“Life is a body ripe for viruses. To be flesh and blood is problematic, I thought. To be stuck in your skin, to be merely entrails in a skin and then, having given your skin up to medicine, to no longer have that skin to yourself, to be forever hidden away behind a body, and the functional extremities of the heart, neurons, and immune system in which it begins and ends, like a knot that cannot be undone, binding us to a plot larger than ourselves–a plot where we are bound to our own body as others are bound to their bodies.”
― Metapatterning for Disconnection
― Metapatterning for Disconnection
“The crisis of Humanism means that the structural others of the modern humanistic subject re-emerge with a vengeance in postmodernity (Braidotti, 2002). It is a historical fact that the great emancipatory movements of postmodernity are driven and fuelled by the resurgent ‘others’: the women’s rights movement; the anti-racism and de-colonization movements; the anti-nuclear and pro-environment movements are the voices of the structural Others of modernity. They inevitably mark the crisis of the former humanist ‘centre’ or dominant subject-position and are not merely anti-humanist, but move beyond it to an altogether novel, posthuman project.”
― The Posthuman
― The Posthuman
“The whole area was crowded with media-generated representations, holographic advertising inducing consumers to imagine that synthetic drugs would bring them good health, that cellular phones would break down the walls of isolation, and that vacations would restore the land and the ocean to them. They wanted consumers to console themselves with the idea that this paltry forgery, this fraudulent, counterfeit luxury surrounding them was really theirs to wallow in, that it existed, that it was real, atmospherically. In whatever direction I looked, the city appeared more and more deserted, the surroundings more desolate, and I was overcome by an unbearable sense of loneliness.”
― Metapatterning for Disconnection
― Metapatterning for Disconnection
“Nature doesn’t appear. It doesn’t appear in the overarching patterns of patterns, not in spheres, sheets, tubes, borders-pores, layers, binaries, centres, calendars-time, arrows, breaks, or cycles, and it does not appear when you consider other metapatterns such as gradients, clusters, voids-space, rigidity, emergence, webs-networks, or triggers. The vague notion of nature as a way of exploring the fundamental connectedness of the phenomenal world is useless. All nature is useless to me except as a science. Nature ends with the word science in the same way that language ends with the word God .”
― Metapatterning for Disconnection
― Metapatterning for Disconnection
“The emphasis on empathy accomplishes several significant goals in view of a posthuman theory of subjectivity. Firstly, it reappraises communication as an evolutionary tool. Secondly, it identifies in emotions, rather than in reason, the key to consciousness.”
― The Posthuman
― The Posthuman
Jesse’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jesse’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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Art, History, Horror, Manga, Non-fiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology, Science fiction, and Thriller
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