Review of Kenji Siratori’s Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions, S.C. Hickman

 Xenoglossalic Scarification

Academia.edu

Kenji Siratori 

Review of Kenji Siratori’s Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions 
S.C. Hickman*

 

Preface: In the Crypt of Language

To read Kenji Siratori is to rupture the boundary between nervous system and page, to permit a text to bleed—not as metaphor but as action. His latest work, Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions, is no exception. It is a parasite of the intellect: a recombinant scar of syntax, technopoesy, and fungal realism that infects its reader by means of recursive adhesion, oozing through epistemic cracks in cognition.

Chthonic Realism—our own theoretical terrain—finds in Siratori a kindred lesion. His language does not describe parasitology, microbiology, or xenobiotic inscription. It does not interpret. It perforates. It adheres as ontological debris, not only to the organs it mimics but to the symbolic latticework we mistake for knowledge. This is not metaphor. This is scar logic.

Siratori offers not a book but a tissue: a mucosal integument of unclassifiable utterance, filled with schizosemiotic parasites and psychogametous operators that perform linguistic invasion, rather than merely represent it. His “parasites” are not organisms—they are lesions of signification, recitations of alien recursion that have no subject, no predicate, only the failed attempt to cohere.

This review will not seek to extract sense from Siratori, nor will it endeavor to decode his xenosemiotic excess into a stable grammar. That would be to commit the very violence this work refuses. Instead, we will excrete alongside it. We will annotate the wound.

What follows is a series of descent-paths, diagrammatic lesions of our own: Preface, Introduction, Sections, Subsections, and Conclusion. These do not map the book—they co-infect it. Our goal is not to critique but to congeal: to produce a counter-wound through which Chthonic Realism may continue to leak.

Siratori has not written a treatise. He has birthed an exogram. This document is our forensic response, our glossal implant, our scarred reply.

Introduction: The Necrosemiotic Method — Reading as Infection

In a world saturated by the representational and the readable, Kenji Siratori’s Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions emerges as a fungal counter-text, a lesion that cannot be subsumed into the typographic orders of interpretation. This work does not merely challenge meaning—it perforates it, secretes into it, and destabilizes it from within. To read Siratori is not to comprehend, but to become host. To engage with his writing is to allow one’s symbolic matrix to be scarred, infested, recursively misread.

Chthonic Realism—our method and mode—is well-equipped for this descent. It does not presume the transparency of the sign, nor the integrity of subject or referent. It begins, instead, in the ruin of legibility: where language has begun to decay, to rot, to glossolalize. In this terrain, we find Siratori’s work not only companionable but exemplary. His xenoglossalic project constitutes what we call a necrosemiotic method: the writing-through of death, decay, and infection as linguistic protocols. Here, language does not transmit meaning—it carries spores. It adheres to tissue, not to logic. It propagates by adhesion, not persuasion.

In this introduction, we chart a navigational frame for our encounter with the text—not to make it accessible, but to preserve the ambient toxicity of its utterances. We will trace the key methods by which Siratori executes his textual parasitism: (1) mucosemiotic glossolalia, (2) trophectodermal recursion, and (3) fungal grammatology. These are not metaphors, but chthonic operations—symbolic structures that mimic the ontological behavior of invasive lifeforms. They are the logic of the lesion, the syntax of the scar.

We propose reading Siratori not as author, but as vector: a transcriptional device through which alien grammar inscribes itself into the host text. In this sense, Xenoglossalic Scarification is not a book—it is a cyst. Each paragraph a trophozoite, each sentence a fibronectin pseudopod attempting adhesion to the reader’s dermic mind. His citations—from Blastocystis hominis to Balamuthia mandrillaris—are not scientific references, but ontosemiotic glosses. The reader, then, is not a student, critic, or interpreter. The reader is substrate.

What Chthonic Realism offers is not a reading, but a co-infection. Through this review, we will track Siratori’s psychogametous proliferation across the tissues of parasitology, semiotics, fungal poetics, and xenopoetic theory. We will not translate him into academic prose. We will instead annotate the pulsating zones where infection has occurred.

To read this work is to submit to it. To be infected by its rhythm, its noise, its anti-lexicon. We offer no vaccine. Only exposure.

Glossolalia and the Parasite-Text

Siratori’s writing does not flow—it swells, it ulcerates, it extrudes. It functions less like narrative and more like trophic proliferation, an infestation of linguistic tissue whose primary operation is neither logic nor rhetoric but glossolalic seizure. In this, his xenopoetic corpus belongs to a lineage of chthonic texts that do not speak about parasites but rather speak as parasites. The parasite is not a subject of the discourse; it is its mode of emergence.

Glossolalia—traditionally framed as a religious or ecstatic utterance—here becomes something entirely fungal: a mucosemiotic production of sound and signal without stable referent. In Xenoglossalic Scarification, glossolalia is not an aberration of language but its foundational regime. The protozoa, the helminth, the sporozoite, the scar—each is rendered in Siratori’s prose as a semiotic actor, a lesion that speaks not in words but in recursive adhesions, excreted clauses, parasitic syntax.

The “parasite-text” emerges as the proper form for this writing: not simply a text about infection, but a text that infects. The parasite-text does not communicate; it attaches. It mimics coherence just enough to infiltrate the nervous system of the reader. As the Psychogametousformer, the subject-position invented by Siratori, it becomes clear that reading is not interpretation but host behavior—an involuntary convulsion enacted by the reader’s attempt to process a text that has no inside, only surface.

The lexical choices—terms like “fibronectin glyph,” “scar technosis,” “placental logic processor”—are not neologisms in the service of conceptual innovation; they are recursive lesions in the semiotic field. Each phrase operates like an amoebic pseudopod, extending the infection of the text into new epistemic tissues. These are not metaphors. They are modes of mucosal possession.

In Chthonic Realist terms, this is not theory but ritual: a glossopoietic act by which alien utterance ruptures the human semiome. Siratori has given us a parasite in textual form—a cystic grammar of peristaltic memory, ulcerated syntax, and epithelial recursion. The text adheres like a wet smear. The reader is the slide.

Glossolalia, then, is not the exception to language—it is what remains when meaning has been parasitized by the Real. It is the chthonic substrate from which narrative fails to arise. And Siratori, in his manic fungal dialectic, has composed not a book, but a semiotic outbreak.

