Last year—two years ago?—Cássia Siqueira tweeted: “Better Call Saul S06E07.” I was mystified, but didn’t ask her what it was about. I’d never watched the TV show. But anything Cássia wrote, wherever she wrote it, however cryptic, deserved investigation. So I watched the whole show, knowing I was looking for the meaning of her tweet. I arrived upon it not knowing that I was actually watching the sixth season’s seventh episode, but I knew it when it hit me: it starts with a repetitive monologue by a person pushing shopping carts around a parking lot, claiming ad nauseam “I Am A Philosopher.” Some months earlier we were discussing “how and when can one claim to be a philosopher?.” Cássia—with all her skill and briskness and curiosity, beyond the technical credentials she’d been gathering in the last four years or more—doubted she could claim this of herself. I offered her my suggestion: I think that when one actively engages with philosophy, one is being a philosopher. Quite broad, quite narrow. But in tandem with a universalist stance we both share. In that sense, I do think a 4-year old can be a philosopher, maybe even more so than those who add ‘PhD’ to their Twitter handle. It’s not like “my 4-year old could’ve painted this”—more like a 4-year old will ask a question when many will content themselves with an answer.
This will be, I think, an eulogy for my late friend Cássia Siqueira. As I write this line I am not yet sure of the shape this will take. I am aware it was possibly suggested by reading a transcription of her friend J.-P. Caron’s words to the same effect, read at the beginning of the latest meeting of the CPC (Circuito de Pesquisas Contemporâneas—Contemporary Research Circuit), an online, transdisciplinary cohort of persons interested in accelerationism, philosophy, transfeminism (and much more!) mostly based in Brazil. Cássia was an important participant in this group. I will not compete with those physically or geographically closer to her in terms of the intensity of coping with her absence or comparatively measuring the sense of loss and the number of memories. This, because I think these are simply qualitative—myriad determinate instances of interacting with a friend who is present, in some way or another, in our lives. In that sense, incomparable. In another, beautiful, wealthy way, the same. With this in mind, I retained J.-P.’s words as more of a program than the sort of discombobulating eulogy I am enacting:
From the question Who is Cássia Siqueira?, I want to proceed to the question What is Cássia Siqueira?. The question is not an objectification. I’d say it is exactly the contrary. (. . .) That Cássia becomes to us an event and a mission seems self-evident to me. (my translation)1
I met Cássia soon after enrolling at the New Centre for Research and Practice, fascinated with neo-rationalism and xenofeminism. More or less around then we started following each other on Twitter. I quickly realized that Cássia actively, persistently posed those questions to herself. The affinity was instantaneous: in the Platonic framework, here was a soul-mate in the World Soul; someone who, in the broadest and narrowest possible senses, was set out to ask how things—selves included—hung together, in the broadest and narrowest possible senses. I borrowed Wilfrid Sellars’s idiom about the aim of philosophy in order to claim just that: I had met someone performing the aim of philosophy. Earlier today I recombined some aphorisms of mine to further claim that “a philosopher should become a system,” then that “a person should become a philosopher should become a system,” then—more narrowly and broadly—that “a system should become a philosopher if it should become a person.” The first time we collaborated, if I remember well, was more or less about questions surrounding this theme—a joint presentation for Mattin’s seminar on alienation. Right now, I just realized that this is not quite—it should really be stressed—about remembering Cássia, about holding myself captive to the joy of the cool stuff we did together. I want it to be yet another turn to our mentor J.-P.’s questions: pursuing his investigations of Nelson Goodman on art, of interest to us three as artists as well, perhaps it may be more appropriate to ask “When is Cássia Siqueira?,” in order to emancipate Cássia out of ordered time and recognize her project—her—as diachronic, returning to us from the future. A further remembrance may platform this: after reading her essay on Mattin’s My First 30 Min. On TikTok, I asked her to let me publish a portuguese translation in print. The very same essay touches upon what we were doing: meeting online halfway across the world, transforming our determinate sorts of disenfranchisement into something we could make further intelligible, alienating ourselves in the process, no matter if it was responding to each other on Twitter, providing supportive enthusiasm for each other’s endeavours, collaborating in a diagram for class, trying to grasp computer science among friends late into the night. In this specific regard—bootstrapping alienation—Cássia is coming back from the future right now: many times, her love for intelligibility took her many to exquisitely uncharted corners of the form of the inhuman. The core of my admiration for her mainly revolves around the realization that in these instances I asked myself “Is she really going to fuss around with that?” and then recognized that such doubt in myself can only come from fear. One affinity we share