Sunday, February 4th, at 10 am Pacific Time
(Please use this link)
Meeting link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87110452533
Panelists Include:
David Roden
Ryan Madej
Romina Wainberg
Corey McCall
Martin E. Rosenberg
Germán Sierra
Alexander Wilson
Organized and moderated by:
Sepideh Majidi
Maure Coise
David Roden is a philosopher and writer whose monograph Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (Routledge, 2014) considers the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical implications of the existence of posthumans: powerful nonhuman agents produced by human-instigated technological processes. Along with his novella Snuff Memories (Schism[2], 2021), Xenoerotics initiates the reader into posthuman philosophy through literature. Roden's fiction considers the conditions of biomorphic sexuality and "pleasure," assimilating freshness into artifice; Roden writes what is, in theory, unwritten, sharing a state of knowing desire as both within language and beyond satisfaction.
In the panel discussion, David Roden, Ryan Madej, Martin Rosenberg, Romina Wainberg, Alexander Wilson, Corey McCall, and Germán Sierra will focus on the following themes:
-Transgression and the Posthuman
Is there a specifically posthuman position on transgression? How does it differ from other conceptions of the transgressive or perversion (Bataille, Badiou, Lacan)?
-Philosophy and Transgressive Fiction
Xenoerotics as a springboard for considering other writers of transgressive fiction, such as Gary Shipley, Elle Nash, Charlene Elseby, Tom Bland, and the broader issue of transgression, horror, eroticism and the posthuman.
-Realism, Posthumanism, and Horror
Xenoerotics explores a range of issues familiar to those who followed the debates around 21st century philosophical realism: the withdrawal or autonomy of the real, the idea that of realism in mathematics - e.g. the cardinality of the set theoretical universe overwhelmingly exceeding the cardinality of our means of representing it.
-Disconnection and non-relation
Excerpts:
Edited and directed by Zak Ferguson, this video accompanies the release of David Roden's collection of Fiction/Theory-Fiction, Xenoerotics with Schism[2] on September 8th 2023.
The Marquis de Sade enters the decimal labyrinth and is immediately intoxicated by the smell of a rotten rose. The Medieval meets the posthuman on the operating table and a hooded woman listlessly drains you for some last scrap of pleasure. “It will be just you and me and a blunt instrument.” We are all bored with our biology, but unable to escape the eros-thanatos skinsuit. Roden’s scrawls from some distant outpost are like the tortured pornography of monks and philosophers, minds addled by abstraction, but labouring ever onwards in shrouds of grey meat. As do we all!
—Nina Power
Sensation carries information, and through extreme sensation one can acquire an abject, alien knowledge – a wholly unique disease of faith. Tracing the symbols with your finger, accept from trepanned skull hallucination alighting synapse, to stir your loins and embolden your endocrine. “In truth, I only ever wanted to be vermin.” The story is a hole (O); a place to be buried in. Containment for the sheer sacs of us. Language blooms and coats us, making our skins visible, for what else would we be without? Here, in Roden’s cities, eroticism is a map, nouns as sex as chrysalis – a space from which to emerge permanently altered and forever unrecognizable.
—B. R. Yeager
A dialectic between the abstract and the absurd. Roden aggressively refuses to provide any relief through emotionality. A fully detached perspective on humanity’s demise with the ascension of the posthuman (i.e., extinction).
—Charlene Elsby
One way to read this story collection is to find its methodology in the work itself, as Roden says, “bukkake holocaust deep, interiorized, so when the load is shot, he’ll chain toxic shocks, vesicles bursting like pomegranates.” It is a work of deep readability, perversion, delirium, gothic romance and posthuman mutation, this is the weird fiction your mother warned you about.
—Tom Bland