Slime Dynamics

by Ben Woodard

Despite humanity s gradual ascent from clustered pools of it, slime is more often than not relegated to a mere residue the trail of a verminous life form, the trace of decomposition, or an entertaining synthetic material thereby leaving its generative and mutative associations with life neatly removed from the human sphere of thought and existence. Arguing that slime is a viable physical and metaphysical object necessary to produce a realist bio-philosophy void of anthrocentricity, this text explores naturephilosophie, speculative realism, and contemporary science; hyperbolic representations of slime found in the weird texts of HP Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; as well as survival horror films, video games, and graphic novels, in order to present the dynamics of slime not only as the trace of life but as the darkly vitalistic substance of life.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Horror, Science, Ecology, Biology

84 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 2012

Reviews

[0 · Rating 2 out of 5]

With a lack of punctuation and formatting, a prevalence of run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and technical terms, and references and quotations without contextualization or interpretation, the book reads like slam poetry, but I managed to understand about half of it. I feel like the author finished typing up the first draft a few minutes before it was due and submitted it without reading it? And no one else read it before it was published?

An outgrowth of the "dark" "speculative realism" thing, so expect lovecraft, ligotti, thacker, negarestani, harman, grant, brassier, schelling, deleuze, bergson, merleau-ponty, etc

The general thesis seems to be that the "slimy" forms of life--molds, fungi, viruses, bacteria, and amoeba--are archetypes of a form of capital-l Life that lacks thought, and thus poses a challenge to the correlation of thought and being that is central to post-kantian metaphysics. Slimy life is alien, impersonal, amorphous, multiple, and primordial--and these characteristics evoke in us humans an existential horror, because they reveal Life (and by extension, our own lives) to be guided by blind and unconscious biological drives, rather than by lofty ethical or philosophical ideals. The concluding chapter suggests that conceptualizing Life as a function of entropy, and conceptualizing entropy as equivalent to a cosmological death drive, allows for a psychoanalysis of Nature. In more concrete terms, woodward is proposing that history is an ongoing process of decay that emanates from an originary unity that was the universe prior to the big bang. From this nucleic zero-point, time and space bloom outward in a constantly accelerating explosion. If the expansion of the universe can be said to be its life drive, we can also say that its accelerating expansion outward is also its death drive, since the universe will eventually rip itself apart in heat death. Following this, Woodward cautions us against nihilism, that equates life's sliminess with meaningless, since doing so opens the doors to fascism and biopolitics. Instead, Woodward suggests that life is "not even meaningless"--in the face of thought's supersession by slime, nihilism itself becomes a meaningless position.

But so what? Life might be slimy in many aspects, but life is also fuzzy and scaly and feathered. Life's diversity precludes its reduction to slime. Slime can only ever be a metonym for Life. Life contains slimy elements, and these are worth analyzing, but that doesn't negate the analysis of its more solid and ornate organs, which constitute another level of meaning that deserve their own analysis. It's important to ground phenomenology in natural history (because nature cannot be reduced to our image of it), but human consciousness and "Nature" remain irreducible to each other, precisely because "nature" is such a vague and all-encompassing word that elides the diversity of living and non-living things.

[Ştefan Tiron · Rating 4 out of 5]

[[Was not able to jot down my thoughts on it, but that time has finally come. If I am to agree with other reviewers, I would have to keep a blind eye to my own abysmal editing of Temporal Divergence and Cosmic Drift. So no complaints about typos. Good that I cannot or will not review my own book. I am all for systematicity, since my own instincts struggle with it and yet most of the time trying to find a clear path among the ferocious brambles of speculative theory fiction/SF fabulation defeats the purpose. I enjoyed the lacunae as well as the conceptual splits, nor was I deranged by an overwrought style, with my own checkered past and unnecessary terminological excess in mind.]]

