What does thinking mean in the age of Artificial Intelligence? How is big-scale computation transforming the way our brains function? This collection discusses these pressing questions by looking beyond instrumental rationality. Exploring recent developments as well as examples from the history of cybernetics, the book uncovers the positive role played by errors and traumas in the construction of our contemporary technological minds. With texts by Benjamin Bratton, Orit Halpern, Adrian Lahoud, Jon Lindblom, Catherine Malabou, Reza Negarestani, Luciana Parisi, Matteo Pasquinelli, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Michael Wheeler, Charles Wolfe, and Ben Woodard.

On life and her work.

This set of five pamphlets documents a seminar given recently by Alexander R. Galloway at the Public School New York, a self-organizing educational program where class ideas are generated by the public. “French Theory Today” explores a new generation of French voices—Catherine Malabou, Bernard Stiegler, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Quentin Meillassoux, and François Laruelle—whose work has, to varying degrees, only recently emerged in the English-speaking world. Each night of the seminar consisted of a lecture followed by questions from and discussion with class participants. As Galloway suggests in the online class proposal, the goal was “not to set in aspic a ...

In this book, Benoît Maire addresses his father, transcendental indexation, and the pleasures of being. The language in this text-based piece is non-standard and slang. In addition, the english translation of Catherine Malabou’s essay The Dialectical Simplification is published here in book form for the first time. The Long Godbeye — a book every one should read before travelling to the West Coast.

Umbr(a) was one of the most important US theory journals of the 1990s and early 2000s, publishing work by some of the greatest philosophers, psychoanalysts and theorists of our era. In every regard, it was ahead of the curve – in content, design, and style – often introducing thinkers who have subsequently become globally influential.

Sensation is a concept with a conflicted philosophical history. It has found as many allies as enemies in nearly every camp from empiricism to poststructuralism. Polyvalent, with an uncertain referent, and often overshadowed by intuition, perception, or cognition, sensation invites as much metaphysical speculation as it does dismissive criticism. The promise of sensation has certainly not been lost on the phenomenologists who have sought to ‘rehabilitate’ the concept. In Plastic Bodies, Tom Sparrow argues that the phenomenologists have not gone far enough, however. Alongside close readings of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, he digs into an array of ancient, modern, and contemporary texts ...

This volume gathers notable critics and philosophers to engage the predominant impasse of an emerging era of climate change and ecocatastrophic acceleration: that is, how conceptual and critical practices inherited from 20th century master-thinkers—who took no account of these emergences and logics—alter, adapt, mutate, or undergo translation at the current moment. Rather than assume that the humanities and philosophic practices of the past routed in the rethinking of language and power are suspended as irrelevant before mutations of the biosphere itself, Telemorphosis asks how, in fact, the latter have always been imbricated in these cognitive and linguistic practices and remain ...