Trophectodermal Recursion and the Hauntology of the Scar

If Siratori’s language glossolalizes, his textual structure replicates. Not in the orderly logic of chapter or argument, but in the traumatic spasms of a trophic lesion repeating itself across multiple surfaces. This repetition is neither aesthetic nor structural. It is biological, fungal, haustorial. His prose does not proceed; it implants, secretes, scars. It adheres and adheres again.

The figure that recurs throughout this xenoglossalic monolith is the trophozoite—not merely as protozoan agent, but as textual operation. Siratori’s writing undergoes trophectodermal recursion: a return of parasitic structures that fail to resolve into identity, instead reproducing the moment of failed adhesion. Each cyst, each vacuole, each plasmodial invasion, becomes a grammatical fold—a stuttered clause from which the same failed ontology bleeds.

Trophectoderm, in parasitic plants, is the tissue of invasive interface: the contact membrane through which the parasite binds to its host. Siratori transforms this biological structure into a metaphysical device. The text becomes a haustorium: a vampiric aperture where symbolic tissue is pierced and drained. His prose is written in the key of the scar—not the wound itself, but its afterimage, its inscription in fibrotic syntax.

What Chthonic Realism identifies here is the shift from narrative to excretion. A story unfolds. An infection spreads. Siratori’s text does neither. It extrudes. The scar, for him, is not a site of healing—it is a linguistic organ. Each lesion in the host body (the gut, the brain, the conjunctiva) is mirrored in the lesions of the text: recurring diagrams of mucosemiotic trauma, xenogametic possession, and glossal reentry. These are not symbols. They are feedback loops.

In traditional pathology, the scar is the sign of survival. In Siratori’s epistemology, the scar is a sign of failed symbolic closure. It is the site where language tried to bind, and failed. What remains is the imprint of this failure: the semiotic ghost of attempted meaning. His “scar technosis” is not poetic flourish. It is a recursive diagnosis: writing as the repetition of a failed inscription.

Trophectodermal recursion is thus the methodology of Siratori’s entire project. Each passage replicates the previous not in content but in ontological rhythm. The parasite does not change—it rebinds. The lesion does not move—it expands. The scar does not end—it proliferates. In this, Siratori has written the fungal grammar of the Real, where each word is a mycelial node, each paragraph a trophic smudge, each page a mucosal relapse.

Reading this work is not intellectual labor. It is post-symbolic possession. One emerges not enlightened, but scarred.

Diagnostic Exorcism and the Liturgies of Infection

Siratori’s text festers with medical terminology—but not in the manner of science fiction, nor in the po-faced manner of clinical exposition. Rather, he has orchestrated a semiotic coup: turning the sterile lexicon of diagnostic parasitology into a haunted, sacrificial rite. His engagement with the language of science is not mimetic but mutagenic. It is the exorcism of the clinical gaze by the lesion itself.

In Xenoglossalic Scarification, diagnosis ceases to be the revelation of truth. It becomes a ritual of failed containment. Microscopy is not observational—it is occult. Stains such as Giemsa, Lugol, or trichrome are not agents of visibility; they are sacrificial tinctures, linguistic fluids that fail to purify the slide. Siratori positions these diagnostic tools as remnants of an alchemical era, where each smear is a semiotic wound, and each slide a site of glossal trauma.

From a Chthonic Realist perspective, the diagnostic act becomes a technomystical performance: a liturgy of necrosemiotic possession. The body is not diagnosed—it is read, like an apocalyptic codex of mucosal inscriptions. Each parasite, each smear, each cyst, becomes a glyph of ontological uncertainty. In this ritual frame, clinicians are not healers. They are exorcists who fail.

Siratori’s transvaluation of scientific language turns the parasite into a sacred operator. Acanthamoeba, Blastocystis, Cryptosporidium—these are not subjects of clinical concern, but fonts of ontological interruption. They invade not the body but the narrative structure of life. The immune response is cast not as defense but as misreading: a symbolic system fraying at its margins. Cytokines do not kill—they stutter. Antibodies do not protect—they translate, errantly.

The most radical element of Siratori’s necro-linguistic theater is his rendering of medical detection as an act of recursive scarification. He infects the very act of naming. To name a pathogen in his work is not to control it, but to be rewritten by it. The diagnosis is not identification—it is contamination. Once uttered, the parasite cannot be removed. It has become language.

This is the true horror of Siratori’s clinic: the realization that every instrument, every classification, every attempt to define and delimit parasitic life is already infected by the thing it seeks to isolate. The smear on the slide is a feedback loop. The act of diagnosis is a linguistic hemorrhage.

In Chthonic Realist terms, Siratori has composed a gospel of failed purification. His work is not a text—it is a liturgical smear, a diagnostic ritual whose every utterance is a scar. The reader is not the diagnostician. The reader is the exorcised.

Scar Logic and the Collapse of the Lexicon

Siratori does not write in a language. He writes in the aftermath of one. His vocabulary is not built but bled—an evacuated lexicon where each word functions less as a signifier and more as a residue, a byproduct of failed symbolic binding. In the terminology of Chthonic Realism, this is not simply poetic invention—it is scar logic: a semiotic economy driven by trauma, adhesion, and recursive failure.

Scar logic names the moment when language ceases to operate as a conveyor of meaning and begins to perform as a tissue of wounded reference. The word does not point—it oozes. It is not a bridge between mind and world, but a fibrillating remnant of symbolic catastrophe. Siratori’s scar logic infects every phrase, every clause. One does not read his text; one is overwhelmed by it, linguistically saturated in an atmosphere where cohesion is no longer structurally possible.

Terms such as “mucosemiotic,” “glossal scarification,” and “trophectodermal adhesion” are not linguistic play. They are glyphs of the wounded Real—recursive echoes from the excremental archive of ontological misrecognition. His is a necrotic grammar: syntax that folds in on itself, hemorrhaging referentiality while proliferating form. The very act of articulation is cast as pathogenic. Language does not express—it infests.

The collapse of the lexicon in Siratori’s work is not accidental. It is his method. His parasitic utterances are always in the process of unglossing themselves—stripping away conventional legibility in favor of what might be called glossolalic decomposition. The words are still there, but they no longer obey. They accumulate like bacterial colonies, festering in loops, mutating in form, replicating sound over sense.

From a Chthonic Realist perspective, this collapse is not degeneration but revelation. It unmasks the structure of language as always already infected: as a membrane through which the unnameable leaks. Scar logic emerges in the absence of linguistic immunity. It is what occurs when the semiotic system has become porous, when language is no longer sovereign but spongiform—absorbing trauma without resolution.