So, *Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life*, a slim 80+ page volume, is worthwhile reading. More of an extended essay, and even out of Corona context, it's a welcome mindfuck. Ben Woodard's tome is an early ZerO Books snapshot, born in the throes of new materialism, OOO, the ontological turn, a certain rekindled appetite for metaphysics, speculative realism & horror of philosophy (explored by Jane Bennett, Meillasoux, Negarestani, Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker, Nicola Masciandaro, Steven Shaviro and others). It is prescient in its embrace of the putrescent & contagious and all things 'biological' that came to rule our quarantined days. It is biophilosophical as such and not a tract on the philosophy of biological. Coming out of the various strains of non-correlationist thinking, it is an early, formative publication by a contemporary thinker whose involvement with natural history keeps on tracking conceptual clusters & updating a philosophy that kept itself too long at bay from evolving biological ideas. B Woodard's texts are unavoidable for anybody interested even rhe slightest in these things. It makes a good untimely visit (or revisit) now, especially after the hype over 'speculative realism' is generally over.

On two accounts I consider Ben Woodard's work important. First, from the standpoint of his familiarity and embrace of a whole plethora of weird and new weird literature, his unapologetic and almost relentlessly geeky - sticky ontological (?!) attitude towards all sorts of dirty media, no matter how remote trashy, be it over -theorized or not expunged from the canon. Secondly, these dumpster 'horrorisms' (from gaming, horror B movies fare, comics etc) are being stalked in a shambling lock-step by a whole gamut of Continental philosophy and Naturphilosophie + (more recently) ungainly(for me) and undigestible oddities such as the British Idealists. This includes a monography (which does not seem to be out yet, although finished) situating Francis Herbert Bradley at the very origins of that primordial split of Analytic vs Continental schools via monism & pluralism.

The Creep of Life - takes a cue both from Negarestani as well as Stephen J Gould.
I must say I never read Cyclonopedia by Negarestani, although his influence has been nearly ubiquitous in many quarters & given the proper treatment elsewhere, while for me S J Gould has been important on a personal level. He's a truly formative influence on some of my earliest biological and natural history musings, so I'm always curious about any potential Gouldian cross overs. I was keen on a work that promises to juxtapose these incompatible, maybe even incompossible forces.
Woodard's 'Dark Vitalism' - is a child of both lovecraftian radical openness (in fact he makes Lovecraft feel quite coy) toward unbearable outside dimensions (apud Negarestani). A radical opening that invites invasiveness, quartering, fostering and hosting the alien - as well as taking full advantage of how systematically Darwinism dispels any trace of human excepționalism & sense of purpose. Even a radical contingency as that of Meillasoux, the non-teleological keeps a lingering anthropocentrism, so Woodard makes sure any taxonomic superiority and upper level inevitability has to go. Evolutionary replays will not end up with the same or any kind of intelligence valorizing biped, math or no math. Against any vertebrate-centric or multicellular-centric view, S Gould, a Marxist paleontologist & naturalist, kept encouraging these views from the below - always disdainful & ridiculing our airs of superiority in regard to 'humble' Monera. This 'low' bacterial dimension, a planetary microbiome that extends in all directions, became protoplasmic base reality (something else than just the impeding doom of pathogenicity) -moving slowly into quorum sensing limelight, one that Gould would have undoubtedly recognized.

For Woodard the critical distance from strict adaptionism, Panglossian radical selectionism & selfish genocentrism peddled by the neo-Darwinian apostles (prominently Richard Dawkins), germinates what S J Gould seeded, stemming from a vast, historically grounded encyclopedic knowledge of evolutionary ideas as well as faulty humanism. The many byways of natural history amd geology are explored - in order to make sure many racist pseudo-sciences & faulty methodologies don't get a second chance (phrenology, IQ testing etc that informed eugenic immigration policies in the US etc). This prepares one for tackling any socio biological vagaries, whatever one-sided if well intentioned Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge epistemic fraternization might promise us, or whatever circular 'just so' stories of the day might become institutionalized as evolutionary psychology trivia.

Slime Dynamics does not trace what I just mentioned, and maybe better so, since it is tracking some more rare, viscous and opaque protoplasm - the one that tends to be avoided even by the best of biologically- literate philosophers (the usual French suspects: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty or Deleuze). It is as if thinking about living thought gets obscured, killed at birth, muddled whenever brought down in the mud it came from, just the minute it gets reminded where its mindfulness oozes from.

