Excerpt from A Schizo-Philosopher's Colouring Book

A Schizo-Philosopher's Colouring Book is available for purchase through Guernica Editions. This excerpt has been republished with permission from the publisher.

Vulner-abilité posthumaine

Je propose de concevoir l’être humain comme transjectif : à la fois transsubjectif et transobjectif. Cela suppose de prendre en considération les enchevêtrements matériels dans lesquels nous existons. En prenant également en considération les concepts de transcorporéité et de créature bioculturelle offerts par Stacy Alaimo et Samantha Frost respectivement, nous sommes en mesure de bien comprendre les mécanismes qui sont au fondement de notre vulnérabilité. Puisque le féminisme matérialiste et la théorie des affects démontrent que notre relationalité est essentielle à notre devenir, je propose d’adopter le terme « affect—abilité » plutôt que « vulnérabilité » afin de nous éloigner des connotations négatives de ce dernier et de faciliter la reconnaissance et l’acceptation du sujet exposé, imprégné et imprégnant, que nous sommes.

The Future Has Already Happened

This article interrogates current conceptions of thinking machines of the future. In contrast to dystopian visions of the future, where humans become dominated by machines of their own making, I argue that this future already happened some time ago, and that we are, in fact, already living in the future that we dread might come to pass.

Prostheticity, Disability, and Spaceflight

In this short work, the author will reflect on how we might understand the technology-subject relationship in a way that equally captures the position of the individual with a disability and that of the interplanetary astronaut. The works of Tamar Sharon in mediated posthumanism and Dan Goodley in critical disability studies will be consulted. This cursory exploration will conclude that both the astronaut and the individual with a disability are congruent posthuman subjects insofar as their relationship to technology challenges the idea of a transhumanist overcoming of human limits. Exploring this relationship can tell us something about how posthuman subjects may be understood more generally. Critical Disability Studies, Mediated Posthumanism, Mediation, Reflexivity, Originary Prostheticity, Tamar Sharon, Dan Goodley

Posthumanism

Defining posthumanism as a single, well-oriented philosophy is a difficult if not impossible endeavour. Part of the reason for this difficulty is accounted by posthumanism’s illusive origins and its perpetually changing hermeneutics. This short paper gives a brief account of the ecological trend in contemporary posthumanism and provides a short prescription for the future of posthumanist literature and potential research avenues.

‘By Means Other Than Life’

This essay argues that literature can help us understand posthuman dimensions of memory. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical anthropology of technics, and from the field of cultural memory studies, this new materialist approach challenges the conception of posthumanism that describes contemporary technologies as “transcending” the human. Rather, I maintain that an immanent perspective situates the human as already existing outside of itself, “by means other than life,” as Stiegler puts it. I illustrate this with two examples from postcolonial literature that model an affirmational approach to traumatic material history by way of texts. Instead of posing as detachment or transcendence, these metafictional references foreground present continuities with the past, recovering that which has been forgotten or repressed.

Underneath(s)

You cannot walk it out. You cannot push it through your body, try as you might. Sturdy steps, winter-boot-clad, through fast falling snow in early morning light—all ice fog and fantastical—are futile. Your heart sits squarely, not moving. Bird in a cage, this heart. Wants only for someone to open the door, to let it out and give it wings. Instead, you try to walk it out. But you cannot push it through your body, try as you might. It aches, beats—persistent—strings tugging on memory like a balloon fastened to a child’s wrist with a loose bow. It is enough to know it beats, without thinking. It is enough. You cannot walk it out, this love. You cannot push it out through the soles of your feet, urging it down into the earth and—underneath that, even—more deeply, into hidden labyrinths of nickel and copper mines. You cannot walk it out. It will not let you. Instead, it begs you to carry it, heavy and laden, tired and weary, from this point of land under winter pines to that one, where the bay curves in like the place where a waist is sculpted by a man’s hand. You cannot walk it out because you know it is enough. And it is also too much.

The Mythological Origins of Desire and Marketing Hyperreality

This paper criticizes the profit-driven hyperreality foisted upon consumer goods. The author references Lacan’s interpretation of Plato’s myth on the self-sufficient, solitary and spherical origins of humankind contained within the ancient work, Symposium. The division of these once-whole entities, as described by Plato, resulted in humans being instilled with an insatiable desire for completeness. The author reasons that contemporary marketing strategies prevail upon this desire: transmuting what is real (the product or service) into the hyperreal.

The Sublime and Human Creations

Immanuel Kant pre-emptively excludes all man-made contrivances from his definition of the sublime. The limitations of human creation and the purposiveness in its design preclude it from consideration from both mathematical and dynamic sublimity. At best, human creation is “second-order” or “impurely” sublime. This paper thoroughly considers this assertion and searches for possible exceptions, both hypothetical and extant. It implies that humankind may be a nearing a point where it is able to create a pure example of the sublime, as defined by Kant.