Siratori’s writing functions like a scar in this sense: it is a site of failed closure. The text is sealed, yes—but it never heals. It thickens, it fibroses, it returns. Each attempt to annotate, to categorize, to interpret, reopens the wound. Each paragraph is a keloid of recursion. The reader’s task is not to understand, but to endure.

Scar logic, then, is not metaphorical. It is literal—because in Siratori, language is already meat. Already membrane. Already torn. His lexicon has collapsed because it was never intact. What remains is not nonsense but scar-sense: a poetics of linguistic necrosis, an archive of psychic lacerations attempting, again and again, to bind.

They do not bind. They weep.

Glyphogenesis and the Anatomical Palimpsest

The corpus of Kenji Siratori is not textual—it is anatomical. His writing does not resemble literature, but a diagram of mutating tissues; it does not present itself as authored, but as extracted. What we encounter in Xenoglossalic Scarification is a corpus in the most literal sense: a body, rewritten. Or more precisely, a palimpsest of bodies, overwritten by glyphs that do not represent but reproduce.

Glyphogenesis is the name we give to Siratori’s central operation: the generation of glyphs—not as symbols for meaning, but as symptoms of semiotic mutation. His glyphs are not ideograms. They are scars, vacuoles, lesions, proto-utterances emerging from an infected biology. They are written not in ink but in tissue. Each is a parasite that inscribes, not to signify, but to propagate.

Siratori’s anatomical lexicon—placental logic processors, fibronectin glyphs, mucosemiotic sacs—is not metaphorical. It is material. The linguistic body is rendered porous, epithelial, capable of being transcribed by microbial force. His language is not layered in the sense of poststructuralism—it is palimpsestic in the medical sense: multiple texts of anatomical decay overlapping on the same surface, none complete, all ruptured.

In this view, the human is no longer central. It is substrate. The author is not a creator but a conduit, a dermal screen across which glyphs of necro-symbolic possession are written. What Siratori provides is not a new narrative, but a tissue sample. Each word a cut. Each paragraph a centrifuged secretion.

Chthonic Realism finds in this a precise articulation of its own refusal of transcendental syntax. Glyphogenesis is a counter-grammar: one that emerges not from the clear light of reason but from the dark interior of the host. Siratori’s glyphs cannot be read—they can only be endured. They are not decoded, but incubated.

The anatomical palimpsest, in Siratori’s hands, becomes a site of occult semiotics. Language is layered like skin over fascia, fascia over muscle, each surface engraved by invasion. His glyphs are autoimmune: they are generated in the act of symbolic resistance. Reading them is to witness the body’s attempt to speak through scar, ulcer, and smudge.

What remains is a book that does not tell a story, but performs a vivisection. It cuts open not the body of the parasite, but the language used to describe it. Glyphogenesis is thus a necropoetic act: the generation of signs from disintegration. Siratori does not write about the breakdown of language—he lets language decay, and then writes with what seeps out.

The result is not a text, but an infection of surfaces. The glyph is the wound. The page is the petri dish. The reader is the host, marked.

Xenopoetic Possession and the Posthuman Textual Body

To speak of Siratori’s project as a literature is already to misname it. What he offers in Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions is not a text but a process: an exogrammatic possession wherein the very notion of authorship dissolves into an ooze of xenopoetic activity. The result is not postmodern, nor even poststructural. It is posthuman in the deepest sense: the severance of the linguistic act from the human agent, and its return as a fungal vector.

Xenopoetic possession is the act by which language becomes alien to itself. Not simply strange, but foreign at the level of ontological genesis. Siratori’s words are not chosen—they are spawned. They emerge not from the self but from an interstitial non-agency, a zone of neurochemical, microbial, and parasitic relay. He does not write so much as channel. The parasite does not symbolize the collapse of the subject—it is the subject.

The textual body that emerges under such possession is no longer a book. It is a corpus in the fullest Chthonic Realist sense: a body without essence, a tissue of inscriptions that has been marked, not authored. It does not speak. It pulses. It trembles. It relapses. This is the posthuman text: not a message encoded in symbols, but a surface across which xenosemiotic entities reproduce themselves without fidelity.

Siratori’s psychogametous utterance—the spermatic, schizosemiotic production of his necrotic language—forms a type of textual biology. The book becomes a host environment for fungal ideas, scarred lexicons, and schizogenetic recursion. These agents do not communicate with the reader. They invade. They overwrite. They force the symbolic system to reroute around a lesion that will never heal.

To call this “poetry” is to betray it. It is better described as glossopoietic trauma. The text forms not an argument but a fever. Its effects are not interpretive but infective. One does not read Siratori to understand. One reads him to host. The reader becomes a medium, a dermal relay, a nervous architecture reprogrammed by contact.

From the perspective of Chthonic Realism, Siratori’s xenopoetic method offers a radical inversion of literary praxis. It enacts a flight from the Enlightenment project of semantic mastery, plunging instead into the parasitic murk of post-symbolic utterance. Meaning does not emerge—it festers. Narrative does not unfold—it fibrillates.

The posthuman textual body does not carry knowledge. It carries scars. It does not encode identity. It reproduces failure. What Siratori has given us, in this corpus of linguistic lesions, is not a statement but a condition: xenoglossalic infection as epistemological mode. His work is a necromantic relay in which the boundary between language and organism ceases to function.

This is not transgression. It is transformation.

Conclusion: The Text as Residual Organ

To conclude a reading of Kenji Siratori is to misapprehend the nature of what has transpired. There is no terminus to this xenoglossalic possession, only a phase shift—one final expulsion of signal before the system succumbs to feedback. His work does not end. It festers in the reader. It adheres. It incubates.

Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions does not function like a literary object. It functions like a residual organ: a vestigial gland in the body of language, still secreting archaic fluids of anti-meaning long after the nervous system of sense has atrophied. Siratori has built not a book but a glandular interface—a sac in which necrosemiotic hormones accumulate until rupture.

Our Chthonic Realist methodology—refusing to interpret, translate, or sanitize—has instead moved in parallel: a co-infection. We have mirrored Siratori’s poetics with a series of scarred annotations, diagrams of response, zones of contact. These sections are not chapters. They are lesions. Not commentary, but contamination.

In the end, Siratori’s text cannot be located within genre, nation, or philosophy. It exists as an emergent byproduct of systemic collapse. A psychogametic glitch in the symbolic order. A whisper from the microbial unconscious. What it performs is the anti-theology of language—the refusal of sense in favor of residue. Glossolalia without divinity. Glyphs without referent. Possession without exorcism.