In a time of lacking transparency, of dodgy accountability, when black-boxed (and quite racistic) AIs become existential threats and discrimination machines, this 'darkness' might seem completely out of tune. Corona Pandemics, fake news, and G Agamben letters of biopolitical conservatism, 'dark vitalism' itself feels somewhat unnecessary, an exaggerated excess of - Lebensphilosophical - mystification. Here 'darkness' - does not equal obscurantist add-ons to obfuscate even more & multiply existing misunderstandings, it does not inflame anti-scientific pathos with more or less misplaced mistrust in sometimes imperfect yet badly needed biomedical advances. Maybe this are all very obvious, still its better to spell them out.
First things first, Slime Dynamics is steeped in the purposelessness of evolutionary drift, it is abiogenesis - friendly even when discussing outrageous panspermia, and it is clearly familiar with experiments/scientific theories or the historical significance of discovering deep time. This possibility to think beyond the biotic dimension & into unthinking anorganic origins of life keeps on overflowing, forever unsettling our relation to pure data & mere science reports. Slime Dynamics always enjoys using biologically informed horror in order to both update & degrade philosophy and dissolve the anti-biology inhibitors that have plagued phenomenology and Continental or Critical thought in general. It ultimately takes the obscene results and cool research data of science to their ultimate, unflattering devastating conclusions. In order to dispel this 'darkness' of the dark I am quoting the threefold aspects that Ben Woodard attributes to this new (deep time inflected) mostly unwanted vitalism:

"1. It is dark because it is obscured both by nature (who is to say that we can divine and comprehend the details of the universe from our limited brains) and by time (we are at a temporal disadvantage in trying to discern the creation of all things) since the cause of most of the nature we know has fallen back into the deep past.

2. It is dark because it spells bad news for the human race in terms of our origins (we are just clever monkeys that emerged as a result of a series of biological and cosmological lucky breaks), our meaning (we are just meat puppets based on our construction), and our ultimate fate (Earth will die and we will probably perish if not with it then eventually with the universe).

3. It is dark on an aesthetic and experiential level our psychosocial and phenomenological existence is darkened and less friendly to us, and our perceptions, given the destructiveness of time and space."

Viruses and epidemiology play an important place in Slime Dynamics and spell out some of the most unsettling truths we have since come to loath, but can never ever again ignore (with the inception/global expanse of the Corona Pandemic). It is almost too close to home now that a very simple event of disease spillover, of outside contagion teaches us something the hard way about either complexity or basic simplicity - what medical under-development and patent trolling brings under capitalism to fruition.

Mushrooms and the fungoid also play an important role in Slime Dynamics, and I might say this is my favorite part since most of the newer The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins valuable additions tend to skip the central disgust associated with the undergrowth, the eminently -putrescient- slithering of hyphae or even the unavoidable weird (speculative lit) aspects that subtend it. In particular, space-time for Woodard is always warped along fungal apparitions - contrasting it with the networked contagion ("time overcoming space), the amorphousness and formlessness of fungal life is that of "the spatial overcoming time", dragging life below ground, making it reliant upon down-trodden, plentiful disaggregation, almost addicted on the inorganic.

