Richard Iveson
I am currently working on my third book with the working title ‘Kantian, Neural, Catalytic, Quantum: Feedback and Philosophies of Instant and Infinite Space’ (abstract below).
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In addition I am working on a shorter book project entitled 'Eater of Worlds: Loving the Inhuman' in which I address philosophies and ethics of emergent biotechnologies.
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Abstract: The initial heuristic impulse behind this text comes from two, very different directions: on one side, Albert Einstein’s dogmatic belief in the principle of contiguity and, on the other, Immanuel Kant’s category of community taking the form of disjunctive judgments, with Planck's constant functioning as the hinge that makes such articulation possible. While at first glance this focus likely appears rather esoteric, it quickly leads us into strange waters indeed - waters in which we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge as fundamental something that goes against everything we ever thought we knew. This can be traced back first to the restricted particle–wave duality known in early quantum mechanics as the quantum postulate, and from there to the unrestricted position–momentum relation that constitutes the ground from which the particle–wave duality is abstracted. However, while it is indeed necessary to begin at the quantum level of being, it is equally necessary to thereafter move beyond the quantum level so as to encompass all scales and all levels of being. What takes place on the scale of the quantum, in other words, takes place on all scales of being.
More generally, my research deals with time and contingency in relation to emergent technologies. Despite the recent opening up of contested ethical and political spaces in the wake of the collapsing of traditional boundaries separating human from animal, animal from machine, and machine from human, and despite the huge acceleration of technological innovation and often complementary fascination with the posthuman, the contingent and constructed opposition between the living body and the artificial object still today structures practically every aspect of existence. Starting from the necessary deconstruction of living-nonliving binary, my research explores - and hopefully facilitates - the emergence of complex and layered ‘posthuman’ spaces that bring into being innovative philosophical, ethical and political relationships that were previously unthinkable.
--
In addition I am working on a shorter book project entitled 'Eater of Worlds: Loving the Inhuman' in which I address philosophies and ethics of emergent biotechnologies.
--
Abstract: The initial heuristic impulse behind this text comes from two, very different directions: on one side, Albert Einstein’s dogmatic belief in the principle of contiguity and, on the other, Immanuel Kant’s category of community taking the form of disjunctive judgments, with Planck's constant functioning as the hinge that makes such articulation possible. While at first glance this focus likely appears rather esoteric, it quickly leads us into strange waters indeed - waters in which we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge as fundamental something that goes against everything we ever thought we knew. This can be traced back first to the restricted particle–wave duality known in early quantum mechanics as the quantum postulate, and from there to the unrestricted position–momentum relation that constitutes the ground from which the particle–wave duality is abstracted. However, while it is indeed necessary to begin at the quantum level of being, it is equally necessary to thereafter move beyond the quantum level so as to encompass all scales and all levels of being. What takes place on the scale of the quantum, in other words, takes place on all scales of being.
More generally, my research deals with time and contingency in relation to emergent technologies. Despite the recent opening up of contested ethical and political spaces in the wake of the collapsing of traditional boundaries separating human from animal, animal from machine, and machine from human, and despite the huge acceleration of technological innovation and often complementary fascination with the posthuman, the contingent and constructed opposition between the living body and the artificial object still today structures practically every aspect of existence. Starting from the necessary deconstruction of living-nonliving binary, my research explores - and hopefully facilitates - the emergence of complex and layered ‘posthuman’ spaces that bring into being innovative philosophical, ethical and political relationships that were previously unthinkable.
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Books by Richard Iveson
Introduction: Relative Reason [included]
Chapter 1: Ends of Life: Death of Socrates
Chapter 2: Ends of Nature: The Question Concerning Posthuman Technology
Chapter 3: Ends of the Future: Contingency and the Life of Machines
Chapter 4: Ends of Thought: Mad Times, Hyper-Chaos and Difference More Radical Than Différance
Chapter 5: End Times: Physics and Ignorance
Conclusion: Ends and Endings: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
Reviews:
"Encounters between human living, and other living entities, and between fictive and imaginary, Aristotelian and Cartesian animals are here staged with respect to competing notions of life and value, of writing and of literature. ...Richard Iveson reads a variety of sources with insight and discrimination, contributing highly effectively to this recently emergent and rapidly expanding new life form: zoogenesis" - Joanna Hodge, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, and author of Derrida on Time (2007).
"one of the most thorough and exhaustive treatments of philosophy's recent encounters with animality ... With both impressive scope and penetrating critique, Zoogenesis allows us to think through a comprehensive rearticulation of 'the human' in a radically subversive manner" - John Ó Maoilearca, Professor of Film Studies at Kingston University, London, and author of Postural Mutations: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy (2015).
