Foreign Objekt presents a book reading and panel discussion for David Roden's newly published book, Snuff Memories (Schism Press: 2021), which took place on March 7th, 2021.
Panelists included: David Roden, Amanda Beech, Martin Rosenberg, Romina Wainberg, Corey McCall, and Simon Sellars.
Link to presentations:
In David Roden’s Snuff Memories, an ancient time-war ripples through a demon-haunted cosmos as its characters systematically expunge their humanity. Their ‘posthuman becoming’ pre-empts any possible ethics or sane politics. Instead, desire is weaponized from a bleak, inhuman future. Bodies replicate and unzip across the novella’s pornographic vignettes, remade in erotic rituals of mutation, death, and pain.
Snuff Memories explores themes common to the discourses of New Realism, Posthumanism, Accelerationism, and Weird fiction: the cultivation of general intellect, the storming of heaven, our complicity with alien intelligences and uncontrollable technologies, the possibility of an ethics of ‘becoming inhuman’ in a world without transcendental norms.
In this seminar eight contemporary thinkers and writers--Amanda Beech, Steven Shaviro, Martin Rosenberg, Romina Wainberg, Corey McCall, Simon Sellars, and MOUTH (Edia Connole & Scott Wilson)--consider the themes and questions thrown up by the novella in dialogue with its author.
Resources:
Interviews and short articles:
Tom Bland’s Interview with David Roden at Spontaneous Poetics
Blog post at posthumans.org THE DEATH OF POSTHUMAN LIFE: AN INTRODUCTION TO "SNUFF MEMORIES" (NEW BOOK)
Speculative Posthumanism, from The Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, Bloomsbury Press, 2018.
David Roden, Letters from the Ocean Terminus , Dis Magazine, 2016.
Music
About the Author:
David Roden’s research has addressed the relationship between deconstruction and analytic philosophy, philosophical naturalism, the metaphysics of sound and posthumanism. His monograph Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (New York, 2014) explores the ethical and epistemological ramifications of Speculative Posthumanism: the thesis that there could be agents originating in human social-technical systems that become posthuman as a result of some technological alteration of their powers. His current work considers posthumanist theories of agency and their implications for aesthetics and philosophical method. Roden also writes experimental fiction and concept horror works. His experimental novella SnuffMemories is published by Schism Press (2021).
He teaches at the Open University, U.K.