical writers. The taboo persisted and mutated, gaining strength over the next two and a half millennia. In particular, the pig taboo became a point of contention in the ethno-political struggles between Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures in the Levant. Ultimately, it was this continued evolution within the context of ethnic and religious politics that gave the pig taboo the strength it has today"--

Omnicide

Author: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0997567465
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 489

Book Description
A fragmentary catalogue of poetic derangements that reveals the ways in which mania communicates with an extreme will to annihilation What kind of circumstances provoke an obsessive focus on the most minute object or activity? And what causes such mania to blossom into the lethal conviction that everything must be annihilated? There is no turning away from the imperative to study this riddle in all its mystifying complexity and its disturbing contemporary resonance—to trace the obscure passage between a lone state of delirium and the will to world-erasure.. A fragmentary catalogue of the thousand-and-one varieties of manic disposition (augomania, dromomania, catoptromania, colossomania…), Omnicide enters the chaotic imaginations of the most significant poetic talents of the Middle East in order to instigate a new discourse on obsession, entrancement, excess, and delirium. Placing these voices into direct conversation, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh excavates an elaborate network of subterranean ideas and interpretive chambers, byways, and burrows by which mania communicates with fatality. Like secret passages leading from one of the multitudinous details of a bustling Persian miniature to the blank burning immanence of the desert, each is a contorted yet effective channel connecting some attractive universe (of adoration, worship, or astonishment) to the instinct for all-engulfing oblivion (through hatred, envy, indifference, rage, or forgetting). A captivating fractal of conceptual prisms in half-storytelling, half-theoretical prose, a rhythmic, poetic, insidious work that commands submission, Omnicide absorbs the reader into unfamiliar and estranging landscapes whose every subtle euphoric aspect threatens to become an irresistible invitation to the end of all things.

Object-Oriented Philosophy

Author: Peter Wolfendale
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0993045804
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 459

Book Description
A remarkably clear explication of the tenets of Object-Oriented Philosophy and an acute critique of the movement's ramifications for philosophy today. How does the patience and rigour of philosophical explanation fare when confronted with an irrepressible desire to commune with the object and to escape the subjective perplexities of reference, meaning, and sense? Moving beyond the hype and the inflated claims made for “Object-Oriented” thought, Peter Wolfendale considers its emergence in the light of the intertwined legacies of twentieth-century analytic and Continental traditions. Both a remarkably clear explication of the tenets of OOP and an acute critique of the movement's ramifications for philosophy today, Object-Oriented Philosophy is a major engagement with one of the most prevalent trends in recent philosophy.

Revolutionary Demonology

Author: Gruppo di Nun
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029832
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
An anthology of occult resistance: unpredictable and fascinating, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music. The End Times are here. The Digital Middle Ages approaches, the plague reaps its deadly harvest, climate apocalypse is around the corner, and fanaticism, fascism, and madness are rampant. The idea that we might gain the upper hand over the dark abyss into which the planet is tumbling is a form of magical thinking, laboring under the delusion that we can subdue eternity with relentless bloodlust, brutish exploitation, abuse of power, and violence. Revolutionary Demonology responds to this ritual of control, typical of what esoteric tradition calls the “Dogma of the Right Hand,” by reactivating the occult forces of a Left Hand Path that strives for the entropic disintegration of all creation, so as to make peace with the darkness and nourish the Great Beast that will finally break the seals of Cosmic Love. Unpredictable and fascinating, genuinely bizarre, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music alike with its fevered touch, this “anthology of occult resistance” collects together the communiqués of an arcane group who are already being hailed as the first morbid blossoming of “Italian Weird Theory”: a rogue contingent of theorists, witches, and sorcerers who heretically remix gothic accelerationism with satanic occultism and insurrectional necromancy.