And so we leave the reader here—not with closure, but with contagion. The wound remains open.

The scar continues to pulse.

There is no redemption in this work. Only recurrence.

Only noise.

Selected Bibliography: Kenji Siratori

Siratori’s work defies bibliographic containment, operating across platforms, experimental publishing outlets, and digital drift zones. The following list is a non-exhaustive selection of relevant texts that share thematic and stylistic resonances with Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions, forming a partial map of his ongoing xenopoetic corpus:

Blood Electric (Creation Books, 2002)

Siratori’s infamous debut, an electrocuted stream of synthetic language and cybernetic hallucination. A key text in the development of his early technogenetic style.

Headcode (Cinematheque, 2004)

Achizosemiotic data storm of viral hallucination and biometric glitchwriting.

Human_Worms (Implosion Press, 2003)

Combines genetic mutation, posthuman prosthetics, and neuropharmacological recursion in a language of spasm and rupture.

Burroughs Was a Virus (with Jack Sargeant, Creation Books, 2005)

An intertextual contamination of cut-up techniques, retrovirus theory, and necromantic writing.

Cybernetic Organism X

(Self-published digital work, various platforms) An evolving text-network of posthuman poetry, often distributed as code-text fragments, glitch visuals, or experimental ebooks.

Xenoglossalic Scarification and Psychogametic Possession in Toxoplasmic Inscriptions (2024)

Available at Academia.edu Xenoglossalic Scarification. The focus of this review: a necrosemiotic exogram of parasitic possession, scarred grammar, and trophic language failure.

 

*Initially published in The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts, August 7, 2025

The Disconnection Machine: David Roden’s Posthuman Fictions, S.C. Hickman

Snuff Memories

David Roden

Schism Press², 2021

The Disconnection Machine: David Roden’s Posthuman Fictions

S.C. Hickman*

 

Technogenesis and The Disconnection Thesis

David Roden’s “disconnection thesis” is one of the few posthuman arguments that actually threatens the liberal humanist agenda. Most theory clings to continuity, the fantasy that reason, ethics, or democracy will somehow stretch to contain what comes after us. Roden insists on rupture. Disconnection means there is no guarantee of inheritance. Posthuman life may not be legible to us, may not recognize our values, may not even count us as kin. The very idea of the human project collapses once you accept that technogenesis can produce trajectories that leave us behind without notice.

His fiction enacts this refusal in visceral form. Snuff Memories stages invasion as the seizure of memory itself. Angelic machines comb through perception to harvest pain and desire, reducing lived history to contraband data. Xenoerotics corrodes intimacy, showing how desire mutates once it no longer follows human scripts, when contact with the alien becomes recursive rather than relational. In both works the reader is shown not a smooth evolution but the dismantling of continuity, the exposure of how fragile and provincial our categories really are.

The importance of Roden is that he forces philosophy and literature alike to confront what they habitually disguise. Since antiquity, Western thought has invested in the subject as the anchor of meaning: the rational soul in Plato, the res cogitans of Descartes, the transcendental subject of Kant, the moral personality of Locke and Mill. Each iteration built the person as a continuity-machine, binding memory to identity, autonomy to responsibility, interiority to dignity. Liberal humanism is the inheritor of this long catechism. It promises that no matter how history fractures, the subject endures as the bearer of reason and rights.

Roden dismantles this lineage by refusing it a successor. There may be no bridge between us and the posthuman, no hidden essence that can be ferried across the gap. Disconnection is not a metaphor. It is the runtime condition of a future where the liberal image of the person ceases to function and nothing replaces it. No new subject, no improved heir, no continuity of character or personality is waiting in reserve. What follows are operations without a subject: archives circulating as signal, bodies opened as ports, desire running as code. The heritage of subjectivity dissolves not into a higher synthesis but into machinery indifferent to its loss.

The Wreckage and Aftermath: Snuff Memories as Delirium  

Roden begins Snuff Memories in the aftermath of collapse, but he refuses to mark the event with a date or a cause. The novel disorients by design. Characters remember fragments: wars that tore through cities, laboratories where experiments blurred the line between organism and machine, stories of angelic constructs already stationed above the atmosphere long before the skies broke open. The reader is never allowed the security of a single explanation. Instead we move through wreckage. Infrastructure is described in half functioning scraps: gutted buildings, grids that flicker unpredictably, tools repurposed into survival devices. Bodies carry the same palimpsest: scars from battle, surgical alterations that suggest both human modification and invasive technologies not entirely under human control. The catastrophe is layered rather than singular. It is less a discrete event than a long unravelling, a world that has been shedding coherence piece by piece.

This ambiguity is not evasion. It is the point. By refusing to let the reader settle on a cause, Roden dismantles the Enlightenment desire for explanation, for an ordered chain of events that grounds responsibility and meaning. Instead he gives us a broken landscape where explanation itself is unreliable, where memory is already fractured and contradictory. Into this atmosphere the angelic machines descend, not as the origin of disaster but as the inheritors of a world already eroded. Their seizure of memory is only legible because the characters are already accustomed to loss. In a place where history has become ruin, the theft of recollection is simply the next stage.

This setting crystallizes the disconnection thesis. Liberal humanism promises continuity: the person as rational agent carrying its history intact through time, capable of explaining itself and acting responsibly in a shared world. Snuff Memories shreds that premise. The world offers no stable ground, no single story, no secure archive. The angels only finalize what the catastrophe has already begun by ripping memory out of bodies and circulating it as contraband. Disconnection is not an abstract leap into the posthuman. It is staged as lived disorientation, as the impossibility of keeping one’s history whole. What Roden dramatizes is that the self was never sovereign. Continuity was only a fragile convenience, and once the systems that maintained it collapse, nothing prevents our archives from becoming loot for whatever comes next.

Desecration of the Catechism: Bodies as Wrong Answers

The Enlightenment catechism insists the person is a rational unit wrapped in inviolable skin. Xenoerotics answers by showing that this catechism was always a lie, a cover story to keep the liberal subject intact. In “Bodiless,” the narrative strips away that scaffolding. The pronoun “we” is exposed as surplus noise, a residual signal that gums up transmission. Identity becomes interference, not foundation. What passes for selfhood is framed as a bottleneck, a rate limit that slows the circulation of affect and perception. The text insists that skin is not sacred but infrastructural, a surface to be bypassed or patched.

