About

Russell Samolsky is an associate professor of Anglophone literature in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests encompass South African literature, Modernism, Graphic Novels, Jewish Studies, Animal Studies, Deconstruction, Materialisms, and the Global Humanities. He authored the book 'Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee,' which explores the relationship between past apocalyptic texts and future catastrophic events, offering a messianic counter-time against apocalyptic futures. Currently, he is working on a monograph on J.M. Coetzee and projects related to animality, contemporary literature, and reading in the age of the Anthropocene.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Environmental science
• Economics
• Philosophy
• Art
• Aeronautics
• Literature
• Engineering
• Archaeology
• Aerospace engineering
• History
• Financial economics
• Theology

Selected publications

• Borges and AI

  Poetics Today · 2024-06-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Although at first glance our title, "Borges and AI," might seem to promise or betoken an analysis of the relationship of the work of Jorge Luis Borges to artificial intelligence, what lies behind it is more specifically a play on his fiction, "Borges and I," which we intend to serve as a precursory lead-in and accompaniment to our own thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI) and authorship (Borges [1957] 1998: 324). 1 What Borges's parable gives voice to is his struggle against being eclipsed by his fictions; thinking with this parable will thus help us begin to work through our own confrontation with the "AI author."It is notable that Borges does not articulate one reductive response, and neither will we.What he does instead is unfold the affective and analytical dimensions of being subject to fictional capture.Our essayistic counterpart takes its cue from Borges's parable, but we shall not simply mirror it; rather, we present our own reflections on what might turn out to be a more encompassing eclipse.While "Borges and I" might be read as a pretext in the double sense to such poststructuralist formulations as Michel Foucault's "author function" 1.Our analysis is based on all authorized English translations as well as the original Spanish text, "Borges y yo."

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Rocket Theory

  Routledge eBooks · 2023

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Aeronautics
  • Aerospace engineering
  • Engineering

  What this chapter offers is not another history of accelerationism as philosophy or coterie, but rather a tracing out of accelerationism as it has become co-opted and memetically entered into popular discourse as political affect and cultural condition. What is the significance of this memeification, and why, beyond the obvious literalization, does this take the form of the rocket? We take account of the way in which a political philosophy committed to pushing capitalism to its breaking point and beyond ironically finds itself deployed for capitalistic, even hyper-capitalistic, ends. What we are calling “rocket theory” is not simply a play on an idiom but also proposes a theoretically informed way of thinking through the convergence of oppositional forces as manifest in accelerationist politics, or anti-politics, in our moment.

  PublisherDOI

• The Book of Ashes: Authorial Instructions, Incorporations, and House Rules in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

  Narrative · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Literature
  • Philosophy

  This article examines the apparatus of authorial instructions in Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. It does so by first investigating the role coincidence plays in the literalization of Ware's comic, and then by examining what might be hidden or more deeply at stake in Ware's incorporation of the urn of his father's ashes into the "corrigenda" (or afterword) of his book. My reading takes issue with Ware's assertion of the gap that yawns between his artistic deployment of coincidence in his comic and the blind unfolding of coincidence in life itself; or, as Ware himself puts it, between the "artless, dumbfoundedly meaningless coincidence of 'real' life and my weak fiction." My analysis does not wholly contest Ware's claim, but it does complicate Ware's lamenting the failure of his "weak fiction" by arguing that if his house rules or instructions fail, they paradoxically also prevail. In order to justify this claim, I try to take account of what strangely happens to Ware's "weak fiction" when read in the context of Walter Benjamin's weak messianism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Killing Dogs

  2021-01-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Russell Samolsky’s “Killing Dogs: Animality and Trauma in Waltz with Bashir and Deogratias” brings together trauma studies and animal studies by way of a comparative reading of two graphic novels and their global contexts. Both Waltz with Bashir (2009) and Deogratias (2000) involve the slaughter of dogs that are then caught up in the scene of human massacre and genocide. Samolsky attempts an ethical analysis in which genocide and canicide might be thought in relation to each other without falling prey to the sacrificial economy that elevates human over all animal life.

  PublisherDOI

• Shades of the archive: J. M. Coetzee, the paradox of poetic sovereignty and the lives of literary beings

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “Does AI Have a Future?”

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2021-11-26

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• chapter two. Apocalyptic Futures

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Environmental science
  • Economics
  • Financial economics
  PublisherDOI

• “Inter Alia: Aliens and AI”

  Public · 2019-06-01

  articleSenior author

  Contemporary anxiety concerning our efforts to communicate with aliens might be understood in terms of the exponential advances in neural network research (so-termed “Artificial Intelligence”) and the probability that the aliens we encounter are more likely to be alien AIs than organic beings. The premise of our paper is that the disquieting sense that AI possesses, or is possessed of, an external intelligence, one that operates autonomously, unpredictably, and, in our deepest fears, mutinously, is projectively displaced onto extra-planetary aliens. Our paper offers an analysis of Trevor Paglen’s satellite work, The Last Pictures, as well as Eduardo Kac’s Inner Telescope and Lagoogleglyph series. We conclude with a speculative imagining of an AI-archaeologist encountering in the distant future the orbital ring of dead satellites, one of which contains Paglen’s curated image archive.

  PublisherDOI

• “Inter Alia: Aliens and AI”

  Public · 2019-06-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Contemporary anxiety concerning our efforts to communicate with aliens might be understood in terms of the exponential advances in neural network research (so-termed “Artificial Intelligence”) and the probability that the aliens we encounter are more likely to be alien AIs than organic beings. The premise of our paper is that the disquieting sense that AI possesses, or is possessed of, an external intelligence, one that operates autonomously, unpredictably, and, in our deepest fears, mutinously, is projectively displaced onto extra-planetary aliens. Our paper offers an analysis of Trevor Paglen’s satellite work, The Last Pictures, as well as Eduardo Kac’s Inner Telescope and Lagoogleglyph series. We conclude with a speculative imagining of an AI-archaeologist encountering in the distant future the orbital ring of dead satellites, one of which contains Paglen’s curated image archive.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Apocalyptic Futures

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2011-09-29

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In this book, the author argues that certain modern literary texts have apocalyptic futures. Rather than claim that great writers have clairvoyant powers, he examines the ways in which a text incorporates an apocalyptic event into its future reception. He is thus concerned with the way in which apocalyptic works solicit their future receptions.Apocalyptic Futures also sets out to articulate a new theory and textual practice of the relation between literary reception and embodiment. Deploying the double register of "marks" to show how a text both codes and targets mutilated bodies, the author focuses on how these bodies are incorporated into texts by Kafka, Conrad, Coetzee, and Spiegelman.Situating "In the Penal Colony" in relation to the Holocaust, Heart of Darkness to the Rwandan genocide, and Waiting for the Barbarians to the revelations of torture in apartheid South Africa and contemporary Iraq, the author argues for the ethical and political importance of reading these literary works’ "apocalyptic futures" in our own urgent and perilous situations. The book concludes with a reading of Spiegelman's Maus that offers a messianic counter-time to the law of apocalyptic incorporation

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rita Raley

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  5 shared