Reza Negarestani and the Dark Materialism Symposium

Update: And an interesting, related, blog.Here's the link to the content from a recent symposium, said event described below. If you've been reading this blog, then you know that I believe Negarestani is a stone-cold genius and the future of weird fiction, in addition to the thought-provoking nonfiction he writes. His story in the Lambshead Cabinet anthology is just quite simply a thing of beauty on so many levels. It's mind-blowing.(As a side note it is a little discouraging to see the recent horror best-of table of contents appear to be largely a time machine to fifteen years ago. No diss of the fine writers included, but it doesn't at all reflect the energy of the last five years in weird fiction. This on the heels of two very conservative bests of the last two decades...I'm thinking perhaps a "best of the weird" yearly antho might be needed.)

This symposium draws on recent paradigms in contemporary philosophy, physics and critical theory. It assembles unique and multidisciplinary reflections on the idea of darkness in its relation to matter in diverse locations, namely: physics, astronomy, ecology, mysticism, speculative realism, psychoanalysis and literature. As a conceptual framework, dark materialism engages with matter at the thresholds of its annihilation and disappearance beyond the topographies of ‘base materialism’ and at the very edges of forms of thought where the objects, things, Things and no-things on which it depended exert their independence.