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  1.  12
    Speed, demon! Accelerationism’s rhetoric of weird, mystical, cosmic love.Brian Zager - forthcoming - Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication.
    Accelerationism offers a theoretical stance towards capitalism that takes shape in various rhetorical guises. In general, these writings attempt to push through the boundaries imposed by capital while speeding off into unknown possible futures. While some articulations of this philosophy rely on traditional scholarly argumentation, others proceed along more obscure paths to envision a post-capitalist (and usually post-human) future. In this article, I focus on the latter approach by examining how some accelerationist works embrace occult poetics and subsequently align with (...)
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  2.  75
    Born under a bad sign: On the dark rhetoric of antinatalism.Brian Zager - 2018 - Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 9 (1):41-55.
    Offering a pointed response to the perennial question of being, those sympathetic to the philosophical posture of antinatalism proclaim the suffering of the world does not ultimately justify bringing life into it, consequently advancing a moral stance towards procreation. As this particular topic of conversation is unlikely to curry favor with a majority of interlocutors, the antinatalist-as-rhetor faces a seemingly Sisyphean task in issuing a harsh alternative to the more pervasive narrative espousing birth as an occasion for celebration. Cautious to (...)
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  3.  29
    And now I become its mouth: On Arthur Schopenhauer and weird ventriloquism.Brian Zager - 2019 - Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 10 (1):55-69.
    From Arthur Schopenhauer we can glean a characteristically moody perspective on the primordial condition of speaking and being spoken. Focusing on his dualistic view of the embodied subject as having to contend with the forces of both Will and presentation, in this article I argue that his philosophy construes communication as a sort of weird ventriloquism. Drawing on François Cooren’s proposed method of ‘ventriloqual analysis’, I re-examine Schopenhauer’s subject as a being that both animates and is animated by his strange (...)
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  4.  25
    Hailing black holes: Rhetorical realism in the age of hyperobjects.Brian Zager - 2021 - Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 12 (2):111-128.
    This article addresses the challenge philosophical realism poses to the field of rhetoric by exploring the possibility of symbolic communion with nonhuman entities. As a matter of framing, I invoke Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject to better understand the complexities of communicating with and about sublime nonhuman objects such as black holes. I then delineate how the stylistic modality of the weird best exploits the chasm between autonomous thingness and human presentation that is a primary source of consternation for (...)
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