Homo Catastrophicus: The Revolt Against Civilisation

Louis Armand

forthcoming

In Homo Catastrophicus Louis Armand explores the agonism of an emergent Algorithmic State Apparatus. Its genealogy traverses the constellation of aesthetic & political avant-gardes of the long 20th century & the terminal shock of posthumanism. Technology has always posed a challenge to notions of human subjectivity. Yet this challenge cannot be resolved dialectically, as a rapprochement between the human & non-human, since technology must be understood as defining in advance what it means to be human, conditioning the very possibility of “human being.”

The figure of Homo Catastrophicus is the historical “subject” turned on its head – a theoretical antipode to the dialectic of modernity & the “No Future” conspiracy of Capitalist Realism. If capitalist realism inscribes history as crisis – as a discourse perpetually anachronistic to itself, “out-of-joint,” always before its time yet perpetually after the event – then Homo Catastrophicus evokes history's schizoid chaos agent. Homo Catastrophicus is not a descent of man for modern times, it is an ontology of catastrophic being grasped through an antagonism with every possible world-view: ideology's doppelganger. Homo Catastrophicus is the alterego of the humanist fallacy – an inhumanity that dreams the apotheosis of civilisation.

LOUIS ARMAND’s critical works include Feasts of Unrule (2024), Entropology (2023), Videology (2015), The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde (2013), Event States (2007), Techne (1997) & Incendiary Devices (1993), poetry collections including Infantilisms (2024), Vitus (2022), and Descartes’ Dog (2021), & novels including Anizar (2024), Glitchhead (2022), Vampyr (2021), The Garden (2020), Glasshouse (2018), The Combinations (2016) & Clair Obscur (2011). He co-directs the Prague Microfestival & is the director of the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, Prague. www.louis-armand.com

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ISBN (print) 978-1-916541-07-8 (ebook) 978-1-916541-08-5