is the interest in the emancipatory potential of Reza Negarestani’s infantile schematism, the autodidactic plasticity required for ever revising the categories of the rational, for revising reason itself. For this one requires an absolute rejection of fear. How can one ask questions if still negatively constrained by timidity? How can one ask questions if not enacting radical honesty? If and whenever I emulate the circumstances in which Cássia realized herself in this fashion, Cássia is alienated from the future into such deed. It won’t be me. There and then is the event, in the space of possibilities made intelligible through Cássia’s questions. She is, to my mind, a very brave person. Just today I named someone else as model for me, in the sense of “a philosopher is their systematising” (in the infinitive, yes). It becomes helpful again, when I claim Cássia is a model to me. While perfectly aware I cannot generalize that everyone is a model to me, I can take it somewhat universally. First, in order to avoid any appearance of elitism. Then, to buttress the suggestion that models are for breaking—sometimes the models (kill yr idols, your Self among them), sometimes what they model. Once I wrote an essay titled “Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Emulators.” A juvenile attempt at a sort of Carnapian/Malaspinian pedagogy—something which Cássia did activate with methodological brilliance in her essay “Towards the subversion of the rough ground.” I am still fond of my essay’s title, though, because it compresses a bit of what I see in cherishing a model and using it for profound, bipolar, transformations: as opposed to simulation, emulation is open to contingency. In the former, there is no room for the intelligibility of error; whereas in the latter, error is the catalyst for determinately negating the model. The model breaks in its newfound limit; the modeled breaks—was Frankenstein’s chimaera a whole or the sum of its parts?—in its novel intelligibility. Beauty lies in this thin membrane where and when agency is reclaimed, when and where one proceeds beyond simulation and activates universality in oneself—necessarily activating the possibility of not being oneself. The Form of Abolition: this is what and when Cássia is, which, as she would observe, amounts to a radical—discrete in continuity, continuous in discreteness—subversion of heracliteanism.
The early demise of Cássia’s embodied personhood—but not her lifeforming (in the infinitive, yes)—leaves me with a new formulation of a question I ask of myself and every one; a question I think is the one asked proleptically by and to intelligence, out of love: When I model you, when is the error?
September 24, 2024
I Am A Philosopher
More Articles from &&&
A Mother Is Never Enough for Life on Mars: On Post-Planetary Ectogenesis
In her book Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture, Irina Aristarkhova discusses how the progress of feminist thought on pregnancy has often been impeded by its struggle against the oppressive hierarchies surrounding it: “Often, in feminist research, pregnancy was represented in the context of an impending struggle between mothers and medical and socio-cultural institutions that treated it as a means to an end: the child.” The task of her study is not to keep pregnancy within this “problematic” context for feminist politics, but to find ways of describing it that would make the process of species reproduction emancipatory for those who participate in it—primarily mothers, but also a multitude of other actors. This task is realized nonlinearly, and it runs through several stages. One needs, first, to see through the philosophical presuppositions of the pregnancy-organizing discourses of embryology and immunology, in order to dismantle the hostility toward mothers embedded in them. Conceptualizing reproductive practices in terms of hospitality rather than competition demands, next, a deep inquiry into how the foundational phenomenological relation of the self toward the other is modeled—for the oppressive realities women face within reproductive institutions build up from an under-conceptualized psychic economy. Art projects such as Virgil Wong and Lee Mingwei’s Male Pregnancy then exemplify reproductive practices modeled on the relation of hospitality. And finally, biotechnological capabilities and their material realities directly inform pregnancy as a discursive practice.
You Died, Subscriptions kept Renewing; You’re an Influencer Now!
The dead keep surfacing on the interface. A social media profile reappears under People You May Know, a birthday reminder fires for someone buried in the spring, a subscription renews against a card nobody thought to cancel, a playlist refreshes itself for no one.
The systems are not being callous, requiring a death already registered and then overruled. Strangely, nothing has yet registered. The addressee was never the one who died. It was the profile, the behavioral outer form, assembled from years of signaling, and the profile is now in perfect health again.
The living are currently addressed in the same form; death simply makes the separation of the thing and time easier to observe. A feed never overlaps perfectly with a whole life lived; it meets the signal, then rewards whatever performance it can classify. Users learn the lesson without needing to understand it. Some versions travel, others stall or disappear. Over time, this creates pressure toward a self that can revise itself at the system’s speed.
