Omnicide Ii

An infernal catalogue of manic visionaries, inspired by the poetry of the Middle East. In a new work in which conceptual elaboration, storytelling, and poetics are fused in the infernal heat of the desert, the cycle of Omnicide is closed with a philosophy of doom, deception, and the game, plunging headlong into the inevitable, the fatal, and the infinite. A series of controlled combustions fuelled by fragments drawn from the poetry and literature of the Middle-East, Omnicide II introduces us to a new cast of manic visionaries, from the Selemaniac to the Crystallomaniac, the Bibliomaniac to the Aeromaniac. In his relentless cataloguing of the myriad figures and portents of omnicidal doom, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh resumes the offensive of those writers, artists, and thinkers for whom the fiercest creative incandescence is only kindled in the shadow of certain doom. Amid war cries and lullabies, mages, wolves and pelicans, sabres and crystals, drones and soul-stealers, in settings ranging from the opium den to the Qatari luxury hotels, with his unique style and methodology, his dizzying breadth of references, and his implacable will to follow the most deranging lines of thought and evoke the most startling images, Mohaghegh draws the reader into territories disturbing and unfamiliar, atmospheres delicate and grotesque, moods morbid yet life-affirming, in a book that evokes fever and exudes dead calm. The utterly absorbing music of this writing both lulls and disquiets—a contemporary Necronomicon, an inexhaustible treasury of recipes for disaster, catastrophe, ruination and destruction, all in the name of the most intense creation.

A fragmentary catalogue of poetic derangements that reveals the ways in which mania communicates with an extreme will to annihilation What kind of circumstances provoke an obsessive focus on the most minute object or activity? And what causes such mania to blossom into the lethal conviction that everything must be annihilated? There is no turning away from the imperative to study this riddle in all its mystifying complexity and its disturbing contemporary resonance—to trace the obscure passage between a lone state of delirium and the will to world-erasure.. A fragmentary catalogue of the thousand-and-one varieties of manic disposition (augomania, dromomania, catoptromania, colossomania…), Omnicide enters the chaotic imaginations of the most significant poetic talents of the Middle East in order to instigate a new discourse on obsession, entrancement, excess, and delirium. Placing these voices into direct conversation, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh excavates an elaborate network of subterranean ideas and interpretive chambers, byways, and burrows by which mania communicates with fatality. Like secret passages leading from one of the multitudinous details of a bustling Persian miniature to the blank burning immanence of the desert, each is a contorted yet effective channel connecting some attractive universe (of adoration, worship, or astonishment) to the instinct for all-engulfing oblivion (through hatred, envy, indifference, rage, or forgetting). A captivating fractal of conceptual prisms in half-storytelling, half-theoretical prose, a rhythmic, poetic, insidious work that commands submission, Omnicide absorbs the reader into unfamiliar and estranging landscapes whose every subtle euphoric aspect threatens to become an irresistible invitation to the end of all things.

Mohaghegh tracks the idea of 'chaos' into the contemporary philosophical and cultural imagination of the postcolonial world, exploring its vital role in the formation of an emergent avant-garde literature in the Middle East, concentrating on the writings of the twentieth-century Iranian new wave.

A diverse collection of essays, which reflect the breadth of Judith Jarvis Thomson's philosophical work. The diversity of topics discussed in this book reflects the breadth of Judith Jarvis Thomson's philosophical work. Throughout her long career at MIT, Thomson's straightforward approach and emphasis on problem-solving have shaped philosophy in significant ways. Some of the book's contributions discuss specific moral and political issues such as abortion, self-defense, the rights and obligations of prospective fathers, and political campaign finance. Other contributions concern the foundations of moral theory, focusing on hedonism, virtue ethics, the nature of nonconsequentialism, and the objectivity of moral claims. Finally, contributions in metaphysics and epistemology discuss the existence of sets, the structures reflected in conditional statements, and the commitments of testimony. Contributors Jonathan Bennett, Richard L. Cartwright, Joshua Cohen, N. Ann Davis, Catherine Z. Elgin, Gilbert Harman, Barbara Herman, Frances Myrna Kamm, Claudia Mills, T.M. Scanlon, Ernest Sosa

