Apocalypse Now? What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Believe

Many of Stephen Hawking’s final written words presage doom. Clearly no amount of knowledge can resist a looming apocalypse. “We Continue reading →

Cyberpunk 2.0: Re-imagining the Future

Asia was the future, and this is what it would look like. For a while, perhaps even still, it held Continue reading →

Hume’s Aesthetics: On the Standard of Taste

There is undoubtedly a variety of opinion in matters of art appreciation – someone may, for example, detest Damien Hirst’s Continue reading →

Moebius: 40 Days in the Desert

French comic book artist and illustrator Jean Giraud (1938-2012), aka Moebius, has had, perhaps, a more profound influence on the Continue reading →

Cyberpunk 1.0: Visions of the Future

Growing up in the 1990s, the cyberpunk aesthetic was the commonly accepted vision of the future. Every form of media, Continue reading →

Trump: Hegel’s World Historical Individual?

Recently I read an interesting article from Gideon Rachman. As the chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times, he Continue reading →

Seoul Stories: Han Kang, Violence and Candlelight

The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of Continue reading →

The Phenomenology of Language in David Abram’s ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’

I really do consider this a truly paradigm-shifting book even though I didn’t buy into all of the assumptions written Continue reading →

The Infinite Labyrinth of Time in Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths”

In his story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges explores the labyrinth, the writer, and perhaps above all, Continue reading →

Reclaiming Memory, Recapturing Attention, 2: Paying Attention as Taking Care

But how exactly do we go about doing this? What is the most effective way for us to improve our Continue reading →

Jan Svankmajer: Surrealism in the Contemporary World

Following the much documented downfall of Surrealism as a movement we find numerous contemporary artists working in its idiom but Continue reading →

The Spectacle of the Scaffold – Foucault, Corporal Punishment, and the Digital Age

Witnesses who described the scene could even be prosecuted, thereby ensuring that the execution should cease to be a spectacle Continue reading →

I’m Not Your Mary: The Derridean Différance in Silent Hill 2

Konami’s Silent Hill 2 (2001), a stand-alone title in the Silent Hill series, may be considered one of the seminal Continue reading →

Reclaiming Memory, Recapturing Attention, 1: Socrates and the Internet

‘“This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an Continue reading →

The Mexican Subject: Semantics, Violence and the Female Aspect

Given the recent debates from both the GOP and the Democratic party the subject of the Mexican individual has been Continue reading →

Calvino’s Cosmicomics: Time and the Hunter (or t zero)

To me, there’s virtually no doubt that Italo Calvino is a literary genius. Each one of his works create either Continue reading →

Creating a Character, 2: Bernard Malamud and J.G. Ballard

The question remains: How does a skilled writer establish a good character in so few pages? And how does it relate to their overall style and composition?

How Should One Love?: A Review of Existentialism and Romantic Love

Skye Cleary’s book Existentialism and Romantic Love is a philosophical piece aiming to resolve the problematic nature of defining and Continue reading →

Abjection and the Real

Psychoanalysts Julia Kristeva and her predecessor Jacques Lacan have baffled graduate students for years due to their opaque and relentless Continue reading →

The Web as Rhizome in Deleuze and Guattari

‘A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, Continue reading →

Transport for London and the Total Advertisement

When TfL announced that Canada Water station was to be dubbed ‘Buxton Water’ for Marathon Day we witnessed one of Continue reading →

Louis Althusser, the Ideological State Apparatus, and Interpellation

Imagine that you’ve magically transformed into a bourgeoisie capitalist. You wake up one morning and…poof: regal cashmere pajamas, silk blankets, Continue reading →

Deleuze V. Dolezal – Yeah, We’re Actually Doing This

Deleuze and Identity Politics Deleuze has been used before to critique identity politics, sometimes this has been done with the Continue reading →

Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Video Games

The great messianic art critic Walter Benjamin saw the role of film in his era of capitalist culture as creating Continue reading →

On Certainty and Mad Max

“At the end of the world,” our eponymous hero growls in the prologue of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, Continue reading →

