Accelerationism: Ray Brassier as Promethean Philosopher

The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

“Autonomy means that we make the worlds that we are grow.”

     – Tikkun, The Cybernetic Manifesto 

“If contingency is to be thought absolutely, it must be thought independently of the map of possibilities.”

    – Elie Ayache, The Medium of Contingency

 

Our notions of voluntarism would arise out of the nominalist traditions of the late Middle Ages theology of such thinkers as John Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308) and William of Ockham (c. 1288-1349) who inaugurated the modern secular separation of nature from the supernatural and the concomitant divorce of philosophy, physics, and ethics from theology that was reinforced by influential early modern figures such as Francisco Suarez (1548-1616).1

As Pope Benedict XVI would remark “Duns Scotus developed a point to which modernity is very sensitive. It is the topic of liberty and its relation with the will and with the intellect. Our author stresses liberty as a fundamental quality of the will…

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Realism and Speculative Realism

Larval Subjects .

A long while back someone asked me– I think it was Jacob Russell –what relationship Speculative Realism has to realism in literature. At the time the question didn’t really register, nor strike me as particularly significant because I didn’t take the ontological position of realism as having much, if anything, to say about literary or artistic movements. In short, I don’t see as ontology– at least good ontology –as legislating what art should be. However, in coming across the little passage from Latour where he remarks that the entire tired problem of correspondence arises from a confusion between epistemology and the history of art (Pandora’s Hope, 78 -9), I find that this question suddenly resonates in an entirely different way.

Perhaps, I reflect to myself, when people hear the word “realism” the first thing that comes to their mind is the epistemological position where mind is portrayed as…

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Force of creation; The non-Aesthetic

In Praise of the Spooky: Why I Like Quai Branly – Graham Harman

Dialogica Fantastica

The Musée du Quai Branly opened in 2006 in Paris: a red Lego warehouse suspended in midair, with the nearby Eiffel Tower rising above the neighboring apartment houses. The Museum was built to house non-Western artworks previously scattered throughout the city, not without protest from the curators of their former homes. The masses have quickly embraced Quai Branly; the ticket queues are daunting enough that I abandoned my first effort to visit and returned the following day. Predictably, the mass appeal of the Museum is explained by many critics as the result of vulgar theatrics and intellectual emptiness. True enough, there are numerous cases of popular success where such charges are richly deserved. But in the present case, I find myself on the side of the masses, and opposed to the joyless subtlety of those who believe that the sole function of the intellect is to make the world more…

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Photo-fiction and non-standard aesthetics

Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Non-Standard Aesthetics

Irreversible Noise

This is the text of a talk I gave at the Goldsmiths Conference on Deleuze and Transdisciplinarity Feb 2012:

The question of the relation between philosophy and art engenders the definition of many other relations, such as those with politics and truth, or thought and sensation. In ‘What is Philosophy?’ Deleuze and Guattari borrow the term non-philosophy from Francois Laruelle, and use it to elucidate what for them is the egalitarian transdisciplinary space of interference where these relationships are continually redefined, albeit within the strict remits that they lay down for each discipline in its specificity. However, while they praise Laruelle for the ‘interesting’ nature of his work on non-philosophy and the connection he establishes between this and the pre-Socratic concept of the One-All, they find it ‘odd’ that he should denote this non-philosophical project as science, when for them it is philosophy that draws up or presupposes the non-philosophical…

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Another Path of Disquietude

At a path of disquiet, I crossed swords with I friend, and with the blunt blade of mine I’ve slain him.

I never wanted to hurt him, but we crossed at the worst possible timing. In that moment I knew something about myself that I didn’t know before. I was about to give it all up, leaving him walk his knife through me, but as a last act of survival I turned it into a moment of reversal. A reversal of fortune, and I walked over his failing body.

Now, it is behind me and to my belief behind him too.

Now, it looks like it’s destined to happen all over again…

~

I’ve seen her one day in a spring time, she didn’t see me. I made sure. I’ve followed and I’ve learned. She’s a beauty in an undefinable way. She is a perplexing beauty.

Then when we talked, I gazed at her eyes, and I knew that moment that I gazed in an abyss. The kind of abyss that I love to bath, blend and alloy within, an abyss that can be that of Joy and levity or that of despair.

At what point is self-recognition especially that of plights we’ve been through becomes self-pity? I’m not sure if I know,  but I’ve had my share of despair. I can’t or rather won’t take anymore.

~

As we walk we’re destined to cross, and as I cross me and my friend it feels like we’re going to collide again. Another path of disquietude.

I can leave him to run his knife through me again, not fight it like I did the last time, as it’s my time to lay down and kiss his blade.

But, if I let myself lay down this time it will annihilate me.

Talk to me friend, how do we give the knife slowly, you’ve done before, maybe you even had it coming for what you did, but maybe I made you what you are. How do you like to talk your knife, do you want a blunt with a hammer like destruction, or a smooth sharp pointed edge to the heart?

~

I want the things that I want.
I’m weary of being slender and I’ve got to feed.
Wouldn’t want it to be your flesh, wouldn’t want the taste of your blood.

There was a time where I used to give it all. That time is gone, or it has to be gone. It was never against you. It’s a matter of being.

I want the things I want.

I keep singing this to myself, or maybe to the possibility of my friend.

It’s not your fault,
It’s not your fault.
I’m not human at all,
I’ve got no heart.

A Gentle Reminder to the Self

The abysmal pit is anything but different from the euphoric moments in your life, they’re both a state of mind. Even your mental faculties process reality on basis of causality, being mad or sad is nothing but an effect of a certain cause. Being aware to your mental processing can be in itself the cause to an effect of alternate state of mind. Learn from the stoics.

On another note, you have very little control of the next moment or the next day, don’t worry, that’s on your side. At the end of the day what rules is probability. If you’re sad, the probabilities are in favor of you being sad if you continue that line of action/thought without intending to interrupt it. While interrupting it, in whatever possible way, will always include a new variety of probabilities in the basket. So go ahead. Interrupt your fucking life, and alter things around.

The launch of my website: www.assemhendawi.com

Hi Guys,

So I’ve created a website for my photography and video.

Check it out here

http://www.assemhendawi.com

I’m still baffled though whether I should link this blog or a create a new one.

Cheers,