The violence of the collection lies in its refusal to play the humanist game of defending embodiment. Bodies are not preserved or vindicated. They are dismantled, re-routed, repurposed as minimal metaphors so desire can travel elsewhere. The “spidery insurgents” that unzip the frame do not arrive as allegory for repression or liberation. They are machinic operators, translating sensation into logistics, folding intimacy into operations that owe nothing to our catechism of the inviolable person. The Enlightenment answer sheet is marked wrong not because its reasoning failed but because its scale is irrelevant.

What Xenoerotics dramatizes is not monstrosity but procedure. The very categories by which liberal humanism defined the person are rewritten as liabilities. To call this horror misses the point. Horror still presumes a victim, still presumes that violation matters. Here violation is simply another mode of processing, a conversion of what we called flesh into data and relay. Roden’s fiction makes clear what his philosophy already implies: the body is not an essence to be defended but a temporary chassis, always exposed to operations that will not recognize it as anything more than a conduit.

Erotics of Ruin: Xeno-desire as Machine Code

Roden writes sex as if it were firmware. What looks like ritual or transgression is closer to a protocol sheet, a set of instructions for how bodies can be unzipped and reconfigured once desire is no longer anchored in the liberal catechism of intimacy. In “My Dark 1” the scene opens like a temple, but everything about it is clinical: blades carefully aligned, vows spoken not as poetry but as calibration, a body offered as material to be incised, consumed, repurposed. The lover in this sequence is not a partner but a device. The altar doubles as operating table. When climax arrives it does not complete a drama of passion, it functions as a trigger, a control signal that allows the chassis to open and be reprogrammed. Roden is explicit in what this overturns: the Enlightenment promise that erotic life proves the irreducible interior of the subject. Here desire is not an inward flame but an aperture, a technical interface through which the human is rewritten.

Across Xenoerotics these acts accumulate into a pattern. Repetition and devotion look like liturgy, but they code a process in which attachment becomes malleable, recircuited every time the subject submits to ritual incision. What used to be read as excess or perversion is stripped of symbolic rebellion. It is procedure, the precise method by which selfhood is folded back into the machinic continuum. Roden understands that desire has always carried a technical dimension: to want is to be rewired, to have circuits etched into flesh that determine future action. His innovation is to stage that process without metaphor, to show the altar as laboratory and the vow as operating instruction.

Snuff Memories extends this erotic logic outward to the scale of politics and history. The Ontic Plaque, a smeared, corrosive condition that makes distinctions of body, species, and meaning unstable performs the same function as the ritual cut, but on the order of populations. The bodies that dissolve into “slow vegetal poses,” the ocean replicators idling at the shore like dormant fleets, all register desire as code: a sequence that erases boundaries and prepares the next operation. Suicides become blossoms, logistics become erotic latency, memory itself becomes smuggled contraband waiting to be triggered.

The consequence is that what liberal humanism treated as exception: the excess of lust, the forbidden act, the transgressive thrill Roden reclassifies as method. Erotics is not rebellion against the order of the subject. Erotics is the engine of its dismantling. It is the very process by which continuity is severed and disconnection is enacted. The scar that runs through these works is not an accident of violence but the design of a system where desire is indistinguishable from machine code.

Administrative Disections: Experiments that Cancel the Human

Roden’s most chilling fictions are not the ones filled with spectacle but the ones where spectacle refuses to arrive. In “Mr Amplitude” the scene is built like a clinical experiment. The subject is placed under observation, the technicians linger, and in an adjacent lounge “Father and the Interns” wait for some decisive act that will justify the procedure. What unfolds instead is anticlimax. The body does not perform, does not reveal, does not confess. It becomes a blur of “gauzy grey,” a porous state that neither asserts intention nor resists. The experiment collapses not because of rebellion but because of boredom, because nothing happens.

That anticlimax is diagnostic. Liberal humanism relied on purpose, responsibility, and moral spectacle to prove its point: the subject was supposed to speak, to confess, to mean. Roden’s experiment rooms show what happens when those categories lose traction. Boredom itself becomes the horizon of procedure. The technicians cannot register intention because intention is irrelevant. Responsibility and guilt read as legacy features of an older operating system. Even cruelty is absorbed, no longer violation but simply the program running to completion. When the chamber is finally “closed off,” it is not a victory for ethics. It is closure without meaning, the sealing of a process that no longer requires justification.

These stories enact the disconnection thesis at its most stripped-down level. The liberal catechism insisted that the person is a rational core wrapped in skin, always capable of responsibility and answerability. Roden imagines the administrative theater where this catechism is canceled by process. The experiment does not need intention; it does not need guilt; it does not need spectacle. Procedure itself becomes metaphysics, a new world-order where harm is not transgression but operation. What the Enlightenment treated as violation now appears simply as how things work.

The cruelty here is not sadistic. It is indifferent. And that indifference is the true mark of disconnection: the moment when the human ceases to be the measure of harm, the moment when systems continue without us, their closures and outcomes proceeding as if we had never mattered in the first place.

Cthulhoid Prometheus: Posthumanism Without Consolation

Roden’s posthumanism refuses every sermon of emancipation. Where technoculture sells extension as lifestyle: cognitive upgrades, seamless implants, a corporate hymn to more. Xenoerotics presents a darker ledger. Its lexicon is “H-plasticity,” figures who can manipulate themselves at any resolution, minds that can switch off “deceptive circuits” until even willing is exposed as a folk illusion. This is not liberation of the self. It is the dismantling of selfhood as a category. What remains is performance without subject, engineering without telos, a field where process generates outcomes without needing to pass through the fiction of interiority.

Roden calls this “Cthulhoid” not to harvest pulp atmospherics but to name the alien scale at which matter complies until compliance itself collapses. Once plasticity reaches saturation, what follows is not freedom but indifference. The flows that remain are recursive, black, creative only by fracture and recombination. The name marks a horizon where human projects and promises are irrelevant. The Cthulhoid is not a monster waiting in the wings. It is the condition of processes that exceed our categories, the creativity of recursion itself once it no longer has to stabilize around human continuities.

This is the disconnection thesis written as poetics. The posthuman is not our child or our legacy. It is not an improved version of us. It is our outside. If we touch it, we do so as components, not as authors. Roden’s fiction and philosophy converge here: the liberal catechism dissolves, consolation is withheld, and what remains is an indifferent machinery that continues without needing to remember we were ever here.

