going franciscan poverty mode and selling a good chunk of my wardrobe. much more to upload tomorrow (dresses, jeans, cashmere jumpers) so keep an eye on my Vinted. today’s uploads mostly beautiful shoes and lingerie vinted.co.uk/member/16217061…

The full programme for 'The Instant of My Death' — a symposium with Maya Pettersen, Jacob Phillips @counteredlogos, David Roden @turingcop, organised with Rose Lyddon @providenceluvr — is now online. (Sold out, alas.) 🎟️ verdur.in/event/the-instant-… Maya Pettersen THE ARTICULATION OF MORTALITY: SOLAR DEATH IN THE ṚGVEDA Pettersen’s presentation examines solarity, form, time, and death in early Vedic thought, and the paradoxes that arise between them. Focusing on Mārtāṇḍa, Uṣas, Vivasvat, and Yama, Pettersen will discuss how, in the Vedic cosmology, the Sun does not symbolize the cyclical rise and descent from life into death as rebirth, but inaugurates mortality by making existence visible, measurable, differentiated, and finite. Jacob Phillips CULTIVATING DEATH IN LIFE Countries which have legalised assisted dying usually begin with tight regulations around the practice, which are gradually weakened until it becomes a major cause of death within their populations. Rose Lyddon MARTYRDOM AND ESCHATOLOGY The persistence of martyrdom in early medieval theology was the definitive sign of eschatological escalation. A march towards ‘the end’ required the transformation of martyrdom into new types of sanctity. It gave rise to notions of ‘white martyrdom’ or ‘living martyrdom’ of virginity or asceticism after state persecution of Christians ceased. David Roden THE DEATH OF POSTHUMAN LIFE Posthumanism is often presented as a philosophy of life — life considered not from the perspective of the privileged human subject, but a vital process, extravagantly mutant, alive to joyful new affiliations and ‘cyborg’ couplings. Posthuman life, according to Rosi Braidotti, is intense and joyful. Understood this way, Posthumanism promises an egalitarian approach to our planetary existence, a basis for interspecies justice for which humans are no longer the privileged players on Earth.

Just announced: The Instant of My Death A symposium with Douglas Davies, Maya Pettersen, Jacob Phillips @counteredlogos, David Roden @turingcop, organised with Rose Lyddon. 📅 3 October, 2-6pm 🎟️ verdur.in/event/the-instant-… Contemporary attitudes to death range from denying its inevitability to expediting the end of life as one rational option among many. That these approaches coexist suggests that the conscious mind today cannot comprehend the thing itself. Yet death refuses to go gently and reasserts itself in our self-annihilatory unconscious pursuits. Even as a black hole, the instant of death is solar, hovering on the threshold of ecstasy.  What can standing at the threshold of death tell us about living? What will the human look like when death itself has been destroyed? How does self-destruction reveal death’s supernatural potential? And how can we speak about death at all when our lives are ordinarily distant from its reality? The symposium brings together multiple contemplative traditions, ranging from Vedic myth to accelerationism and from posthumanism to Christian eschatology. Between them, they grant the unthinkable instant of death a before and after.