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Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body

Roy Christopher

Published onJun 29, 2022
Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body
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Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body

Roy Christopher

  • ISBN: 978-1-68571-062-0

  • Paperback, 5×8 in., B/W, 164pp.

  • Publication date: July 14, 2022

  • Price: $21

  • BISAC: MUS019000, PHI015000

  • Thema: 6HA, QDTJ

  • Categories: Philosophy, Black Metal Theory

“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, In the Dust of This Planet

The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs and 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.

“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

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 Ph.D. 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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