Book chapters by Richard Iveson
If we are to understand how a certain “post-Derridean” deconstruction constitutes a fully materialist, antihumanist and posthumanist philosophical praxis, the fundamental dichotomy that remains to be challenged is between the living and the nonliving, that is, between the animate and the inanimate. Derrida, by contrast, deconstructs only the living-dead binary, that is, between the living and no longer living, while leaving intact the barrier between the living and the never or not yet living.
In fact, Derrida installs an unbridgeable abyss between the living and the nonliving when, in Of Grammatology, he posits a first “coup” which allows that being as such only appears with the emergence of life, synonymous with the emergence of the trace, thus leaving deconstruction susceptible to the charge of correlationalism as posited by Quentin Meillassoux. Put simply, for Derrida there is being, but no being as such, without a living being. However, as Martin Hägglund suggests, the trace continues to function whether there is life or not, and this, as will be shown here, has serious consequences not only for deconstruction, but for political and ethical questions as well. Indeed, this becomes clear once Derrida’s understanding of the trace is placed in dialogue both with Meillassoux’s notion of ancestrality and with Manuel DeLanda’s conception of the structure of the space of possibilities – a dialogue constituting a genuine posthumanist encounter between deconstruction and “object-orientated ontology.”
This paper begins by reviewing recent philosophies of technology (Heidegger, Simondon, Derrida, Stiegler, DeLanda), along with a summary of recent and anticipated technological advances focusing upon extremophiles, microscopic critters able to thrive in extremely hostile environments. Having previously evolved over eons, technoscience is now able to fabricate extremophiles within the laboratory, tasked most pressingly with dissolving – literally – imminent ecological crises that threaten to limit the expansion – i.e., the modus operandi – of global capitalism. The emergence of these ‘entities of extremes,’ in being both predicted and wildly unpredictable, here sets the stage for a deconstruction of the metaphysical binaries living-nonliving, living-artifice, and living-object – a move that is absolutely crucial to any account of who or what will ‘count,’ ethically and politically, as a posthuman being.
We must be very careful, however. Advanced capitalism also suspends any simplistic living-nonliving distinction in its insatiable quest for surplus value, such suspension permitting an unfettered instrumentalization in which the mode of a being’s existence is entirely discounted. Capitalism, however, presupposes a reduction of life to nonlife. By contrast, this paper proposes a deconstruction of the opposition in favor of a differential a priori relation of living-nonliving within and across every existent.
To consider extremophiles thus as ‘relations of technology’ is to approach a ‘wild’ proliferation of differences – a rigorously local ethics of physis and physics stripped of all vitalist residue. Above all, extremophile ways of being cast light on a planar continuum of existence that permits no hierarchical privileging, be it anthropocentric, zoocentric, geocentric or whatever – a flat ontology indeed. This does not, however, presuppose an ontological flattening in the sense that every existing thing is deemed to be of equal value to every other and thus, as a result, equally without value. In contrast to any such notion of universal exchange – the very foundations upon which the capitalist order of instrumentalization is constructed – to approach and be encroached by the ways and forms of extremophiles is to open potential relations through and as which the most radical of posthuman bodyings could possibly emerge.
Papers by Richard Iveson
Published as part of the Genealogy of the Posthuman project headed by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus at Critical Posthumanism (https://criticalposthumanism.net)
It can neither be overstated nor stated too often that the covert sleight of hand upon which humanist and vitalist ideologies depend is the very same dissimulation that makes possible unfettered instrumentalization on a truly grand scale. Put simply, it is only once we cease to draw lines of exclusion dividing life from its absence that instrumental exploitation in turn ceases to be possible. This, above all, is the story narrated by the lives and times of countless billions of extremophiles. As the determining order of reason definitive of the Anthropocene continues apace to reduce the entire postindustrial world to nothing more than a stockpile of instrumentalized resources, the recent history of extremophiles provides not only a cautionary tale but also a litmus test of possible and impossible futures insofar as who or what the extremophile is, and who or what he or she or it or they might become, remains always up for dispute. As the very matter of foundational collapse, as we shall see, what will be contested through these sites and these bodies is a battle for posthuman futures playing itself out in the arenas and laboratories of human privilege.
https://cafedissensus.com/2017/12/31/contents-humanimal-and-the-planet-earth-issue-41/
Introduction: Relative Reason [included]
Chapter 1: Ends of Life: Death of Socrates
Chapter 2: Ends of Nature: The Question Concerning Posthuman Technology
Chapter 3: Ends of the Future: Contingency and the Life of Machines
Chapter 4: Ends of Thought: Mad Times, Hyper-Chaos and Difference More Radical Than Différance
Chapter 5: End Times: Physics and Ignorance
Conclusion: Ends and Endings: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
Reviews:
"Encounters between human living, and other living entities, and between fictive and imaginary, Aristotelian and Cartesian animals are here staged with respect to competing notions of life and value, of writing and of literature. ...Richard Iveson reads a variety of sources with insight and discrimination, contributing highly effectively to this recently emergent and rapidly expanding new life form: zoogenesis" - Joanna Hodge, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, and author of Derrida on Time (2007).