That training takes place inside an infrastructure (platforms, models, attention routes, finance, law), and the means of reproduction is owned. No one has to command the trajectory. Platforms set out to maximize engagement and predict conduct, which requires many users who can be addressed at scale. Because some forms of subjectivity are easier to measure and route than others, optimization selects for them effortlessly, almost as a side effect.
Sirat, Exocapital & Europe’s Beautiful Souls
I wish I could write an objective review of this movie, but the first third to half of it was a straight-out portrayal of a continental Western European working class subculture (teknival/French hardtek) that myself and many others grew up intimately familiar with, on a visceral, physical level: the complete illegality of it, the walls… Read More »
NO SHIT: Notes from Venice Biennale 2026
“In SEAWORLD VENICE, the promise of progress unfolds as a ‘Frankensteinesque’ dystopia: robot dogs wade through the rising water behind glass, acting as mechanical Cerberuses guarding a central sacrificial altar. Here, a performer lives within a tank sustained by body fluids contributed by the audience.” -Austrian Pavilion, Nora-Swantje Almes’s curatorship After the online introduction… Read More »
On Trump Defeating Communism, Again!
You must love our country. […] as we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack, a generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism. There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country […]… Read More »
Death in Venice
Before I went to Venice I thought I’d try a travel diary, but that’s not how I like to write and it’s what everyone does, i.e. deferring the responsibility of coming to any conclusion about the Biennale as a whole by giving a first-person account of how utterly chaotic preview week was. I wasn’t at… Read More »
Who Is Western Marxism Really For?
There is this letter Althusser wrote in 1962, to a woman he was seeing, where he just trashes Lenin. He is rereading Lenin on philosophy and he is basically going: god, this is weak. Amazing guy when it came to reading an actual situation, reading what was in front of him, but the second he… Read More »
Occult Perso-Punkism of Cyclonopedia
Nuqtavism was a heretical, atomist cosmology that emerged from within Islamic mysticism while simultaneously pushing it toward its limits. The endgame of Islamic esotericism was always the horrifying announcement that the mystic, through infinite cycles of ascetic self-creation and self-annihilation, had finally reached the highest point of abstraction, or tajarrud: the final release from materiality.… Read More »
Genealogy of Wokeism
Introduction The last thing most progressives think we need is another male writer complaining about “wokeism.” Why not talk about more important things? Wokeism has become somewhat of a floating signifier. Wokeism can mean different things to different people, with many people throwing the term around as a pejorative in highly inconsistent ways. However, many… Read More »
Paratypology: Towards a Scrap Theory of Form
1. To Sort I find myself at a furniture factory, in the seaming department, surrounded by the pneumatic humming of sewing machines. All around me, industrious hands are swift in joining odd parcels of hide, textiles and other soft surfaces according to flat templates. Although the individual steps they carry out are familiar to me,… Read More »
Socialism after Socialism, A Response to Conrad Hamilton
In the spirit of dialogue, I am responding to the observations in Conrad Hamilton’s recent expansive review of my book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. I will be concentrating on Hamilton’s three main claims, that there is a gap between the form and content of socvialism, invoking Marxist theories of struggle before coming down… Read More »
Biennialese Blues: Review of Whitney Biennial 2026
ARTISTS: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Kelly Akashi, Kamrooz Aram, Ash Arder, Teresa Baker, Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Zach Blas, Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien, Leo Castañeda, CFGNY, Nanibah Chacon, Maia Chao, Joshua Citarella, Mo Costello, Taína H. Cruz, Carmen de Monteflores, Ali Eyal, Andrea Fraser, Mariah Garnett, Ignacio Gatica, Jonathan González, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Kainoa Gruspe,… Read More »
No View from Nowhere: On Discourse, Différance & Functorial Semantics of Micro-Communities
This essay argues that natural language semantics admits no global orientation—no ‘view from nowhere’—but only local positions within psychoanalytically and sociologically embedded discourse communities. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of différance, I demonstrate that meaning is constitutively deferred across the differential play of signs, precluding any meta-linguistic standpoint from which all local meanings could be adjudicated.… Read More »
Liberalism Is Dead, Long Live Liberalism!
