My forthcoming book Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body, which Repeater Books will be publishing in December, is 25%-off at Barnes & Noble from July 8-11 (use code PREORDER25)!
Previously published by punctum books as Escape Philosophy, this new expanded and updated edition includes new additions to each chapter, a new Foreword by Mark Dery, a new Afterword by me, and is now named after an album by its metal muse, Godflesh.
We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.
The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs, 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, Post-Self 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, Post-Self asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and if it is even possible.
Advance Praise:
“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self 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
“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch
“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, Stratagem of the Corpse
“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.” — B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space
“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck
“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room
Thank you!
The crew on The Exorcist is such a solid collection of humans. Everyone from the Director (Michael Nankin) and the main cast (I was in scenes with Geena Davis, Alfonso Herrera, Kurt Egyiawan, Kirsten Fitzgerald, and Brad Armacost among several great others) to the ADs (I worked with my friends Jimmy Hartley and Lorin Fulton), PAs (Ben, Chelsey, Patrick, et al.), award-winning make-up artists (Tracey Anderson and Tami Lane), Wardrobe (Laura), Props (Jeff), and extras (Kevin, Chuck, Dale, Tim, Phil, Bill, and Jennifer, among many others) was there to get the work done. No ego. No bullshit. Aside from being the most hectic, it was the most positive working environment I’ve ever been in. The fact that it was both simultaneously is utterly astounding.