ContraContemporary

Author: Suhail Malik
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1916405258
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
An incisive analysis of neoliberalism's intensely futural composition of time—the pretermodern, a condition of overwhelmed modernity. The modern vision was characterized by a future that had the potential to transform the present through human foresight and planning. With the depletion of modernity, however, the institutions and operations of the “contemporary” offer new configurations of time-sequencing and history. Theses such as “posthistory,” “presentism,” or the “cancellation of the future” diagnose our postmodern condition as that of a progressless contemporaneity haunted by the ghosts of futures past. In this incisive intervention, Suhail Malik contends that such claims fatally misidentify the rigorously postmodern time-innovations of neoliberalism, which instead enable a torrent of futures, a condition of superfluous and multitudinous newness in which futures are continually enacted upon and factored into a “speculative present”. In ContraContemporary, Malik seeks to describe this intensely futural composition of time, which is at once true to the premises of modernity yet far outstrips its anthropometric limitations—a condition of overwhelmed modernity that Malik calls the pretermodern. Malik demonstrates how the fate of the avant-garde and its successors in contemporary art indicates the shifting registers of futurity and the new, confronts the violent colonial origins of global modernity and their transmutation into postmodern racisms, and radicalizes the analysis of “risk societies.” He contests the widespread image of a postmodernity deserted by the future, presenting instead a trenchant vision of the task of constructing an art and a politics adequate to the speculative present. When the future is happening now. Everywhere. All the time.

The Infra-World

Author: Francois J. Bonnet
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1916405290
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 99

Book Description
Traversing philosophy and the human sciences, literature, cinema, and the visual arts, this book maps out a history where all is chaos, maelstrom, and fog. If perception and language objectivate the world, if imagination structures it, if knowledge orders it, then how can we describe, name, or even apprehend that which comes to pass when language is absent, when perception vacillates, and when knowledge eludes us? How can we say, show, or make known that which undermines and refutes the order of things, the supposedly immutable real, and the administration of the sensible? This book takes us on a quest that traverses philosophy and the human sciences, but also literature, cinema, and the visual arts. Not content with analysing the ordering power of our representations, in The Infra-World François J. Bonnet also interrogates the works of artists who have experienced and experimented with those moments when they crack open, giving way to anguish and vertigo. If perception is a sieve, what can be said of that which slips through its net, how does one speak of what escapes? What remains of unqualified perceptions, of vanishing sensations? Where do the indescribable, nocturnal fears hide, the horrors lurking behind closed eyes? What of the world beneath language and objectivated sensation? What of the infra-world?

Human Accomplishment

Author: Charles Murray
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061745677
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 790

Book Description
A sweeping cultural survey reminiscent of Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence. "At irregular times and in scattered settings, human beings have achieved great things. Human Accomplishment is about those great things, falling in the domains known as the arts and sciences, and the people who did them.' So begins Charles Murray's unique account of human excellence, from the age of Homer to our own time. Employing techniques that historians have developed over the last century but that have rarely been applied to books written for the general public, Murray compiles inventories of the people who have been essential to the stories of literature, music, art, philosophy, and the sciences—a total of 4,002 men and women from around the world, ranked according to their eminence. The heart of Human Accomplishment is a series of enthralling descriptive chapters: on the giants in the arts and what sets them apart from the merely great; on the differences between great achievement in the arts and in the sciences; on the meta-inventions, 14 crucial leaps in human capacity to create great art and science; and on the patterns and trajectories of accomplishment across time and geography. Straightforwardly and undogmatically, Charles Murray takes on some controversial questions. Why has accomplishment been so concentrated in Europe? Among men? Since 1400? He presents evidence that the rate of great accomplishment has been declining in the last century, asks what it means, and offers a rich framework for thinking about the conditions under which the human spirit has expressed itself most gloriously. Eye-opening and humbling, Human Accomplishment is a fascinating work that describes what humans at their best can achieve, provides tools for exploring its wellsprings, and celebrates the continuing common quest of humans everywhere to discover truths, create beauty, and apprehend the good.