Here is another example of Hermeneutic circles in action. Annihilation, both the book and the movie, are like David Tracy's "Classics" to me because they provide an inexhaustible wealth of possible interpretations, especially because they both deal so strongly with the ambiguity of identity, including the ambiguity of the apparently determinate nature of our genetic inheritance. My partner Char and I have a horror podcast in which this episode first appeared that deals with ideas around the vertigo of irreducible ambiguity in the Horror genre. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184 My sister Andrea who works professionally as a scientist joins us for this episode's exploration of the slipperiness of the material reduction to "scientific facts."
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2565712 This is the link to my podcast "Deep Calls to Deep: Reading Together," which explores the possibilities for hermeneutic circles more thoroughly.
https://youtu.be/nqaZp3-AK4Q and this is the YouTube link to the episode if you'd like a visual of us hashing out Annihilation.
We get deep into the weird genetic refractions of Alex Garland's very loose take on Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. Area X seems to be a place of infinite possibilities, except for the possibility of remaining untouched by the mysterious, churning flows of organic codes that produce mixed bodies of unknowable intention. What is the intention of this alien presence in what seems to be a swamp somewhere on the Florida coast of the Gulf of Mexico? Maybe, it doesn't have one. Join us as we think about the human proclivity for self-destruction, the ambiguity of identity, and how the intentions of organic bodies arise from the non-intention of inorganic processes.
Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.