"one of the most thorough and exhaustive treatments of philosophy's recent encounters with animality ... With both impressive scope and penetrating critique, Zoogenesis allows us to think through a comprehensive rearticulation of 'the human' in a radically subversive manner" - John Ó Maoilearca, Professor of Film Studies at Kingston University, London, and author of Postural Mutations: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy (2015).
If we are to understand how a certain “post-Derridean” deconstruction constitutes a fully materialist, antihumanist and posthumanist philosophical praxis, the fundamental dichotomy that remains to be challenged is between the living and the nonliving, that is, between the animate and the inanimate. Derrida, by contrast, deconstructs only the living-dead binary, that is, between the living and no longer living, while leaving intact the barrier between the living and the never or not yet living.
In fact, Derrida installs an unbridgeable abyss between the living and the nonliving when, in Of Grammatology, he posits a first “coup” which allows that being as such only appears with the emergence of life, synonymous with the emergence of the trace, thus leaving deconstruction susceptible to the charge of correlationalism as posited by Quentin Meillassoux. Put simply, for Derrida there is being, but no being as such, without a living being. However, as Martin Hägglund suggests, the trace continues to function whether there is life or not, and this, as will be shown here, has serious consequences not only for deconstruction, but for political and ethical questions as well. Indeed, this becomes clear once Derrida’s understanding of the trace is placed in dialogue both with Meillassoux’s notion of ancestrality and with Manuel DeLanda’s conception of the structure of the space of possibilities – a dialogue constituting a genuine posthumanist encounter between deconstruction and “object-orientated ontology.”
This paper begins by reviewing recent philosophies of technology (Heidegger, Simondon, Derrida, Stiegler, DeLanda), along with a summary of recent and anticipated technological advances focusing upon extremophiles, microscopic critters able to thrive in extremely hostile environments. Having previously evolved over eons, technoscience is now able to fabricate extremophiles within the laboratory, tasked most pressingly with dissolving – literally – imminent ecological crises that threaten to limit the expansion – i.e., the modus operandi – of global capitalism. The emergence of these ‘entities of extremes,’ in being both predicted and wildly unpredictable, here sets the stage for a deconstruction of the metaphysical binaries living-nonliving, living-artifice, and living-object – a move that is absolutely crucial to any account of who or what will ‘count,’ ethically and politically, as a posthuman being.
We must be very careful, however. Advanced capitalism also suspends any simplistic living-nonliving distinction in its insatiable quest for surplus value, such suspension permitting an unfettered instrumentalization in which the mode of a being’s existence is entirely discounted. Capitalism, however, presupposes a reduction of life to nonlife. By contrast, this paper proposes a deconstruction of the opposition in favor of a differential a priori relation of living-nonliving within and across every existent.
To consider extremophiles thus as ‘relations of technology’ is to approach a ‘wild’ proliferation of differences – a rigorously local ethics of physis and physics stripped of all vitalist residue. Above all, extremophile ways of being cast light on a planar continuum of existence that permits no hierarchical privileging, be it anthropocentric, zoocentric, geocentric or whatever – a flat ontology indeed. This does not, however, presuppose an ontological flattening in the sense that every existing thing is deemed to be of equal value to every other and thus, as a result, equally without value. In contrast to any such notion of universal exchange – the very foundations upon which the capitalist order of instrumentalization is constructed – to approach and be encroached by the ways and forms of extremophiles is to open potential relations through and as which the most radical of posthuman bodyings could possibly emerge.
Published as part of the Genealogy of the Posthuman project headed by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus at Critical Posthumanism (https://criticalposthumanism.net)
It can neither be overstated nor stated too often that the covert sleight of hand upon which humanist and vitalist ideologies depend is the very same dissimulation that makes possible unfettered instrumentalization on a truly grand scale. Put simply, it is only once we cease to draw lines of exclusion dividing life from its absence that instrumental exploitation in turn ceases to be possible. This, above all, is the story narrated by the lives and times of countless billions of extremophiles. As the determining order of reason definitive of the Anthropocene continues apace to reduce the entire postindustrial world to nothing more than a stockpile of instrumentalized resources, the recent history of extremophiles provides not only a cautionary tale but also a litmus test of possible and impossible futures insofar as who or what the extremophile is, and who or what he or she or it or they might become, remains always up for dispute. As the very matter of foundational collapse, as we shall see, what will be contested through these sites and these bodies is a battle for posthuman futures playing itself out in the arenas and laboratories of human privilege.
https://cafedissensus.com/2017/12/31/contents-humanimal-and-the-planet-earth-issue-41/