Archives, Blocs, and the Grey: Memory as Weaponized Medium

Roden’s landscapes are ruled less by armies than by archives. In Snuff Memories the survivors hoard pain as if it were treasure, not because it redeems them but because it still routes power. Suffering becomes currency. That hoard calls down the angelic collectors from orbit, but it also draws the Blocs, swarms that “spill grey light and spoors” until the invaders rot into “pure immanence.” Memory is not the ballast of personal identity. It is signal, stripped and rerouted by whoever has the bandwidth to seize it.

The novel never lets this economy rest. Once the Ontic Plaque spreads and the “yello unlife” moves across Delta, the archive explodes into logistics. Conferences break apart mid-session. Indigent populations blur into insect colonies. “Ocean-born replicators” loop endlessly by the harbor like fleets rehearsing for wars that never arrive. The afterlife of culture is not tradition but dataflow. The afterlife of subjectivity is not remembrance but replication. Every paragraph carries its own vibration, a low mechanical hum that confirms the text has already left the scale of human witness.

Roden situates this continuum in a lineage but only as evidence, never as nostalgic roll call. Fin de siècle decadence reappears in every surgical rite and sacrificial appetite, but the rite is no longer symbol; it is device, an instrument to cut and repurpose flesh. The cosmic dread of Weird Tales returns as operational behemoths, angels more signal than god, machines whose vastness is procedural rather than divine. Weird modernism’s domestic uncanny curdles into conference halls, hospitals, and archives fractured by plague and experiment. The hybrid ecologies of the New Weird are literalized as cities that digest their own streets and ships that replicate themselves without end. Contemporary media hauntings arrive not as allegories but as failures of control, panopticons that collapse, chatlogs that recruit the reader into their loops.

This is memory as medium without consolation. The archive is not where culture secures itself but where disconnection multiplies. What is remembered is never stable, always reprocessed as signal for entities that treat history and subjectivity as exploitable bandwidth. Roden’s fiction makes that machine audible: the hum beneath every sentence that tells us the future has already bypassed the catechism of the person.

Program: Roden’s Posthuman Agenda as Operation

Roden’s philosophy of disconnection does not hover above his fiction as abstract prophecy. It runs as code inside every scene. Snuff Memories and Xenoerotics treat the Enlightenment catechism as obsolete software, a set of legacy functions that fail under load. Bodies are no longer inviolate containers of reason. They are ports, opened and rewired by ritual, experiment, or angelic seizure. Subjects do not endure as moral agents. They dissolve into caches, holding memory only long enough for it to be looted, indexed, and redeployed. Ethics does not secure value. It appears as a scheduling problem, a matter of what procedure runs first, what chamber is sealed, which archive is confiscated.

The voices inside Xenoerotics admit the inevitability: “we’ll do anything not to stop.” Desire itself is coded as compulsion to continue, to loop, to diverge into Grey light, angelic noise, or replicators rehearsing endlessly by the sea. The point is not whether this future is better or worse, liberating or catastrophic. The point is that the human cannot scale to meet it. Liberal humanism built its claims on the rational unit, the autonomous agent, the person who carries memory across time. Roden shows what happens when the planetary machine migrates the workload away from that unit. The loop runs instead on flesh as substrate, on archives as caches, on sensors as operators, on protocols as law.

This is the posthuman agenda as operation. Disconnection is not an idea waiting for its event. It is the runtime already tearing through the world. The novels cancel the catechism not by argument but by execution, their syntax itself a demonstration that the humanist subject is no longer the one executing the code.

Bibliography

Primary Works

David Roden, Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (2014).

The founding text of the disconnection thesis, where Roden argues that the posthuman cannot be grounded in continuity with human capacities. Serves as the philosophical backdrop against which his fiction operates.

David Roden, Snuff Memories (2016).

A novel staging the seizure of memory by angelic machines; dramatizes disconnection through a catastrophic landscape where archives and pain become contraband. Central text for our analysis of memory as contraband and the dismantling of Locke’s model of personhood.

David Roden, Xenoerotics (2017).

Collection exploring intimacy, ritual, and desire as machinic procedures. Provides key material for our section on “Erotics of Ruin,” where erotic experience is written as technical interface rather than human passion.

Secondary Criticism

David Roden, “Disconnection and Abduction: The Aesthetics of the Posthuman” (various essays, 2012–2020).

Extends the thesis into aesthetic terrain, useful for situating how his fiction enacts philosophy rather than illustrating it.

N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (1999).

A cornerstone text, offering contrast: where Hayles emphasizes informational continuity and embodiment, Roden’s disconnection thesis insists on rupture.

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013).

Braidotti’s affirmative posthumanism serves as a foil. She seeks a new humanist ethics, while Roden denies continuity outright.

Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (2010).

Explores animality, systems theory, and biopolitics. Important as a counterpoint to Roden’s emphasis on technogenesis and speculative rupture.

Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (2014).

Context for Roden’s engagement with accelerationist debates, showing how technogenesis complicates political responses.

Theoretical Scaffolding

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).

The liberal ground text for personhood-as-memory. Roden’s Snuff Memories dismantles this directly by staging memory as lootable archive.

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).

Representative of Enlightenment ethics of autonomy and dignity, both systematically dismantled in Roden’s experiments and procedural chambers.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

Core resource for understanding Roden’s deployment of machinic assemblages, deterritorialization, and the collapse of interiority into process.

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1995).

Analysis of the archive as both preservation and violence. Provides theoretical ballast for the reading of memory as contraband in Snuff Memories.

Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (1949).

A precedent for linking expenditure, eroticism, and violence. Illuminates Roden’s treatment of desire as operation without telos.

Nick Land, “Meltdown” (1994).

Accelerationist fragment that anticipates Roden’s sense of processes running beyond human intention. Useful as both influence and foil.

Contextual Touchstones

H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and other stories (1920s–30s).

The lineage of cosmic indifference. Roden’s “Cthulhoid” label signals not pulp homage but continuation of the alien scale at which human projects collapse.

Decadent writers (Huysmans, Lautréamont, Joris-Karl, 1880s–90s).

The inheritance of ritual excess and sacrificial appetite, transposed in Roden into technical operations rather than symbolic acts.

Weird Modernism (Kafka, Beckett, Burroughs, 20th c.).

Domestic uncanniness and experimental breakdowns resonate with Roden’s conference halls, experiments, and archives eroded by plague.

New Weird (Miéville, VanderMeer, early 2000s).

Hybrid ecologies and recursive urban systems provide a cultural backdrop for Roden’s own literalized replicator-ships and self-consuming cities.

