This article addresses how the Iranian-born philosopher Reza Negarestani has negotiated human distinctiveness in the course of his intellectual journey from speculative realism to inhuman rationalism (Rather than rationalist inhumanism, as some sources have it (Anon 2021)). Moving from challenging the correlationism of post-Kantian Western philosophy, via critiques of the Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine, Nick Land’s accelerationism, and Ray Brassier’s nihilism, Negarestani eventually turns to the neo-pragmatists of the Pittsburgh School and their reflections on reason, normativity, and praxis. The (...) mapping of this trajectory is divided into four parts: Having already discussed the political theology of Reza Negarestani elsewhere (Kersten, World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, 78(2–4), 256 267, 2022), the first part of this article briefly introduces Reza Negarestani’s early theory fiction as an exponent of speculative realism (Negarestani 2008), followed by two sections dedicated to close readings of Negarestani’s investigations of the inhuman (Negarestani 2011 and 2014). The examination of these writings will demonstrate how they have served as prolegomena to his next book-length publication, Intelligence and Spirit (2018), a connection that will be briefly assessed in the final part. (shrink)

The final lines of Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? call for a non-philosophy to balance and act as a counterweight to the task of philosophy that had been described by them in terms of concept creation. In a footnote, Deleuze and Guattari mention François Laruelle’s project of non-philosophy, but dispute its efficacy in terms of the designated relationship between non-philosophy and science, as had been realised by Laruelle at the time. However, the mature non-philosophy of Laruelle could indicate a (...) resolution to the problematic relationship between science and educational philosophy that we have inherited due to the poststructural theories of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Non-philosophy suggests a framework for thought that includes science in a non-positivist style and provides the means to view education as a performative practice. This article explores the non-philosophy of Laruelle in education as a means to view education under the conditions of strict immanence and in line with an anti-phenomenological metaphysics of non-representation. Laruelle is perhaps one of the most important critics of Deleuze in France, and as such, his insights into the Deleuzian oeuvre reveal a way forward for education as a practice that analyses science, philosophy and politics through non-philosophy. (shrink)

El presente ensayo maneja un interés doble. Primero, sin pretender dar una visión acabada, establece una serie de nudos relacionales entre el discurso estético y esa singular categoría del pensamiento contemporáneo de las últimas décadas que, presente tanto el realismo especulativo como en el aceleracionismo, procura analizar eso radicalmente otro: lo xeno o alien (Del gr. ξενο- xeno- 'extranjero', 'extraño'). Para ello, de manera preliminar, se desplegarán los alcances teóricos elaborados por Helen Hester, Laboria Cuboniks, Armen Avenessian e Ian Bogost (...) en torno a lo xeno y lo alien. Posteriormente, se precisarán los márgenes –tal como veremos, siempre abiertos– de una xenoestética o, si se prefiere, xeno-poesis. El segundo interés –en un intento dilucidar formas en que devenga el potencial emancipatorio de la tecnología– procura desarrollar la siguiente tesis: existe un vínculo directo entre la violencia conceptual que se escribe a través de los algoritmos y el miedo al xeno, es decir, lo extranjero. Eso “alien” que trae la enfermedad y, con ello, la destrucción biológica de todo el orden establecido. (shrink)