Sartre’s Existential Lobsters

‘“What crabs? Are you mad? What crabs? Ah! Yes. Well, yes… The crabs are men. And so? Where did I Continue reading →

Hemingway and Modernity’s Necropolis

The works of Ernest Hemingway have always aimed to elucidate the looming presence of death as it follows his characters Continue reading →

Simulacrum in Literature: Baudrillard and Barthelme

Simulacrum, like many terms surrounding postmodernism, has been defined in a number of ways. Perhaps the simplest definition of the Continue reading →

The Third Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution of the 19th Century has undoubtedly been one of the most significant economic and cultural developments in human Continue reading →

Time-Tearing with Philip K. Dick

I like Philip K. Dick. His ideas are intriguing and his writing is more than passable by my standards. I Continue reading →

Creating a Character: Carver and Cheever

The short story, the ever neglected cousin of the novel, requires many of the same techniques used in the composition Continue reading →

Stiegler’s Memory, 2: The Industrialisation of Consciousness

Technical and Political Memory As I outlined in Stiegler’s Memory,1: The Problem With Husserl, Bernard Stiegler argues that Husserl’s traditional Continue reading →

Stiegler’s Memory, 1: The Problem With Husserl

The Problem With Husserl To French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, the outer objects that human beings create can be looked at exteriorisations of Continue reading →

How Green Party Policy Would Resuscitate the BBC

True democracy can only be achieved through a properly informed public. This is the maxim on which the Green Party Continue reading →

Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip and Pragmatic Knowledge

Philip K. Dick is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting writers of the 20th century. His prose is Continue reading →

Borges and Murakami: Philosophy in Fiction

Borges and Murakami Philosophy in fiction has had a long and storied history, from the mythology of Ancient Greece to Continue reading →

Election 2015: The TTIPing point

The TTIPing point: TTIP Versus Cigarette Legislation MPs have voted by a majority of 254 to strip branding from cigarette Continue reading →

Is Postmodernism Self-Defeating?

In academia postmodernism is nearly impossible to avoid. Characters like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Jameson, Baudrillard (and many others of course), Continue reading →

Man the Animal Without Essence, 4: The Edge of Time

In the first part of Man, The Animal Without Essence I focused on the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, in Continue reading →

Storie Naturali: The Weird and Wonderful World of Luigi Serafini

Recently I received a book in the post. The words were written by an author I’d never heard of and it Continue reading →

What the Big Environmental Groups Don’t Want You to Know

I used to be a fan of Greenpeace. I’ve donated to them in the past and have always assumed they Continue reading →

Two Lessons on Animal and Man, 2: Christianity and Cartesianism

Christianity and Cartesianism In the second lesson of his book Two Lessons on Animal and Man, Gilbert Simondon begins to Continue reading →

Two Lessons on Animal and Man, 1: Antiquity

Simondon Gilbert Simondon (1924 – 1989) was arguably one of the most original and innovative thinkers in contemporary French philosophy. Continue reading →

In What Sense Can We Understand the Mind As Existing Beyond the Brain?

In what sense can we understand the mind as existing beyond the brain? Throughout history, since the days of the Continue reading →

Foucault and Digital Discourse

Foucault calls into question the definition of discourse in his famous, methodological work the Archaeology of Knowledge. While it is Continue reading →

The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? UFOs, Area 51, The Illuminati, 9/11, New World Order, ‘chemtrails’, the moon landing Continue reading →

The Failed Übermensch: A Marxist Reading of Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment highlights the turmoil, and tribulations of the societal exclusion of 19th century Russia’s lower class. Raskolnikov, Continue reading →

Calvino and the Codex Seraphinianus: A Psychedelic Mystery

On a cloudy Friday afternoon, sometime at the end of March, we were sat huddled on the floor of a Continue reading →

Man, the Animal Without Essence, 3: Brains, Hands and Tools

Artifice and art itself – these are the two meanings of the Greek word technē. Technē is, according to French Continue reading →

Borges and the Book of Infinity

If the Library of Babel is a library that is all libraries, then what if there was a book that is all books? What if, in the pages of a book, one could find infinity itself?