“Entanglement” now saturates the pages of articles and monographs across disciplines, usually signifying alternate ontologies to the Aristotelian and Abrahamic notions of identity grounded in (a) Being. Whether from the works of New Materialists, proponents of Actor Network Theory, cyberneticists, Earth and life scientists, eco-feminists, and/or Indigenous thought and praxis, re-orienting to the fundamental reality of “entanglement” in its varied iterations is presented as the sine qua non for “living well together,” including non-human species. In ontologies of entanglement, the valence of “freedom” shifts toward relationality, obligations, de-centered and distributed agency, and circularity—a far cry from libertarian notions of “freedom” that permeate much public discourse and activism in the West.
Unlike other organs, the human brain has remained ontologically isolated—practically sacred as an embodied concept—within the value system of industrialized modern science. While manipulation of brain chemistry has been tested on model species, until recently, we have not dared to cross the biological boundary of merging synapses. However, with the creation of neural chimeroids, that is no longer the case. The human brain—the gold standard of cognition and the biological center of human supremacy—can now be integrated into nonhuman animals, and potentially, one day, vice versa. Neural chimeroids emphasize that we live in a field of evolutionary similarities and differences, reflective of many mythological contexts; they show that on a biological level, our brains are not exceptional. The choice to etymologically merge these intermediary lab subjects with the great chimeras of myth forces us to further interrogate the ontologies underpinning prevailing power dynamics between humans and our nonhuman kin.
Description forthcoming
The defeat of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress in 2024 has accompanied renewed attention to the ways in which struggles for racial justice have long been mobilized through creolized religious formations. Focusing on “Colouredness” as a site not only for enacting and policing colonial white supremacy but also for phenomenological attentionality, trans-sociality, kinship and remembering, this paper explores the ways in which South Africans have used coffee – a plant, medicine, trade good, “tot-system” commodity, symbol and potential ethical resource – to facilitate indigenous forms of anticolonial resistance. Attending to Western Cape writers and religious reformers as well as cultural and political activists, I show the ways in which Islam, and Islamic secularity, provide critical leverage for realizing this resistance work. At the center of my paper is consideration of a short story and novel by Zoë Wicomb; I will also discuss related literary material as well as my own fieldwork.
Julius Evola, a key figure in modern fascist philosophy, claims Theravāda Buddhism as metaphysical support for his Aryan racial-spiritual hierarchy. Yet Evola neither refutes nor revises core Theravāda doctrines, including self-dissolution, non-attachment, and the universal accessibility of Nirvana. This paper uses symbolic logic, modal fictionalism, and paraconsistent reasoning to demonstrate that Evola’s system collapses under its own commitments when modeled within hypothetical worlds governed by Theravāda metaphysics. Building on recent research on dialetheism and Buddhist logic, I formalize four unavoidable contradictions that arise from Evola’s simultaneous affirmation of Theravāda metaphysics and racial essentialism. Rather than dismissing these contradictions as trivial, paraconsistent logic tracks and exposes the structural incoherence of Evola’s system on its own terms. Ultimately, Evola’s use of Theravāda Buddhism does not reinforce his self-described "metaphysics of war." Rather, it ensures its self-refutation. This analysis shows how symbolic logic and Buddhist philosophy together dismantle extremist thought from within.
| Jon Gill | jigill@gustavus.edu | View |