hegelsh / aidan clark

I was born in 1999. For the last 7 years my life has been occupied with an engagement, entirely my own, in philosophy, literature, and political economy. I have struggled to explain to people my reluctance to go into an institutional setting, despite the privileges it would have offered me, and have even been accused of having thought myself better than others on this account. This, and many other things, I reject. What I have felt principally was the need to explore things on my own, and if I have made a mistake it is in thinking that this separates me from institutional settings, such as the university. My choices have ultimately been my own, and I have been lucky that the benefaction of my parents has allowed me to nevertheless make these choices myself.

There are a number of projects I have been working on, which I present in lieu of the standard metrics by which people of my age and with my interests typically measure themselves. The first is a novel, called lethe, and it is the first in a cycle which I have begun. I wrote it between the fall of 2020 and the winter of 2023, and have been occupied with editing it these last 6 months.

The second project is a philosophical system, entitled theoremata, which concerns a theory effectively of mathematical theories, based upon a more general theory of language, which treats mathematics as a subspecies of language.

The third project is a series of analyses of contemporary political economy, which I have organised under the heading hyperlink. These include smaller or subsidiary projects; namely, the commons project and a series of what I also call hyperlinks, which model small-form wiki complexes (as in, wikipedia), including hyperlink 1 + 2, abelard, and renaissance.

This last project deals with a large theory or model of the digital, which I consider essential to the political aim of the immediately mentioned smaller projects.

The fourth “project” is a series of stories, which I have written, the first instance of which was a collection entitled the heart (the heart, the pit, the letter, the voice, the compartment, the symptom, the crab, the skull, the heartbeat, the dog, the gasmask, the talk, the dream, the child, the chestnut) which I began in december 2021, with a second “collection” comprising every other story written since, so far titleless (melancholia, blackspot, the forest, kempe, horses, insects, snowfall, hole, fleshmarket, the tunnel, h, the sky, the camp, einsatzgruppen, the demon, the mutant, the throat, the sickbed, paul, the violet, andrew, tristan, the bird, the flower, the cell, the visit, the lightning, the cross, the pest, the tree, the fox, the vampire).

The fifth is a poetic cycle, heartmouth, which is succeeded by a shorter cycle, voidsky / autumnspring.

I nevertheless try to organise my work between introverted and extroverted projects. most of the above projects belong to the latter. my more extroverted projects include articles I've written for networks or institutions outside of my own personal domain of research.