Nietzsche and Wagner on Tragedy: The Slave and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Germany

During the nineteenth-century, the German speaking world was going through a period of rapid social and political upheaval. This tumultuous 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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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?

Stiegler and Derrida: The Technical History of Memory

Stiegler defines what he calls ‘grammatisation’ as the ‘technical history of memory, in which hypomnesic memory continually reintroduces the constitution Continue reading →

The Role of Freedom and Necessity in Schelling’s Inquiries

“The time has come for the higher distinction or, rather, for the real contrast, to be made manifest, the contrast Continue reading →

Man, the Animal Without Essence, 2: Fire and the Cave

Why do humans produce art? What is it that has led us as a species to feel the need to Continue reading →

Is Vertical Farming The Future?

With the population sky high, and the size of our cities reaching breaking point, the demand on the agriculture sector Continue reading →

Kafka, Orwell, Huxley: The Surveillance State in Literature

Even since the days before the Edward Snowden revelations there have been comparisons made between the powers of the NSA Continue reading →

Man, the Animal Without Essence

In the second half of his most famous work, Technics and Time, 1, ‘Prometheus’s Liver’, Bernard Stiegler analyses the Greek myth Continue reading →

Borges and Calvino: Invisible Cities and Dreams

  …Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan’s Continue reading →

No Place to Hide: The Importance of Glenn Greenwald’s Newest Book

‘There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or Continue reading →

When Fiction Lives In Fiction

Fantastic Borges essay on the history of meta-fiction and its role in literature. After a thorough search of Google I couldn’t Continue reading →

What Would Life Look Like Without Advertising?

What would life look like without advertisement? This is a question that seems almost unthinkable to us in a modern Continue reading →

The Importance of the Synthetic A Priori in Kant’s First Critique

For Kant, the analytic/synthetic distinction and the a priori/a posteriori distinction are fundamental building blocks in his philosophy. In this Continue reading →

Slavoj Zizek writes for Ambercrombie and Fitch

The internet truly does bring up some strange things. Whilst researching an article about São Paulo’s current city-wide ban on advertising Continue reading →

Borges’ Dreamtigers

  A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images Continue reading →

It’s Time For a Serious Discussion About Psychedelics

Ed Miliband recently stated on the program Bite the Ballot: ‘while I haven’t taken drugs, I’ve got a pretty clear Continue reading →

Paranoia in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly

paranoia /ˌparəˈnɔɪə/ noun a mental condition characterized by delusions of persecution, unwarranted jealousy, or exaggerated self-importance, typically worked into an Continue reading →

Modafinil – Are Smart Drugs Really That Smart?

If you’ve been reading the national newspapers over the last couple of years you’d be forgiven for believing that students Continue reading →

Citizenfour, Snowden, and the Problem of Privacy

In the USA, 1972, the Watergate scandal shook the foundations of the American political institution in what has been described Continue reading →

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions

Another Borges book. Another 5 stars. I mean this man is so brilliant I’m starting to turn into a dithering Continue reading →

The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: The Role of the Slave In Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals

In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche aims to provide a new philosophical standpoint, one based on the concept of value Continue reading →

Proletarianization in E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops

‘cannot you see […] that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really Continue reading →

To what extent has Kierkegaard’s view of the self influenced Heidegger’s conception of Dasein?

 ‘A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self Continue reading →