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, 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?

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 →

Why Do Spirals Exist Everywhere in Nature?

Spirals are a common shape found in nature, as well as in sacred architecture. In the natural world, we find Continue reading →

Fernando Pessoa and Nietzsche: The Last Man and Happiness

“Zarathustra has changed, Zarathustra has become a child, Zarathustra is an awakened one; what do you now want among the 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 →

The Mystery of The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript dates to the early 15th Century and it is believed to have come from northern Italy. It 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 →

From Huxley to Jung: The Psychology of Initiation Rites

Initiation rites are an integral part of traditional societies. An initiation rite is a ritual or ceremony marking entrance or Continue reading →

The ‘Champagne Socialist’ Fallacy

‘Champagne socialist,’ ‘limousine liberal’, or my personal favourite ‘bourgeois bohemian’ are equivalent accusations aimed at people who advocate socialist thought, 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 →