Slime Dynamics comes as good critical reminder of classical (altough contemporary xenobiology seems to have evolved) teleological attachments, its unimaginative program of 'intelligent' contact out there, its ignorance of the extremophilic non sapient possibilities out here. Slime Dynamics makes a fungus thriving inside a Chernobyl sarcophagus a much better candidate for sentient alien contact at home as well as outside of the bounds of our evolutionary bland & stationary 'pinnacle' position.
I think Naturphilosophie gas waited much too long for a comeback, and that Fichte and Schelling in their liminal situation btw Kant and Hegel may act like a philosophic slime-mold, a composite multi-phase creature or answer to the Kantian-Blumenbachian program that can be many things at once, or one unified thing at different times.
Slime Dynamics takes an important cue from H Grant making Nature After Schelling as contemporary a thing as any nowadays, not just by mere retro academic 'recovery' but by extending & activating 'power metaphysics' overall. Ben Woodard is well able to critically siphon out any romantic excess of Schelling - without jettisoning the precedence Schelling gave to base nature over thinking, as well as him being well aware of how intelligence (or better sapience) has been preserved apart from an inescapable basic materiality that keeps clinging to our angel wings. A clinging hodologic mucus not be confused with a pre-packaged and regurgitated as fixed 'human nature'.
A neo-Schellingian vibe lures our attention towards the net forces operating on environments, bodies and especially on thought as explored by another relatively forgotten German Naturphilosoph - Kielmeyer. Schelling is critical of vitalism because of his aesthetic romantic leanings, because 'vitalism' per se seems to entail something contradictory to him, almost feet in the sky, unopposed by any equal force, just forever exhaustive matter. Schelling thus appears to have been priming us for 'dissipative structures' - for riding vortices as the Russian-Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine thaught us. Maybe we have here the same 'aesthetic' engagement that seriously considered totality as a conjunction of opposing forces, of intensities & contrasts also vital in - A N Whitehead's cosmological scheme, as he also came to appreciate the Romantics, beside his interest in metaphysics & history of science. To me, although Whitehead never mentions any specific German Naturphilosoph but only their British poet- adepts, he seems to qualify 'eternal darkness' in manner quite close to Schelling as "an environment of vagueness stretching into the darkness of what is merely beyond".

What i miss from Woodard's examples are maybe hints of an eastern ex Socialist SF slime - as the DDR movie Der Schweigende Stern 1960 loosely based on Stanislaw Lem's The Astronauts. During the the shoots it apparently used up the whole country's whole supply of glue. These tons of glue were used to simulate a post apocalyptic Venusian surface. This civilizational residue of muck overflows everything, a preview warning of the ultimate no-return extinction, if we would choose to follow the same path of megadeath militarism & weaponized science.


But let's see how Woodard keeps on smearing ardently cleaned paths from this history of philosophy with a necessary creepiness that is of great benefit, so I better leave him the last word:

"The material being of humans, and of all life is a slimy one. Slime is the smudge of reality, the remainder and reminder of the fact that things fall apart. The shining path of humanity is only ever the verminous - like the trail of our own oozing across time and space - the trace and proof of our complete sliminess trough and trough."

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would love to give this work a higher rating, but its flaws fault the thought far too much, as I shall elaborate below. First of all, I must say that Woodard has put in the thought and work, and the fundamental theme of a base and degraded, yet monstrous, material reality qua Urschleim which ruptures and rends open temporality beyond any anthrotopic time-scale is facinating and benefitial for inhumanist thought. Unfortunately, this work suffers from a number of faults which mar not only the expression, but the thought itself.

The first of these is the means of conveying the thought. At its filthy roots, this work is an amalgamation of Grant's work on Schelling cobbled together with the infectious dustism of Negarestani's Cyclonopedia (though shorn of its Middle Eastern, heretical Druj-element which perverts and corrupts not only the divine, but everything that takes up its vacant space in our secular world) and an unhealthy number of references to horror genre media. This would be much more valuable if Woodard spent more time elaborating on the thought conveyed by these elements, and how he weaves them into the mutational slime of his topic. Instead, Woodard tends to favor large block quotations with little to no elaboration upon why they are being excised from their origins and grafted onto this little monster of a text. A rookie writing error, which I certainly hope Woodard has overcome in the intervening years and with the publication of his dissertation on Schelling.

The other major fault of this work lies in the writing itself. This book is littered with typographical and grammatical errors, missing words and incomplete thoughts that seem to have been changed mid-sentence, still bearing the trace of this altered expression. Early on this made reading rather irksome, but it quickly makes for a distraction that fatally taints the experience of reading and thinking. I am surprised that Zero books would publish such an obviously unedited piece of work (it is blatantly clear that not a single pair of eyes glanced at the manuscript before sending it to the printer). Were I Woodard, I would return to correct such a public stain upon my name - is it carelessness, or has the morass of time rendered the point moot for the man? Or maybe it plays right in to his morbid fascination with being "dark" and "grotesque." While Negarestani made such a move seem less immature and vain, Woodard only comes off as an angsty grad student who finally found someone to take his Lovecraftian obsession seriously in the Speculative Realist movement or moment. Again, hopefully he has outgrown this neurosis (coming from one who is haunted by reflections on death and absence).

