A Last Elegy for a Dying Species

Описание: A Last Elegy for a Dying Species examines the work of Kenji Siratori as a diagnostic literature of the posthuman condition, arguing that his writing functions less as representation than as infection. Framed through posthumanist theory, electronic literature, and necro-semiotics, the text positions Siratori not as an author in the traditional sense but as a generative process—an epistemological machine whose texts operate as time-machines, accelerating readers into nonhuman futures. Against optimistic narratives of technological progress, the work advances a darker thesis: that humanity was never a stable, autonomous category, but always already machinic, technical, and in mutation.

Central to this analysis is the concept of language as parasite. Siratori’s texts do not communicate meaning but attach, seep, and proliferate within the reader, transforming language into a vector of contagion. Meaning collapses not through absence but through excess, producing what the text terms scar logic: a necrotic grammar in which words ooze, thicken, and return as wounded forms rather than transparent signs. Reading becomes exposure rather than interpretation, and the reader is reconfigured as biological substrate rather than critical subject.

The work further develops a xenopoetic framework in which language behaves as an arthropod system—swarming, recursive, and indifferent to human intentionality—while visual and textual glitch aesthetics are interpreted as ritualized breakdowns of form that reveal the body as a carrier of entropy. The concluding movement reframes posthumanism not as transcendence or doom, but as immanent metamorphosis: an acceptance of becoming-other, where the death of the human is understood as a generative passage rather than an end. In this sense, the elegy is not mournful but lucid—an acknowledgment that what is dying may be precisely what has been holding us back.

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IPGL logo design by Zoetica Ebb; the concepts of psychogametous lifeforms and the Institute for Psychogametous Life were introduced by Ebb in her 2022 book, Chimeric Herbarium. ‪@Zoetica‬