Matthew McManus’ The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism is a powerful attempt to merge two disparate traditions, parlaying reformist compromise into a coherent political program. It also rests on the assumption that socialism is inherently illiberal, an assumption that deserves to be questioned. While often hailed as the single-minded son of America, perhaps the best… Read More »
Luxury Activism: Art, Fashion & Capital
[This text was previously published by the author in Portuguese on Contemporânea Magazine — Ed.] I don’t want to work with fashion. Beauty must be preserved from capitalism. Fashion favours the escape into personal, private, selected, chosen space, as a form of false self-determination. Fashion reflects the fear of losing’ identity. — Thomas Hirschhorn The purposelessness… Read More »
The Questions Concerning the Ethics of AI
With recent articles in &&& concerning the status of what is or is not Marxism, I took it upon myself to write a piece that I consider firmly placed in that tradition. I am not being paid by the CIA, I promise. Furthermore, despite appearances, my article is not an article in the “ethics of… Read More »
The Best Ever Art Basel Review that Qatar Money Can Buy
During the Art Basel Qatar’s VIP preview of Sweat Variant’s durational performance My Tongue is a Blade on February 4, two special seats up in front of the stage stayed empty for a while. Empty with intent. People hovered, looked, and reconsidered occupying them in their head at the last minute like they were about… Read More »
SUPPORT THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION 2026!
SIGN THE STATEMENT HERE The past several weeks have borne witness to a bloodbath in Iran amidst images of systematic massacre and horrific abuses of power by the Iranian government against its own people. As a united front, we stand together to uphold the following convictions: 1- That the Islamic Republic of Iran must come… Read More »
Rhetoric vs Reality: Iranian Regime Is an Imperialist Project Preventing a Free Palestine!
Since its founding, the Islamic Republic of Iran has cultivated legitimacy by embedding itself within global progressive movements—particularly those oriented around anti-imperialism and racial justice. Rhetoric, repeated, obscures reality: the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) is an imperialist project that will not enable a free Palestine. The IRI is built on an expansionist doctrine resembling… Read More »
On State Collapse & Democide in Iran
1. Middle Eastern Islamisms and Islamists are reorganizing in a post-jihadi/takfiri Muslim/Arab world within their national boundaries. First of all, the Taliban’s path back to Afghanistan was facilitated by the USA. Afghan Islamists were swift in adopting a more Afghanistan-focused vision and dismantling any public state capacity, especially in social and women’s affairs, built under… Read More »
How Was This Monster Born? Contemplations on the Ontology of the Iranian Islamic Republic
By Asal Mansouri and Borna Dehghani, writing from Tehran How can survival turn into something shameful? How does breathing itself become a burden – one that a person no longer dares to carry, a weight that grows heavier by the moment, with no path of escape left open? What took place across Iran in January… Read More »
The Human Centipede II: Qatar & the Broker’s Cut
If my first The Human Centipede: A View From the Art World (2013) traced the art world as a closed alimentary circuit, this sequel begins where that circuit was sublimated into brokerage as a state-form with unmistakable political aspirations.[1] The same logic is now in the open for everyone to witness, wearing the grimace of… Read More »
الغای زیر ساختهای شیعه اسلام در ایران
ENGLISH VERSION در لحظهای که این سطور نوشته میشود، ایران با زخمی باز زنده است. جامعهٔ ایران یکی از تاریکترین مقاطع تاریخ معاصر خود را از سر میگذراند. دهها هزار نفر در خیابانها کشتار شدهاند؛ معترضانِ زخمی توسط نیروهای امنیتی از بیمارستانها ربوده میشوند؛ و اعدامها در زندانها به شکلی صنعتی ادامه دارد. خانوادهها آیینهای… Read More »
Abolition of Infrastructural Shia Islam in Iran
FARSI VERSION As I write this, Iran is an open wound. Iranians are living through one of the darkest moments of their country’s contemporary history. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands have been massacred in the streets; wounded protesters are being removed from hospitals by security forces, and executions are taking place on an industrial scale… Read More »
ایران، بزرگترین دردسر: دربارهٔ سکوتِ مزمنِ بخشی از چپِ معاصر
با چیزی آغاز میکنم که در نگاه اول شبیه یک حاشیهروی است، یک خاطرهٔ قدیمیِ تلویزیونی که زمانی لبخند روی صورتِ ما میآورد. اما همین خاطره، مدلِ فشردهای از یک واکنشِ سیاسی است که مدام در ایران تکرار میشود. وقتی جوانتر بودم، سریالی بود به نام «روزی روزگاری». یک پدیده شد و واقعاً هم عالی… Read More »