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This book works through the notion of the alien in contemporary philosophy. The authors attempt to think through politics, posthumanism, and alienation beyond and across the circuitry of thought that would otherwise enfold the alien in its regressive and parochial trappings.
The figure of the Other has held critical thought in its sway for decades, to the point that we now suffer from a surfeit of alterity. This book considers whether the figure of the alien can offer us something better. It traces the outlines, intersections, and problems of emergent vectors of thought that coalesce around a renewed relationship to alienation: left accelerationism, xenofeminism, and inhumanism. Their common thread is the embrace of alienation as a positive force, transforming our progressive exile from a series of edenic harmonies - be they economic, sociological, or biological - into an esoteric genealogy of freedom.
Appeals to alien forces can mask all too familiar prejudices, repackaging old assumptions in the language of sublime strangeness or harsh reality. This book seeks to move beyond this by looking at how the notion of the alien interacts with present problems and politics. It was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
List of contents
Foreword Introduction - Alien Vectors: accelerationism, xenofeminism, inhumanism Part I: Politics 1. Strategy Without a Strategiser 2. Platform Cosmologies: enabling resituation 3. Empire's New Clothes: after the "peaceful violence" of neoliberal coloniality Part II: Posthumanism 4. The Reformatting of Homo Sapiens 5. Sapience + Care: reason and responsibility in posthuman politics 6. Xeno-Patterning: predictive intuition and automated imagination Part III: Alienation 7. Strange Sameness: hegel, marx and the logic of estrangement 8. Alienation, Freedom and the Synthetic How 9. Accelerationism's Queer Occulture: "or, thinking according to the alien ovum of nature" 10. Elegy
About the author
James Trafford is Reader in Philosophy and Design at the University for the Creative Arts, UK. His book, The Empire at Home, will be published in January 2020.
Pete Wolfendale is an independent philosopher based in the North East of England, UK. He is the author of Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes (2014).
Summary
This book analyses the notion of the alien in contemporary philosophy, thinking through politics, posthumanism, and alienation beyond and across the circuitry of thought that would otherwise enfold the alien in its regressive trappings. It was first published as a special issue of Angelaki.
