Xenoflesh: Vegan Poetics and Capitalocene Meat

FORTHCOMING Fall 2024

Xenoflesh: Vegan Poetics and Capitalocene Meat considers the representation of flesh and meat in an eclectic range of literary texts, artworks, and films produced incipient to and across capitalocene modernity, from Hesiod’s Theogony and Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Moving between art, film, and literary texts,[…]

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World

Published: 09/22/2022

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World explores how liberal humanism first enlivened, racialized, and gendered global cartographies, and how memory, ancestry, expression, and other aspects of social identity founded in its theories and practices made for the advent of the category of the posthuman through the dimensions of cultural, geographic, political, social,[…]

Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI

Published: 03/02/2023

Before the company OpenAI publicly released their ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022, Robert Leib had been a tester in OpenAI’s beta playground for GPT-3, a powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine — a chatbot, or artificial intelligence. Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI is a series of dialogues between Leib, a continental philosopher, and GPT-3’s hive mind[…]

Escape Philosophy

Imprint:

Published: 07/14/2022

We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether. The physical body has often been seen as[…]

Diseases of the Head: Essays on the Horrors of Speculative Philosophy

Published: 09/24/2020

Diseases of the Head is an anthology of essays from contemporary philosophers, artists, and writers working at the crossroads of speculative philosophy and speculative horror. At once a compendium of multivocal endeavors, a breviary of supposedly illicit ponderings, and a travelogue of philosophical exploration, this collection centers itself on the place at which philosophy and[…]

Imperial Physique

Published: 11/19/2019

In 2008,  JH Phrydas wrote a story about how bodies talk without words. He wanted the story to not just describe the silent ritual of nonverbal communication but to perform it. The interaction would be visceral – the exchange melancholic, yet full of lust. He wanted words to retain the unsayable: the subtle movements of[…]

Museum of Nonhumanity

Published: 05/28/2019

Museum of Nonhumanity is the catalogue for a full-size touring museum that presents the history of the distinction between humans and animals, and the way that this artificial boundary has been used to oppress human and nonhuman beings over long historical periods. Throughout history, declaring a group to be nonhuman or subhuman has been an[…]