David
RodenSchism
Press2, 2021
The
Disconnection Machine: David Roden’s Posthuman FictionsS.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).
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