If you are interested in the topic I would look to Cyclonopedia, as well as Grant's book on Schelling and his essay "Being and Slime" (which alleviates Woodard's book of its apparent originality in subject matter).

[Aaron Zimmerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slime Dynamic is a fun little meditation on the ontological, epistemological, biological and metaphysical roots of slime. Whether it be the microbial, the viral, the fungal, or the horror of the unknowable extraterrestrial, Woodard illustrates the notion of slime as the prima materia through which all life perpetually oozes in a pathological, random and meaningless flow trapped in the unendurable prison of the accident of consciousness and the spatio-temporality it misguidedly constructs meaning around.

Using a mash up of hard science, philosophy, science and horror fiction to illustrate his points, Woodard's perspective is wickedly savage in it's debunking of the anthropocentrism so commonly used to justify mankind's flawed view of itself in the universe. Quoting sources as varied as F.W.J. von Schelling, Slavoj Zizek, Freud, H.P. Lovecraft, and drawing on films like Alien, Outbreak, and Resident Evil, Woodard steps outside the ordinary confines of academic writing to deliver a tome as culturally saavy as it is scholarly and as humorously enlightened as it is sardonically nihilistic.

You will giggle with malicious glee if you delight as much as I do in the grotesque, anti-everything perspective Woodard lays bare in the pages of 'Slime Dynamics'.

Also of note is the value of publisher Zero Books who support perspectives as wonderfully outside the mainstream as Woodard's. From their mission statement: "Contemporary culture has eliminated the concept and public figure of the intellectual. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheered by hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their stupor. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse - intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist - is not only possible: it is already flourishing. Zer0 is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before."

[Sam]

Whose mans is this? Someone proofread their mans.

[Willy Boy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good Luck With This - you are probably more intelligent than me and so will get more out of it, me, it went right over my head. I was disappointed, I have to say. Just an unfortunate mismatch - a cerebral creature of brilliant light bumping into a hairy smelly ape.

What I really wanted was a Social History Of Slime, with reference to popular culture, the great slime year of '88, when Madballs vomitted gouts of luminous gunk, when He-Man was held prone while a bird-like or dinosaur skull similarly ejected goo all over him. The viscous days of youth. Let us draw back the slime-veils to consider the ectoplasmic projections of spiritualism, flash forward a while later, the magical palace of dreams, the cinema, held among it's most prestigious attractions a young girl, who sprayed green goo on priests - so potent an image, it was deemed to filthy to be seen in private houses for several decades.

Enough about the primal slime from whence we came and ejaculating women - a guide to Slime Film is what is called for, with Toxic Avengers, Green Doors and Ghostbusters II's vision of psychoactive pink goop flowing through the sewers - 'Dust to dust', they say - no, Slime eternal.

From the foregoing 'review', you will determine that Mr Woodward's text is likely a worthwhile and serious work, and my inability to get to grips with it is down to my generally peurile mindset.

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admire what Woodard was aiming for here, but the stodgy exposition and wearying gluts of jargon fail to deliver the payload as explosively as this essay could and should have – i.e. Spinoza’s Ethics by way of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

As for the atrocious copyediting of the print edition, I’ll give Zero Books the benefit of the doubt and assume it was a spoofy meta-trope – the ur-grammatical undulations of slime squeezing through the pores of the galley-proofs to enmold and putrefy Woodard’s oozing syntax.

I mean, what do you think, Moose?

“Jeez, I don’t know.”

