Trees do not exist: nobody has ever seen one. We see something we identify and name as “a tree,” but what we call a tree is always something else than what we assume. Suppose we touch the tree instead of staring at it: free from its twofold visual enclosure – from its numeric and objectual…
Author: polymorph
Humanity and Cannibalism as Problematic Notions // S&C
The crocodile-man from Papua New Guinea whom you see on the picture below is more similar to a crocodile than to any other “human” living in a nearby community. In turn, this cat-man from the Amazon rainforest is more similar to a jaguar than to any other “human” living in a nearby community. Finally, this…
Animism as a Question of Bodies and Logical Paradoxes // Carlos
There are two possible definitions of animism. The most widespread one turns around notions of projection and belief. Briefly, it states that we project onto animals, plants, rocks, and natural phenomena human qualities which these things lack like, for example, consciousness, intentionality, and agency. According to this definition, set forth by Hume and popularised by…
Life’s Autopoietics and Sympoietics // Sofya
This world, the same for all things, did none of the gods or men make, but it always was, is, and shall be an ever-living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures Heraclitus, Fr. 30 They (Empedocles and Anaxagoras) assert that everything is mixed in everything, because they saw everything arises out of…
On Sade // Carlos
I. Which Sade? It is quite easy to ignore Sade(*). One just needs to place his writings on the shelf of psychosexual deviations. And yet it is only inexactly that Sade is called a pornographer. Pornologist might be a better term. But then again, this term, too, tells us very little – if it tells…
When the World is Nothing but Dust // Sofya
A Question of Mentality Mentality is what makes people see, accept, and think some things conceivable, but not others. It is the basis of people’s thought, something they do not question—the condition of possibility of their ideas and actions. What is modern mentality? It is, among other things, what allows deforestation and the extinction of…
Death through Music // Sofya
I have never experienced anyone’s death. Fortunately none of my relatives or friends have died and I have neither seen nor felt people dying. Before listening to the fourteenth and last fugue in Bach‘s incomplete The Art of the Fugue, published posthumously in 1751(*), I could understand, but never experience, someone’s death. And then with…
Asking “Why” with Albert Camus // Sofya
It is not easy to commit suicide. One clings to life even if it is unbearable. One wants to preserve oneself, and can only commit suicide if one is already dead. When one is no longer oneself, one cannot continue living, one must jump out of oneself transforming into something else—or die. Life can never…
The Outside of Thought // Carlos
It is not only that attempting to write while lacking a certain degree of sensitivity is not possible at all. But that writing is, we may say, a sensitivity event. Yet there is no sensitivity but towards the Other – for sameness moves, instead, to recognition. Now, showing sensitivity towards anything means to let it…