A precise and poetic argument for the renewal of transcendental philosophy. The great poets and thinkers of modernity described a situation we still inhabit today: the catastrophic undermining of all foundations, the disorienting relativization of all reference points, the prospect of abandonment to chance and contingency alone--the shipwreck of Mallarmé's Coup de dés. In this precise and poetic work of philosophy, Gabriel Catren sketches out a new "phenoumenodelic" solution to this momentous ungrounding, defiantly refusing both unrestrained contingency and arbitrary refoundation. Mobilizing a formidable knowledge of the major currents of modern thought, deftly articulating Kantian transcendentalism and Spinozan immanentism, phenomenological reduction, and scientific realism, Catren argues that the projects oriented by the infinite ideas of reason (Truth, Beauty, Justice, Love) need not be abandoned in the face of the "exquisite crisis" of modernity. Instead, the "shipwreck" is to be understood as a suspension of finite subjectivity in the fullness of a "phenoumenodelic pleroma," an atonal milieu ringing with unheard-of possibilities. Announcing an ambitious program for the renewal of transcendental philosophy, in Pleromatica Catren recomposes the primary elements of modern thought into a startling new configuration, introducing a vivid constellation of new concepts with which to map out and navigate the vast space of this "worldless daydream."

"Elemental Disappearances casts a wanderer's eye upon an ever-expanding configuration of sites of disturbance. The things sought after are apparitional: they appear and disappear at will; they perfect the art of materialization and vanishing. Such is the nature of living dangerously, and with it the short duration of enchantment. This collection tracks provocative ideas, artifacts, and phenomena rising and fading across different territories of the contemporary world. Through a constellation of powerful thought-images, the authors uncover spaces of an ephemeral and fugitive nature in order to generate a fractal vision of our time and beyond." (back cover)

Prominent philosophers explore themes in the work of Owen Flanagan, focusing on debates about the nature of mind, the self, and morality. Owen Flanagan's work offers a model for how to be a naturalistic and scientifically informed philosopher who writes beautifully and deeply about topics as varied as consciousness and Buddhism, moral psychology and dreaming, identity and addiction, literature and neuroscience. In this volume, leading philosophers--Flanagan's friends, colleagues, and former students--explore themes in his work, focusing on debates over the nature of mind, the self, and morality. Some contributors address Flanagan's work directly; others are inspired by his work or methodology. Their essays are variously penetrating and synoptic, cautious and speculative.

An investigation of the nature and philosophical uses of number. The first volume of Collapse investigates the nature and philosophical uses of number. The volume includes an interview with Alain Badiou on the relation between philosophy, mathematics, and science, an in-depth interview with mathematician Matthew Watkins on the strange connections between physics and the distribution of prime numbers, and contributions that demonstrate the many ways in which number intersects with philosophical thought—from the mathematics of intensity to terrorism, from occultism to information theory, and graphical works of multiplicity.

Strange how many déjà vus you have here. How might we conceive of comradeship with a present that is increasingly predetermined by algorithms and governed by techno-politics? Armen Avanessian chronicles his stay in Miami as an experiment in writing about our times of individual optimization and digitization. An inventory of the self in the second person—and a philosopher's reflections in the infinity pool of the art world—this book reckons with a new time complex as well as the aesthetics and infrastructures of the contemporary. Can we advance from conditions of financial feudalism and climate change to a progressive poetics of the digital? The city of tropical noir becomes a case study for a geopolitics and economics of the future—Miami vision, Miami vacation, Miami fiction, Miamification.

The historical continuity of spinal catastrophism, traced across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology. Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, André Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal. Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and “organic memory” that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from “railway spine” to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought. Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history.