Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2022. 164 pages. ISBN-13:978-1-68571-062-0. DOI: 10.53288/0416.1.00. OPEN-ACCESS e-book and $21.00 in print: paperbound/5 X 8 in.

“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Escape Philosophy takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.”

~ Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of This Planet

“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.”

~ Robert Guffey, author of Chameleo and Cryptoscatology

“Using Godflesh — the arch-wizards of industrial metal — as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.”

~ Peter Bebergal, author of Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Strange Frequencies

“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.”

~ Gary J. Shipley, author of Stratagem of the Corpse: Dying with Baudrillard

“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.”

~ B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space and Amygdalatropolis

“An interesting read indeed!”

~ Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room

Escape Philosophy

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by Roy Christopher

Published: 07/14/2022

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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 a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs, sensory deprivation, alien abduction, Rapture, or even death and extinction. Taking in horror movies from David Cronenberg and UFO encounters, metal bands such as Godflesh, ketamine experiments, AI, and cybernetics, Escape Philosophy is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out.

As the physical world continues to crumble at an ever-accelerating rate, and we are faced with a particularly 21st-century kind of dread and dehumanization in the face of climate collapse and a global pandemic, Escape Philosophy asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and if it is even possible.

About the Author

Roy Christopher is an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where he learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. He has since written about music, media, and culture for everything from self-published zines and personal blogs to national magazines and academic journals. He holds a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and currently lives in Savannah, Georgia. As a child, he solved the Rubik’s Cube competitively.

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