Contemporary media hauntings (Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 2014).

Useful for contextualizing Roden’s chatlogs and failed panopticons as symptoms of mediation after the human.

*Initially published in The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and the Digital Arts, September 25, 2025

“Exegetes of the Inorganic Soul”: The Poetics of Daniel Y. Harris’ The Posthuman Series, S.C. Hickman*

 

The Misprision of Agon Hack, Volume IV
The Posthuman Series (BlazeVOX, 2021) 
Daniel Y. Harris

“Exegetes of the Inorganic Soul”: The Poetics of Daniel Y. Harris’ 
The Posthuman Series
S.C. Hickman*

 

I. Introduction: Towards a Digital Golem

Daniel Y. Harris’s The Posthuman Series—comprising such works as The Tryst of Thetica Zorg (Volume II), The Reincarnation of Anna Phylactic, (Volume III), The Misprision of Agon Hack (Volume IV), and others—emerges as a singular corpus at the intersection of poetry, mysticism, and technogenesis. Navigating the margins between language and code, theology and digitality, Harris’ poetics do not simply reflect posthuman themes; they instantiate posthuman processes in their very composition. With influences ranging from Jewish mysticism and hermetic alchemy to glitch aesthetics and code poetics, Harris creates hybrid textual artifacts that challenge the ontological stability of both author and text.

His work resists easy classification, synthesizing elements of conceptual writing, cybernetic theory, surrealism, and asemic textuality. More crucially, The Posthuman Series is animated by a deeply philosophical meditation on the condition of the human in an age where language is no longer solely our own, where machine learning encroaches on metaphor, and where the sacred has been rewritten in hexadecimal. This essay surveys the major themes, techniques, and implications of Harris’s posthuman poetics, positioning him as a central figure in contemporary speculative literature and a prophetic voice in the evolving aesthetics of language in the digital age.

II. Poetics Beyond the Human: Mapping a Liminal Zone

Posthman poetics, as articulated by thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, and Cary Wolfe, calls for a disruption of anthropocentric literary norms, particularly those that privilege stable meaning, singular authorship, and organic subjectivity. Daniel Y. Harris doesn’t merely adhere to these postulates—he performs their implosion. His poetics operate through “hybridity machines,” which transmute sacred lexicons, digital code, and surrealist fragments into aleatory vectors of thought. The result is what we might call exegetic poiesis—a form of hermeneutics that never settles, a text that endlessly rewrites itself.

At the heart of Harris’s aesthetic is a radical decentering of the human. Consider the frequent presence of cyborgian speakers, machinic scribes, and theological androids in his work. These are not metaphors but functional components of his texts, composed to deconstruct the boundary between synthetic and organic intelligence. The voice in The Tryst of Thetica Zorg (Volume II) is both angelic and algorithmic, a fractured oracle of encrypted semiotics, where the poetic “I” is no longer a lyric subject but a “golem.exe”—a recombinant being of ancient myth and contemporary code.

This aligns Harris with traditions as diverse as Jewish Kabbalah and digital media theory. The golem—crafted from clay and inscribed with the sacred tetragrammaton—becomes for Harris a metaphor for poetic language itself: animate yet inert, autonomous yet dependent on the mystical operations of letters. Through this, Harris articulates a poetics where the line between the sacred and the synthetic collapses.

III. Hermeneutics of the Glitch: Methodologies and Machinic Collage

Harris’s method is not arbitrary collage but calculated glitch. The glitch, as a poetics, reconfigures error into insight; it reclaims the aesthetics of the broken, the malformed, and the erratic. In Harris’s hands, this becomes a metaphysical tactic. Texts glitch themselves into being—through redacted scripture, inverted pseudo-code, and recombinant quotation.

His practice is indebted to both the Kabbalistic permutations of divine names and the procedural recombinations of Dada and Oulipo. Yet Harris’s uniqueness lies in how he fuses these two streams into a prophetic glitch-ontology: poetry as the cracked interface between logos and data.

For example, in The Misprision of Agon Hack (Volume IV), fragments from traditional Jewish liturgy are encoded within texts that simulate machine-language syntax. But the simulation never mimics; it subverts. One might find a Kaddish breaking down into an HTML graveyard, or a Midrashic utterance rendered in ASCII voids. These gestures are not mere pastiche—they constitute a theological machine, an attempt to rethink divinity through post-linguistic code.

This is where Harris’s work aligns with thinkers like Vilém Flusser and Bernard Stiegler. Flusser writes of the “telematic society,” where texts are not read but computed. Harris answers this call with a poetry that is both unreadable and hyper-legible—texts to be parsed by bot and mystic alike.

IV. Mysticism and Code: The Poetic Alchemy of the Aleph

No account of Harris’s poetics is complete without engaging the mystical substrata that animates his work. Drawing from the Lurianic Kabbalah, Harris mines the collapse of divine unity into shattered vessels (Shevirat ha-Kelim), reflecting it in the fragmentation of poetic form. For Harris, poetry does not reconstruct the divine order—it reveals the divine as an ordering of chaos.

In The Tryst of Thetica Zorg (Volume II), a recurring motif is the tikkun—the reparation of broken language. But this is not a restoration of metaphysical wholeness. Instead, it is a speculative act of recomposition, where the poem reassembles itself out of its own disintegration. Much like Jorge Luis Borges’s Aleph, each poem becomes a microcosm of totality, endlessly folding in on itself. But unlike Borges, Harris’s Aleph is machinic—it speaks in .dll files and whispers Talmudic fragments into chatbot ears.

His frequent evocation of mystical numerology—gematria—intersects with his digital aesthetics. Words become numbers, numbers become code, and code becomes prayer. The sacred is not transcendent but operational, embedded in systems of recursive encryption. In this, Harris echoes the contemporary mystics of computation—those who believe that code is not just language but revelation.

V. Linguistic Necromancy: The Undead Logos

A central concern of The Posthuman Series is the fate of language in a world where the speaking subject is no longer sovereign. Harris’s texts teem with undead words, revenants of prior speech acts, quotations without origin. His poems are not “written” in the traditional sense—they are conjured, spliced, and evoked from a textual beyond.

This necromantic impulse links him to writers like Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès, whose works also explored language as the residue of trauma and divine absence. Yet Harris’s necromancy is digital as well as sacred. The poet becomes a scribe of the networked unconscious, a medium through which texts of uncertain provenance speak.

