publications

Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysical conception of life in Process and Reality is elucidated. The article is about neither biology nor psychology, but about how Whitehead’s view of interstitial life might account for these scientific disciplines’ range of phenomena and originality more generally. Whitehead’s view of the universe as always novel but rarely original will be clarified, as will the role of eternal objects through the category of conceptual reversion.

This essay considers the political economic ideology in recent popular cinematic depictions of finance in terms of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime. I give a sustained reading of how the Kantian sublime operates in Neil Burger’s film Limitless (2011). By subordinating both the technics of neuro-augmentation and economic contingency to an innate human reason, the protagonist shows audiences what it might mean today to experience sublimity – but not without hinting at a latent anti-Kantian fissure that would reorient us against this bourgeois discourse.

What is it to experience a fragment of time in its pure state? Is such an aesthetic really possible, as Gilles Deleuze assumes in Cinema 2? How do film and electronic visual media either depict or instill such experience? In reply to these questions, this book chapter proposes an aesthetic relation between viewer and temporal object: the error-image. Through numerous examples from visual culture, I synthesize Henri Bergson's philosophy of memory with Bernard Stiegler's technological phenomenology. Technics, on one hand, help to materialize the former's metaphysical dualism and, on the other hand, transgress the latter's clearcut stratification of technical recording from living memory.