[Leftjab · Rating 3 out of 5]

My bathroom tub/shower grows mold. I've bleached, cleaned, pretty much whatever I can do to try to combat the mold, but no matter what it will still continue to grow - maybe it's the chemicals in the water or the chemicals in the soaps - the residue left after showering. No matter what, in the grout, in the caulk around the tub, over time, eventually, mold will begin. I've found great new ways to clean the caulk - bleach mixed with baking soda makes it look as good as new - but in the end, the mold triumphs.

I mention this because the gist of the book could be summed up in that we all come from slime, so slime it what we are. Thinking slime. The oldest forms of life on earth - variations of bacteria - are forms of slime. I guess the author is trying to say - don't look at slime as gross because that's what you are. Sure, he dresses it up with some thinkers on the modern end of things - Deleuze, etc. - and then this also falls into the Lovecraft being recognized as not just a horror prose stylist but also having some philosophical implications in his creatures and things that cannot be imagined. I'm not slagging on Lovecraft because, hey, I read Slime Dynamics and In the Dust of This World and I like his fiction - I'm just saying he's fallen into vogue among the thinkers, and maybe the vogue is making more of what he was saying than what he was actually saying.

Maybe it's just me. I do recognize that when there is talk of life on Europa or the remnants of life on Mars - all based around water and our idea of carbon based life forms - what these things are are basically microbial bacteria type life forms - slime essentially. So yes, Woodard is right - maybe we shouldn't see slime as gross and in recognizing that we are all slime, then, I don't know, maybe we can see that our differences are inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Slime is what we were, and as we die and decay, slime is what we become. And Lovecraft's focusing on the viscousness of things - many of his creatures come bathed in slime - shows that he was unafraid to face those aspects of existence that are universal to life. Though he was afraid of lots of other things...

Once the author starts getting into Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty and Reza Negarestani (whose Cyclonopedia is one of the strangest, most difficult works of "fiction" or whatever it is I have ever attempted to read) my bachelor's degree in film finds itself out of its depth. But then again, sometimes those writers seem to be writing for the sake of writing, rather than really illuminating anything substantial. But then again, I'm out of my depth.

[6655321 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't tell if Ben Woodard suffers from not being able to develop ideas or poorly understanding how to communicate them. His introductions are always somewhat gripping and then they lead to the disappointment of his chapters. Often he just does things that are usually corrected out of writers in their later college experience, if not graduate school or the writers market. This includes: an over-reliance on citation (assuming that a quote simply *TELLS* the reader all they need to know rather than necessitating *telling his reader why this is important*. Additionally, there is an assumption that his reader is equally familiar with the media that he utilizes to explain theoretical points. In some sense, the writing is disjointed because it flows something like: (larger theoretical point) > (quote from fairly esteemed horror philosopher) > (less than 2 sentences devoted to explicating the Zerg or Resident Evil or Warhammer Mythos or a Horror Story) which does not ever really come to fruition because he thinks things flows because he considers his reader to be himself so *of course all of this makes sense*. His project would be interesting (i gave 3 stars to his other book on the potential for a good idea here) and i think Dark Vitalism is something that needs developed but *he seems singularly incapable of doing this*. As a finally nitpick: please never cite Michel Houellebecq and especially his poetry for the sake of YOUR FUCKING READER. I honestly hoped this project would be better honed because there is something *really worth doing here* and my disappointment is honestly painful in going through this text.

[Brian_roesler · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the continuing tradition of pop-philosophy that has been deeply influenced by horror fiction maestros Ligotti and Lovecraft, Slime Dynamics (poor editing aside) is a breezy, light read that exemplifies in some fashion, Zero Books capacity as a publishing house. Where else could someone get away with talking about Dead Space, Parasite Eve, and other associated media in a relatively serious philosophical effort?

The core thesis of Slime Dyanmics, centered around breaking down and developing the tenants of a "Dark Vitalism" are accurately conveyed here, if not sometimes constrained by odd media references. It's at the same time that I myself, feel joy in understanding a reference to Alien or Warhammer 40,000 that makes me smirk in some capacity.

References aside, this is a philosophical treatise of concept, but not necessarily execution. It sits perfectly fine alongside contemporaries like Eugene Thacker, but never managed to cultivate the same thoughtful provocations. What is here though, is worth reading especially if the concepts of a nihilism beyond nihilism, illustrated through the alien aesthetic of biology itself appeals to you.

