This essay follows closely the process of making the work for my degree project. The aim of the text is to reflect as much as possible the entire journey of my thinking and doing, demonstrating how one of the main concepts of the work, metamorphosis, served the final purpose of the project, to build a world for bizarre creatures made of colorful piles of clothes. The methods used were looking for inspiration material online i.e. a performance by Ingri Fiksdal, several drag performers, or a music video by the band Primus, bringing in Posthuman theory and decolonial thinking as well as readings on the grotesque, including writers like Rosi Braidotti, María Lugones, and Sara Cohen Shabot respectively, taking an excessive amount of notes on diary form, and playing dress-up in the studio. The information that surfaced while all the above was combined, is presented in quite a raw form here, not as one smooth text, but as chunks that mirror where my process was at each moment. More so than anything else, this essay demonstrates the messiness of a/my artistic process and acts as a mind map of interests as they get closer to some kind of crystallization. / <p>This master work includes both a performing and a written part.</p>

This paper seeks to forge a grounds for conversation between the affective turn in contemporary theory and a vital materialist ontology. This conversation focuses on materials and their affects through the experience of weirdness. I use weirdness to describe a register of enchantment which is disruptive and alienating, rather than enticing and delightful. The project is motivated by a desire for ways to think about our relationship to the natural world that afford for fuller experiences of perception. The paper works through four major sections; the first three form a conceptual framework while the fourth is an exercise in mobilizing the concepts through subjective readings of affect. It begins by establishing a concept of vitalism with which to think about interactions with a moving, active world and, in following vitalism across borders of embodied flora and fauna, agitates the notion of what constitutes life. To put vitalism into a dynamic of engagement between entities, I then chart processes of affect through various conditions and situations, such as haunting, hallucination, anticipation and psychotropics. I then address the concept of the event in order to trace the contours of affect as it manifests through situated, temporal passages of force. This conceptual netting culminates in episodic readings of affective experiences, taking a kaleidoscopic form oriented toward anxious fascination. / text

<p>Keywords: Immanuel Kant (</p><p>narratives in European naturalism and political anatomy. Yet the concept surfaces in gender historical research on the period in foot notes and cursory remarks. This paper interrogates why epigenesis has been eradicated from the historical consciousness of today’s scholarship on gender politics. By honing in on the weirdness, a term borrowed from Lorraine Daston, in and of Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) theory on animal generation I show how an alertness it requires a re-evaluation of views on "political anatomy" taken-for-granted in scholarship, but also of Kant’s philosophy itself. The endeavour is divided into three main sections.</p><p>In the first, I situate the failure of Kant-scholars to, in the words of John H. Zammito, "stabilize" epigenesis by exploring the hitherto unacknowledged peculiarity of Kant’s use racial hybridity to ‘prove’ the theory. In the second, the analysis departs from the notion ‘modern sex difference’ and show that a reading of epigenesis requires a re-thinking of sexed bodily identity in terms of conflict and contradiction. The third section reads this strife in light of Kant’s experience of "astonishment", a cognitive mode, I argue, designed to resolve both physiological and ideological inconsistencies. The antinomy of sex differentiation is in a concluding section juxtaposed with Kant’s phrase "eloquent speechlessness" in which the gender practice activated in the writing of, about, and on epigenesis is compared to the structure informing moral philosophy’s definition of lies.</p>

Keywords: Immanuel Kant ( narratives in European naturalism and political anatomy. Yet the concept surfaces in gender historical research on the period in foot notes and cursory remarks. This paper interrogates why epigenesis has been eradicated from the historical consciousness of today’s scholarship on gender politics. By honing in on the weirdness, a term borrowed from Lorraine Daston, in and of Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) theory on animal generation I show how an alertness it requires a re-evaluation of views on "political anatomy" taken-for-granted in scholarship, but also of Kant’s philosophy itself. The endeavour is divided into three main sections. In the first, I situate the failure of Kant-scholars to, in the words of John H. Zammito, "stabilize" epigenesis by exploring the hitherto unacknowledged peculiarity of Kant’s use racial hybridity to ‘prove’ the theory. In the second, the analysis departs from the notion ‘modern sex difference’ and show that a reading of epigenesis requires a re-thinking of sexed bodily identity in terms of conflict and contradiction. The third section reads this strife in light of Kant’s experience of "astonishment", a cognitive mode, I argue, designed to resolve both physiological and ideological inconsistencies. The antinomy of sex differentiation is in a concluding section juxtaposed with Kant’s phrase "eloquent speechlessness" in which the gender practice activated in the writing of, about, and on epigenesis is compared to the structure informing moral philosophy’s definition of lies.