This week we read “Slime Metaphysics?”, the conclusion to Ben Woodard’s 2012 book Slime Dynamics. No introduction from me — we talked about the ethics of horror, occulted metaphysics, the politics of outsideness (both progressive and fascist-adjacent) and, inevitably, H.P. Lovecraft.
Kudos, as ever, to Wassim for coming up with the neologisms in this week’s title.
I am once again mortified that OBS failed to properly record the Discord session this week and only recorded my microphone input, despite levels and settings all being correct and seeming to function properly during the session. This is maybe the third time this has happened now so I am taking the hint and will be abandoning that software from here on out and looking for something much more reliable. (I think Reaper will suffice from now on, since it has a much better, clearer and more intuitive UI.)
I am especially disappointed about this failure as I felt this week’s session was particularly interesting and productive, taking us from an understanding of some of the strange materialisms Negarestani’s is working with in Cyclonopedia and the political implications of this thinking as well, concluding with a discussion of the afropessimism of Frank B. Wilderson.
Given it was such a productive session, I have done by best to reconstruct it with summaries of what I can remember of the various discussions. It means there are 80 minutes of just me rambling on this week but hopefully it gets most of the talking points across from what was a really excellent Sunday.