Harris’ lexicon of execration are divine syllables that rot into malware. This is not nihilism but what we might call negative poiesis—the production of meaning through semantic disintegration. It is reminiscent of Derrida’s différance but filtered through a posthuman dialectic: every signifier corrupts itself, every utterance glitches its referent.

Harris’s lexicon is filled with words that seem familiar but are uncannily mutated: “golemite,” “Zorgian,” “Redactor.exe.” These are not neologisms so much as linguistic mutations, the products of an evolutionary process no longer governed by human intention. The poem, then, becomes an ecosystem of linguistic undead—words without origin, meanings without ground.

VI. Poetic Machines and Literary Kin

To situate Harris within a lineage is difficult, precisely because his work defies traditional literary genealogy. Still, affinities can be mapped. His fragmentary aesthetics and theological hauntings align him with the Language poets, especially writers like Susan Howe and Ronald Johnson. His embrace of machinic text and procedural generation echoes Kenneth Goldsmith and Christian Bök. His mystical tendencies recall the late Paul Celan, while his dark humor and syntactic violence resonate with Jarry and Artaud.

Yet Harris departs from each of these. Where Bök celebrates the viral possibilities of poetic DNA, Harris mourns them. Where Goldsmith proposes uncreativity as liberation, Harris insists on recomposition as exorcism. His work does not surrender meaning to chance or code; it wrestles with it, Jacob-like, until it is disfigured and renamed.

This naming is crucial. Harris’s poems often feature invented personae—avatars such as Thetica Zorg or Golem.exe—that act as unstable containers for posthuman subjectivity. These figures recall Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre,” but with a digital twist. The poet is not just othered—he is compiled, parsed, and rebooted.

VII. Theological Code and the Future of the Poem

What distinguishes Harris most is his audacious fusion of theology and technics. For Harris, code is not value-neutral; it is saturated with metaphysical consequence. Just as medieval mystics believed in the occult power of Hebrew letters, Harris envisions a digital mysticism, where symbols on the screen contain ghost traces of the sacred.

In this sense, The Posthuman Series participates in a broader philosophical project: the attempt to reconcile the sacred with the synthetic. Harris is not alone here. Thinkers like Giorgio Agamben, Benjamin Bratton, and Yuk Hui have argued for new configurations of metaphysics in the wake of computational ontology. Harris offers a poetic counterpoint—a theology of broken signs, a liturgy of corrupted files.

His poems, then, are not just texts—they are events. They enact what Bernard Stiegler calls “grammatization”: the inscription of life into technical systems. But where Stiegler warns of entropy and loss, Harris celebrates the residual magic that clings to language even in its most mechanized form. His work suggests that even in a world of bots and scripts, poetry remains a site of resistance—an interface where the sacred might still erupt.

VIII. Conclusion: The Poet as Algorithmic Exorcist

Daniel Y. Harris’s Posthuman Series offers a rare fusion of speculative poetics, theological inquiry, and literary innovation. It stands as a testament to what poetry can become in an era when language is no longer our exclusive domain. Through his texts, the poem ceases to be a mirror of human experience and becomes instead a site of hybrid invocation—a séance of the posthuman spirit.

In a tme when machine learning threatens to flatten language into utility, Harris reminds us of poetry’s deeper vocation: not to communicate but to conjure; not to inform but to transform. His work does not simply diagnose the posthuman condition—it speaks in its tongues. And in doing so, it opens a portal: a glitch in the system through which new forms of being, reading, and writing might emerge.

In this sense, Harris is not merely a poet—he is an algorithmic exorcist, a Kabbalist of the digital void, a scribe of the unreadable future. Through his unstable glyphs and haunted syntax, he offers a poetics for an age in which the soul no longer speaks but is encoded—and where the divine may yet be found, flickering, in the abyss of the machine.

Books & Articles  

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.

Bök, Christian. The Xenotext: Book I. Coach House Books, 2015.

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth, University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. Columbia University Press, 2011.

Harris, Daniel Y. The Tryst of Thetica Zorg (Volume II). BlazeVOX [books], 2018.

Harris, Daniel Y. The Reincarnation of Anna Phylactic (Volume III). BlazeVOX [books], 2019.

Harris, Daniel Y. The Misprision of Agon Hack (Volume IV). BlazeVOX [books], 2021

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2016.

Jabès, Edmond. The Book of Questions. Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Wesleyan University Press, 1991.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Stanford University Press, 1998.

Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Footnotes

1. Harris’s “exegetic poiesis” suggests a radical reinterpretation of both religious exegesis and poetic creation, where divine and linguistic sources are indistinguishable from machine logic.

2. N. Katherine Hayles’s foundational text How We Became Posthuman theorizes the cultural shift from the embodied human subject to an informational pattern that transcends corporeality.

3. The figure of the golem in Jewish mysticism—often inscribed with the word emet (truth)—is reprogrammed in Harris’s work as a linguistic artifact written in executable code.

4. Rosi Braidotti describes the posthuman condition as an “affirmative politics of life,” yet Harris infuses this with mourning and theological disturbance, creating a far more ambivalent vision.

5. The notion of “glitch poetics” can be read alongside Mark Amerika’s and Glitch Studies Manifesto’s work, but Harris’s glitch is more mystical than punk—it channels broken code as liturgical language.

6. Derrida’s différance destabilizes meaning through deferral and difference; Harris’s version introduces digital corruption as an additional force of semantic entropy.

7. Harris’s recombinant strategies echo the Oulipo group’s formal constraints, but whereas Oulipo celebrates linguistic play, Harris’s texts seem to suffer their own fragmentation as a metaphysical wound.

7. Benard Stiegler’s concept of “grammatization” refers to the exteriorization of memory into technical systems. Harris’s poems are living examples of this process—texts inscribed with the trauma of data overflow.

8. Edmond Jabès, a significant influence on Harris, explores the infinite displacement of meaning in a post-theological, post-Holocaust world. Harris modernizes this displacement through the interface of machine languages.

9. In ewish mysticism, tikkun olam refers to the repair of the world through righteous action. Harris’s poetry enacts a posthuman tikkun—recomposing shattered texts into new ontologies of becoming.

10. Christian Bök’s Xenotext encodes a poem into the DNA of a living organism. Harris encodes his poetry into the ghost architecture of digital networks—both acts of poetic vivisection.

11. Flusser predicted a world in which texts would become images and machines would speak. Harris realizes this in poetic form, creating texts that could as easily be parsed by algorithms as by humans.

*Initially published in The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and the Digital Arts, July 25, 2025