Acknowledgements

Plato’s quote “something inserted between motion and rest… in no time at all” is from his dialogue “Parmenides.” The lyric “Until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard” is from Sheryl Crow’s song “All I Wanna Do.” Certain opinions of Monica’s regarding brains and computers find their precedent in Robert Epstein’s essay The Empty Brain, first published in Aeon. Henry Markram, the colleague Monica refers to in the second chapter, is a real neuroscientist; he is the director of the Blue Brain Project and the Human Brain Project. Lord Krishna’s quote “There is neither birth nor death at any time…” comes from chapter two, verse twenty of the Bhagavad Gita. Plutarch’s quote “it scatters and again comes together, and approaches and recedes” is from his dialogue “On the E at Delphi.” The character of Julia Kristeva, as she appears in the Sofia apartment scene, is completely fictional. The following quotes and ideas of Kristeva’s are all drawn from her essay Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection: “There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being…”; “the world of dead material objects”; “The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection”; “It is death infecting life”; “As in true theatre, without makeup or masks…”; “The various means of purifying the abject…”; “crucified on Golgotha, not as Christ but as Artaud, in other words as complete atheist”; “a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness”; “The abject is simply a frontier… .” George Bataille’s quote “moment of the ecstatic and intolerable” is from his book The Tears of Eros. Denis Diderot’s quote about actors being “fit to play all characters because they have none” is from his essay Paradox of the Actor. Lee Strasberg’s quote that Diderot’s Paradox of the Actor “has remained to this day the most significant attempt to deal with the problem of acting” comes from Strasberg’s introduction of the 1957 edition (New York, Hill and Wang) of Diderot’s treatise, translated by Walter Herries Pollock as The Paradox of Acting. Charles Baudelaire’s poem “You’d Entertain the Universe in Bed” was sourced from his book The Flowers of Evil, translated by James McGowan. Jacques Lacan’s writings about jouissance come from his seminar “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.” Michel Foucault’s quote “the point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living…” is from his Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, translated by R. James Goldstein and James Coscaito. The Antonin Artaud quote “The obscene sexual erotic golosity of mankind, for which pain is a humus…”is from his essay Suppôts et Supplications, though I first came across it in Kristeva’s essay “Approaching Abjection,” published in The Continental Aesthetics Reader, edited by Clive Cazeaux. The quotes from Saint Augustine’s Confessions are drawn from three different translations: the Penguin Classics edition translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin (1961) (yes, his real name!), the Hendrickson Christian Classics edition (2004), and Sarah Ruden’s extraordinary translation for Random House (2017). The character Robert’s “sentience quotient” is a real concept proposed by Robert A. Freitas Junior. Elements of the conversation between Jordan, Will, and Gia in Videofag’s kitchen were inspired by Bruce LaBruce’s interview of Nina Arsenault in Vice Magazine (“An Interview with Nina Arsenault,” June 27, 2012). Teresa of Ávila’s quote “I saw in his hand a long spear of gold…” is from her autobiography The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself, translated by J. M. Cohen. The Daily Mirror article cited in the book is “Nice terror attack leaves 84 dead and bodies strewn across street after ‘worst in [sic] day in city’s history’ ” (July 15, 2016). The Sun article cited in the book is “Daylight reveals horror of Nice attack as buggies, belongings and bodies litter promenade” (July 15, 2016). Osama’s theory of perception is based on Donald Hoffman’s theory as articulated in Amanda Gefter’s article “The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality” in Quanta Magazine. The robot Emily is inspired by “Sophia,” created by Hanson Robotics. The lines “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” and “for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” are taken from Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself.” Heidegger’s concept of “the moment of vision” (Augenblick) appears in his book Being and Time.