Philosophy
I don’t really update this blog too regularly. If you want to read more of my recent writing, here are some links. I write occasional articles for New Frame, the organisation I work for: https://www.newframe.com/writer/aragorn-eloff/ There are a few recent pieces up on Medium: https://medium.com/@aragorneloff If academic writing is your thing, I have some stuff… Read More »
“Nothing more can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event.” – Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” – Ursula Le Guin, The… Read More »
I recently presented at Earth Animal Communities – a conference organised by the Institute for Critical Animal Studies in Africa, of which I am a member. Here is the abstract of the paper I based the presentation on. The full paper is downloadable here. Abstract In recent years ethical philosophy has taken up a sustained… Read More »
You may not yet be aware of it, but just recently all the world’s governments – which, it turns out, were just a cover for the corporate global elite – were shut down. We the people are now the rightful and equal owners of all the titles and rights of these corporations and all their… Read More »
The 20th century was the century that trusted in the future. Or, as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi – veteran of the 1977 Italian post-workerist movement and founder of the legendary pirate radio station Radio Alice – states in the opening pages of his newest work, ‘After the Future’, “Liberalism and social democracy, nationalism and communism, and… Read More »
It is rare to discover a book as trenchant, poetic and philosophically profound as The Garden of Peculiarities. Originally published in Spanish in 2002, translated into English in 2005 and now re-released by local alternative publisher Missing Books, this short work by Chilean anarchist and radical environmentalist Jesús Sepúlveda is nothing less than a manifesto… Read More »
When we look out at the sky at night, we’re also looking back into the past. The light from distant stars takes so long to reach us that we cannot really be sure that, in reality, they’re still there. Although the myriad things that surround us on Earth – rocks and rose bushes and… Read More »
I heard it yet again the other day: ‘if you’re not a socialist by age 19, you have no heart. If you’re not a capitalist by age 29, you have no brain.’ What fascinates me about this ‘truism’ – and those who spout it – is its sense of utter resignation. Not only are we… Read More »
This piece was originally published on Thoughtleader.co.za in early 2011. When I visit a restaurant, my opening line to the waiter is usually ‘Hi, I’m vegan. What do you suggest?’ What I really mean when I say this is: ‘Hi, I was just wondering…I don’t eat meat and I don’t want anything with butter in… Read More »
This is a response to Lierre Keith’s argument in The Vegetarian Myth, a poorly researched, fallacious and dishonestly argued anti-vegan screed. It was originally written for www.thevegetarianmyth.com, a never-completed crowdsourced response to Keith’s book. Inconsistent animist ethics Keith defends her position with a confused animist-type ethics that veers unclearly and inconsistently between hylozoism (everything… Read More »