Spheres Reading GroupBubbles, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 8
#8 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 7, “The Siren Stage – On the First Sonsospheric Alliance,” as well as Excursus 8, “Illiterate Truths – A Note on Oral Fundamentalisms” and Excursus 9, “Where Lacan Starts to Go Wrong,” pps. 477–538.
Sustain/Decay: A Philosophical Investigation of Drone Music and Mysticism (Review)
Floating from time period to time period amid spiritual and religious observances and contemporary soundscapes the drone remains consistently omnipresent, like the angel of death, hovering just out of reach yet connecting all things living and dead…
Spheres Reading GroupBubbles, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 7
#7 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 6: “Soul Partitions – Angels—Twins—Doubles,” as well as Excursus 6: “Spheric Mourning – On Nobject Loss and the Difficulty of Saying What Is Missing” and Excursus 7: “On the Difference Between and Idiot and an Angel,” pps. 413-476.
Delusions, by Stanisław Kapuściński: A Review
Kapuscinski’s intentions are early implied, to match Dawkins bite for bite and (as honestly) to demonstrate the irreconcilable gulf between intellectual reductionism and emotional religious dogmatism, each flailing towards fundamentalism in trying to flatten one another.
Spheres Reading GroupBubbles, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 6
#6 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 5, “The Primal Companion – Requiem for Discarded Organ” as well as “Excursus 5: The Black Plantation – A Note on Trees of Life and Enlivement Machines,” pages 343–412
Spheres Reading GroupBubbles, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 5
#5 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 4, “The Retreat Within the Mother: Groundwork for a Negative Gynecology,” along with the following Excursi, pps. 269–342
The Name of God
He stood upon an old skull, and he crushed it under his dark heel. A snake was inside it, and its blood seeped into the ground. He stood in the crater where Gods went to die, the valley without light where a bloated Leviathan would rest upon the ground, and spears piercing its belly beneath dark clouds, the sun would turn away in time for it to rot and die. In its carcass, in its open bones a new God would form, a new rotten Beast to occupy the holy Throne….
Saturn in Scorpio in the First House
We will build our grave here on earth. Is it grave? Our bodies reduced to the skeleton of gluttony and the like. Or a marker, we build with substance, where our former bondage and body lies? The villains, if you will, have their will, they were here b …
Spheres Reading GroupBubbles, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 4
#4 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 3, “Humans in the Magic Circle: On the Intellectual History of the Fascination with Closeness,” and Excursus 1, “Thought Transmission,” pps. 207–268. — Readers Underground
At Play: A Personal Odyssey in Chess
Chess is two wills locked not only in combat but also in cooperation. Players must together create the conditions allowing one to emerge triumphant—or not.
Spheres Reading GroupBubbles, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 3
#3 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 2, “Between Faces: On the Appearance of the Interfacial Intimate Sphere,” pps. 139–206. — Readers Underground
The Long Curve of Descent
Since the end of the Paleolithic Era, it is possible that we have been riding a long curve of descent, in which all things once transparent have become more and more opaque.
Poems of Degeneration
A selection of poems from John David Ebert’s new collection, These Things We No Longer Are, including Descent of the Angel, Peter, Dead Men, Five Skulls, and The Angel of Death
Spheres Reading GroupBubbles, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 2
#2 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Preliminary Reflections and ch. 1, “Heart Operation; Or, On the Eucharistic Excess,” pps. 83–138.
Reading Albert Murray in the Age of Trump
In his near-century of life, Murray confronted race by re-constructing American identity as omni-American—that out of many, we are one.
Spheres Reading GroupBubbles, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 1
#1 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Preliminary Note and Introduction, pps. 9–81.
Deliver Us From Evil
The global political landscape today reads like something straight out of Revelations. On a daily basis, we read shocking stories of the cruelties imposed by those in power. Education and healthcare are being gutted, families are being broken apart, minorities are being senselessly attacked, discrimination is being legalized, dissent criminalized, and corruption institutionalized. The very fabric of society is becoming undone before our eyes, and tyranny is rearing its ugly head.
Spheres Reading GroupBubbles, by Peter Sloterdijk – Welcome & Overview
Readers Underground group for Bubbles, by Peter Sloterdijk – Welcome & Overview page
ShantaramReading Group for Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts
Join the Readers Underground for a group reading of Gregory David Roberts’ novel Shantaram, hosted by David Gaian and Marco V Morelli, starting April 17, 2017.
HyperNormalisation (Review)
“We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They don’t care. We say we care but we do nothing. And nothing ever changes.” BBC documentary by Adam Curtis.
Prose for the Paranoid
I am, I am slightly ashamed to admit, a little paranoid at the moment. Some of it is genetic. My family have a history of “nerves.” My lovely cousin, who shares a big batch of genetics with me along with a childhood of school holidays spent together indulging our creative whimsy
Consciousness and TDVP: Welcome to a New World
These two scholars collaborated for eight years constructing their unfunded, paradigm-shifting work. Their efforts are stunningly transdisciplinary. They involve theoretical and empirical findings in quantum physics, mathematical logic, philosophy, biology, psychology and consciousness research, often requiring leaps into the unknown.
Songs of Sodom
We were lost. Daddy sucked on a fat cigar, leaned across the steering wheel, stared at the dark road up ahead and let out a stream of four letter words, which my mother told me never to repeat. She snapped off the radio, got real quiet. The car filled with smoke, my eyeballs burned. I rolled down the window, gulped the night wind, and squinted at the crescent moon…
The “Other” Globalization and Fear of the Feminine: a Mythological View
In Western culture what is “feminine” has become associated over time with what is evil or immoral… This frightening view of the collective, akin to the archetype of the Terrible Mother, is what drives a lot of the global political and social narrative.
The Global Abyss
It seemed unthinkable. A narcissistic reality show star with an authoritarian personality and a highly volatile temperament was elected to the highest office in the land on a platform of bigotry, xenophobia, and bullying. He was quite possibly the least qualified man to ever make it to the general election, let alone win the election. Yet against all expectations, here we are.
How to Live in the Future (Part 2)
If some Omega Point in hyperspace, the Eschaton that waits for us at history’s end, draws all mundane phenomena into its all-embracing unity, we’re implicated in that vast conspiracy already. We can celebrate. But particles apparently pop in and out of being all the time, each moment a Creation. All of it occurs at once, a party more than a parade. So point me to “the” Singularity, again?
Is Myth Dead?
If new myths are born, re-tethered to something sacred, they must be brutally immediate, possessing unavoidable gravity, poignant, fragile, they must be anything but contrived, planned, and developed with the intention of bringing us the sacred. (She does not come to us on a platter. More likely, the platter will have your beating heart on it.)
The Fall and the Eschaton
Most of us have, in some form or another, if not a philosophy of time, at least a mythos of time.
Banishing the World: Conner Habib on Postmodern Philosophy and the Occult
I spoke with Conner Habib about his new course, “Banishing the World: Postmodern Philosophy and the Occult,” and learned about the surprising ways in which the most interesting and sophisticated philosophies coming out of humanities converge precisely with occult ideas.
Taking the Waters
“We are lost and strangers to this place, this mother of terrors and wonders.”






![Juan Gris; Chessboard, Glass, and Dish [public domain]](https://wp.cosmos.media/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/06/Juan_Gris_-_Chessboard_Glass_and_Dish-332x190.jpg)














