Category: Fragments

Confident Indwelling

📍 Confident Indwelling – looking past one’s doubts, speaking as if one lacked them. Pretending, as it were, that no one would correct you; stowing away doubt until such call for correction comes. This is a tactic for saying anything one wants without fear of reproach.

Aesthetic Limitations

📍 Aesthetic limitation – the fact that human experience concretized as a material item enters into another’s experience only as that item. Hereby, another is felt only as aestheticized, their humanity reduced to a spectacle. We live not with them, but by them. They are our bread and wine – we consume their living sacrifice.

Immediate upshot: all immediate statements of others always at first depend on their aesthetic appearance. Thus some say that to “make a good first impression,” one must “look one’s best.”

Mediate upshot: no one ever presents themselves as they intend, since intention is not aesthetic. Nor, moreover, can it be. One might create an aesthetic presentation through their intentions, but these will always be locked away behind a visible veneer. This is an problem of the human experience a priori.

Reality, considered from a first person point of view

Reality considered from a first point of view: the difference between (1) that which I think another thinks and (2) what I think, which subsumes and accounts for what the other thinks as incorrect. This is hypothetical, proved only where I and the other both face a situation, and wherein what I think better accounts for the situation than what the other thinks. There is no “reality,” no “actuality,” but this. Or, in sum: reality is always only what has not yet been proven unreal.

Hypocrisy-Vultures: an Idea

📍 Hypocrisy-vulture: someone who trades in others’ failures, thereby reducing all possibility to a mere show of ironic inconsistency. The only consistency, for the vulture, is the innards that can be picked apart by the loser who’s failed to submit to their view of common sense. These vultures gobble such failures up and shit them out, relishing in the excretory excitement of death, profiting thereby.

Anyone who practices the above ought to rightfully be called as such. Theirs is a repeatable pattern of behavior, a determinate character type. With their pattern disarmed as something iterative, it bares no unique content. Rather, it is just another tactic of public discourse and can be disregarded and ignored on such grounds.

A Note on the Idea of Semiotics as a Way of Life

If “semiotics” or “the reading of signs” could be a method of living, it would have to at once be a method of thought, action, and self-accruing history (or the dialectic of thought and action over time). The semiotician of life should be thus able to say the following in polysemy, or in a multivocal signification:

  1. reading any life-semiotic analysis should directly inform – it should adequately describe reality conceived of as signs
  2. reading (ibid.) should directly enable some kind of action
  3. that action should itself be conceivable as a sign, as should its vector relation to the signs against which it reacted

Speed and Knowledge

The distinction between the practical-applied and technical-theoretic points of view: speed.

  • the practical-applied point of view demands a this about which practice can proceed indifferent to the inner content of the this. This content (essence) must appear only insofar as practice demands it. Practical application is thus a question of sufficiency, of “good enough.” Sufficiency hereby takes the form: “if x, then y. x, therefore y.”
  • the technical-theoretic point of view enters the scene when this essence fails to appear, asking: how could the essence have failed to appear? This inner negativity is the hallmark of theory, since it wonders not what is sufficient or “good enough” but what is necessary, or what must be. Necessity, hereby, takes the form: “if x, then y. not-y, therefore not-x.” The conditional stipulates a necessity which, absent y, demands an absent x.

Speed essentially captures this difference, since sufficiency is faster than necessity. Any x can be posited in connection to a y if that x appears and the y follows. The rapture of this speed wins it great joy of mind. By contrast, the careful, painstaking labor of peeling back the concomitant conditions of y’s succeeding x destroys such rapture as the mind feels itself sundered by negations of its gross, misdirected confidences. Here the mind slows down, carried no longer by the joy of connection but by the anxious weight of separation. Theory, as Plato writes, is thus preparation for death, since it is a form of death itself – the death of mind at work enjoying the world.

3 Pillars of Liberalism

3 pillars of liberalism: progress, majority, resignation. It’s good because it’s new. It’s good because most say so. It’s good because you aren’t.

No one thinks liberally except by thinking at least one of these. He is either liberal in time (progress), in privilege (majority) or in coercion (resignation). Only the most liberal among us admit of all three.

Thus, if someone says, “I believe in progress,” demand that they stop reading, since everything written cannot progress (it is stagnant and conserves the will of the writer – thus Neoconservatives love the classics, thus any classicist, for many liberals, is automatically conservative). If someone says, “I believe in the will of the majority,” demand that they go to a sundown town. If someone says, “I believe in a meritocracy in which everyone does their part for the best of society,” demand that they shut up, since this belief does nothing for society and indicates no merit (they should get to work!)

Liberalism should really be called the philosophy of self-immolation. Liberalism is, in point of fact, a belief in the correctness of torture (if only John Rawls has declared this “fairness,” in and by the just will of the majority). Any liberal who says anything less is either dimly witted, a liar, or both. Indeed – whoever professes liberal should say so with gusto. You want my resignation to your bureaucratic system of obfuscation, where each new form wills another method of confining me to empty pseudo-service – say it loudly and proudly, or say nothing at all!

No political “belief” is anything but inhuman instrumentality. All “politics” really wants a dialogic submission of one to another. This pseudo-dialogue – “it’s good because you aren’t” – is the fattest sham in all human existence. Anyone who declares themselves to have any political label is just this – a pretentious loser, since they are right and you are not. Wherever there is a will to make someone else submit in this way, there is a dehumanization, one man’s use of another as nothing but a puppet for his beliefs.

3 Pillars of Conservatism

3 pillars of conservatism: tradition, authority, conformity. It’s good because it’s old. It’s good because I say so. It’s good because you aren’t.

No one thinks conservatively except by thinking at least one of these. He either conserves in time (tradition), in privilege (authority) or in coercion (conformity). Only the most conservative among us admit of all three.

Thus, if anyone says “I believe in tradition,” demand that they say “I believe in things only because they are old.” Likewise, if anyone says “I believe in hierarchy and order,” demand that they say “I believe some should be compelled to do and believe things because others say so.” And again, if anyone says, “I believe in conformity to objective truth,” you must insist they say “I believe some lay prostrate before others and whip themselves for failure to do so, since some have seen the truth and others have not.” 

Conservatism should really be called the philosophy of self-mortification. Conservatism is, in point of fact, a belief in the correctness of torture (if only God has ordained it). Any conservative who says anything less is either dimly witted, a liar, or both. Indeed – whoever professes conservatism should say so with gusto. You want my submission to you – say it loudly and proudly, or say nothing at all!

I, when so unsettled

I – when so unsettled – cannot capture even eyes –
Four hands quake as each partakes of searching for a side,
To grasp, or pass, from self – too crass – to object of the Other,
But falling through the eyes melt too quick for me to cover
Self up of – a hopeless love – a feeling me at home,
Without which – I cannot mix – a self is shaken ‘lone.