[melancholinary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rather meandering with many references that I find unnecessary (there is a part where all of sudden one of the worst archeological horror film The Ruins is mentioned for only one sentence) and as many have pointed out; hard to read due to the lack of editing. Would love to read more of speculative naturphilosophie as an external rendition of the mind rather than further engaging interiority through psychoanalysis. However, I like the idea of thinking ethic as an inhuman form—an ethic that comes from the notion of human as an animal.

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

I understand zero books is a bit of a boys club where showing off your vocabulary and how deeply you’ve read all the big Frankfurt school names is par for the course, but there does need to be some substance to your book.

Also, it’s possible to reject anthropocentrism without devolving into childish nihilism. (Nitpicking of the term ‘nihilism’ in a philosophical context is one thing, but are you going to argue that asserting that all life is nothing but slime speaking to itself is not nihilistic?)

[NN · Rating 2 out of 5]

As many reviewers have commented already, very fertile subject matter that is occasionally brought to fruition by Woodard, but overall gets sucked into the muck by absolutely atrocious structuring and editing.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am tempted to call this study a slime salad. "Word salad" would be more appropriate in most cases, but since it's a book about slime

[Katrinka]

No idea how to rate this one; potentially interesting, but it was so terribly edited, I got tripped up quite a bit. Haven't seen a book in such bad need of copyediting in a long time.

[rita 🐊 · Rating 1 out of 5]

me when the essay deadline is in 5 hours and i need to reach my word count

[Ivy Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

My real rating is 3.5 stars.

This books is full of interesting ideas that are, genuinely, very much worth reading about and engaging with. Unfortunately, a big chunk of it gets lost in convoluted writing and egregious copyediting errors. Though I can't fault the author for my lack of familiarity with so many philosophical concepts and thinkers (which I believe his intended audience would know and understand a lot better than I do), I do think his writing doesn't help things. The book lacks a clear throughline as Woodard's arguments often feel like they jump around, making the message very difficult to follow. A majority of the fictional examples he uses help ground his ideas and usually make the book much easier to digest, but in some cases they distract from the point he's trying to make. To end on a positive note, Woodard did, ultimately, convert me to the idea that meaning is, more often than not, a prison and that understanding "life as merely life" is liberating. Credit where credit is due.

[Aksel Dadswell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I got a lot out of this work in retrospect and have many questions and avenues of inquiry, but I’m also incredibly frustrated. There are some great points and interesting ideas in here but they’re generally buried under that obfuscating style that seems to be the go-to for some (annoyingly, most) academic writers, and an absolutely infuriating lack of editing or proof-reading. The number of errors and clunky sentences made my brain bleed and coupled with the author’s propensity for discussing some complex ideas in an incomprehensible and somewhat rushed way, I wondered what point was trying to be made or conclusion arrived at, thus rendering a lot of interesting theories a bit flat. This could have been a fascinating and original work (which it often had moments of, with its discussion of a variety of interesting texts covering both fiction and theory, and Woodard’s own conclusions) but was ultimately let down by its lack of polish. I want more of the ideas presented here, just written in a more engaging way and with a much better editor. Academic writing can be hard enough with needless errors peppered throughout.

[R Montague · Rating 4 out of 5]

Straightforward language, makes for a fairly easy read. More of the recent trend in philosophy aimed at overcoming the Kantian impasse through explorations of horror. Ben Woodard takes his starting place with the beginnings of life: In slime.

By looking at the ways in which the virus, the fugus, and the swarm all contribute to inspire acute bodily horror, and the ways in which Woodard thinks that will help us see our “selves” as bodies, rather than immaterial subject.

[Jorge Villarruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

No me queda claro si he leído un libro de ciencia o de filosofía. Lo que me queda claro es que el tema de la sustancia mucilaginosa que es la base de la vida, es interesantísimo.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful romp through slime, fungus, speculative realism and German Idealism. The readings of pop culture are especially insightful.