Books published by Atropos Press

What Edmund Burke identifies as the sublime in human experience, the arts, and science has been“overthrown” by a new cult-like religion of Scientism. As a secular religion, this new cult structures itselfon the old framework of the Christian religion, in particularly Roman Catholicism, which it attempts todisplace. While it does indeed depend upon the discoveries and advances of science to evangelize itsmessage, it relies chiefly on belief, manipulation, and coercion as much as did its predecessor, but withentertainment and consumerism rather than great art and holy ritual as its expression. It is supported bya lesser cult: The Cult of Mediocrity, represented by the creators of entertainment content, theeducation system, government, and the financial industry. Its basis is largely commercial, as its financeneeds are infinite. However, to create the right environment for its infinite expansion, it must workclosely with government and the banking system in various effective ways to achieve its end: which isthe creation of the Apex Consumer, the super-consumer helplessly indebted while equally helplesslyaddicted to the mediocre and toxic distractions the amnion offers in place of the Sublime. The collectiveresult is the “amnion,” matrix, or technosphere. It is a de facto false world that strives to be “more real”than reality to the consumer. Consequently, the mass of consumers have already begun to eschew the“real” world of cause and effect, human relations and action, and nature and the sublime. Instead, theyhave elected to adopt the amnion’s doctrine that everything good comes “in the future” – includingmedical immortality -- if they can only keep up with the monthly payments on the debt they have takenon, fatally, through the instrument of the promissory note. The exegesis of this work relies on what itdefines as the “world-historic” culture of the collective voices of those who valued the sublime above allelse. These voices include the literary work of European and American Romantic authors, French andGerman philosophers, artists, scientists, mathematicians, logicians, and, to a significant degree, thephilosophical and semiotic work of American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist CharlesS. Peirce.

Emotional Permaculture is a philosophy of relation focused on the sense of Being With. At once poetic, narrative, and conceptual, Emotional Permaculture blends the realms of art, philosophy, and psychology in order to shed light on the general dynamics of relation - that which influences perception, communication, and action - in the private sphere, as well as the shared world. Loosely based upon the conceptual framework of Permaculture as articulated by ecologists Mollison and Holmgren, Emotional Permaculture acts as a lens through which to view the relational landscape, shifting the perception of personal ecology to reveal all interactions as imbedded within the active meditation of a shared world. Cultivating relationships that create energy, rather than drain it, opens pathways for sustainable collective evolution, as well as profound personal development. This labor of love is a humbling but rewarding endeavor, a living beating heart of truth. For while this is a metaphor of a garden, it is also one that is alive and growing, evidence of both the trials and beauties that come to pass in the garden of relation.

Queerness has always been the Arab world’s secret pleasure growing in privacy and secrecy as institutionalized heterosexism has marginalized it and made it forbidden to exist.Yet it still grows forcing a wave of consciousness-raising within Arab culture.Queer Arab Martyr explores the violence, secrets and fetishes unique to the Arab world unveiling the intersectionality of identity and body politics, religion and ethnicity. The book collects short emotional ethnographies to describe the sexualities, body politics, and of course, the sex of queer sexual minorities in the Arab world. The book also accompanies these short stories with beautiful illustrations by the author himself.Access to queer representation and language through global online networks and dating apps has created a new wave of urbanized Arab queers that are negotiating their visibility and sexual orientation with the older, more conventional Arab generation, exasperating an already abysmal generational gap.

The First Thermodynamic Law states that energy neither goes out of being nor comes into being. Consciousness is not dependent on the existence of matter, space, or time, although it interacts with these variables. As a fundamental force, dark energy would retain its form regardless of space or time. Inspired by Knud Ejler Løgstrup's approach of looking at the whole of nature, cosmophenomenology integrates cosmology and quantum physics to examine the hard problem of consciousness, the problem in quantum physics of why a wave changes to a particle, the alterity and harmony of consciousness as dark energy, and the necessary relation quantum physics has to multiple worlds-topics phenomenology alone is inadequate to examine. The Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff holds that consciousness continues in a quantum state after death. This theory is compared to Leibniz's Monadology and Deleuzian multiplicity, and Blanchot's neuter. The view of death as a liminal state is discussed.

This treatise offers a novel and comprehensive approach to re-reading Heinrich von Kleist's works, with an in-depth focus on the eight dramas. It unravels his texts' overt textual fabric and isolates and de-codifies the covert thematic strands of which they are shown to be systematically composed. It demonstrates that these individual textual strands express and embody their author's main political and personal life pursuits and that his works function as his vehicles and mechanisms for the active pursuit of his agendas, thereby establishing them as being not only auto-biographical but indeed eminently auto-, as well as hetero-, poÏetical. This treatise demonstrates that it is always possible in principle, and usually in practice, to eliminate those ambivalences, dissonances and incommensurabilities that apparently mar Kleist's texts and that have long preoccupied and puzzled the Kleist-Forschung, showing them to comprise mere textual surface phenomena brought about by his intricate interweaving, within a single textual fabric, of multiple heterogenous thematic threads. In rigorously unravelling these threads and thus decrypting the texts, this book demystifies Kleist and confirms him to have been among that exceedingly rare breed of writers of whom he himself once wrote that they master both metaphor and formula in equal measure.