Slime Dynamics [Paperback]

Through speculative philosophy and lurid cultural objects, Slime Dynamics explores the muck of life as a darkly vitalistic substance.Despite humanity? s gradual ascent from clustered pools of it, slime is more often than not relegatedto a mere residuethe trail of a verminous life form, the trace of decomposition, or an entertainingsynthetic materialthereby leaving its generative and mutative associations with life neatly removedfrom the human sphere of thought and existence. Arguing that slime is a viable physical and metaphysicalobject necessary to produce a realist bio-philosophy void of anthrocentricity, this text exploresnaturephilosophie, speculative realism, and contemporary science; hyperbolic representations of slimefound in the weird texts of HP Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; as well as survival horror films, videogames, and graphic novels, in order to present the dynamics of slime not only as the trace of lifebut as the darkly vitalistic substance of life.Benjamin Graham Woodard is a first year PhD student in Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His blog, Naught Thought, combines contemporary continental philosophy, evolutionary biology, and weird fiction towards constructing a theory of dark vitalism. He is also cofounder of the online collective Speculative Heresy, which serves as the American center and textual archive for Speculative Realism and Non Philosophy.?