April 2012
“The terror of Lovecraft is not a noumenal horror, then, but a horror of phenomenology. Humans cease to be master in their own house. Science and letters no longer guide us toward benevolent enlightenment, but may force us to confront ‘notions of the cosmos, and of [our] own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing’, and ‘impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturous [humans]’.”
—Graham Harman, On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl (via hodos-ano-kato)
tempted to make a stalinist russia monopoly game where you "go to gulag" instead of jail
Are you a closeted fascist?
“You have to take the work as a whole, to try and follow rather than judge it, see where it branches out in different directions, where it gets bogged down, moves forward, makes a breakthrough; you have to accept it, welcome it, as a whole. Otherwise, you won’t understand it at all.”
—Gilles Deleuze (via carnivorousdreams)
Tannhäuser'in like a teuton
do i like naomi klein? i'm really on the fence here.
you expect me to study thomas fucking nagel now?
no thank you. boring.
owned
- Richard Feynman: Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
- Jonathan Schaffer: It is likely that ornithological knowledge would be of great benefit to birds, were it possible for them to possess it.
“Generally speaking, the world of things is perceived as a fallen world. It entails the alienation of the one who created it. This is the basic principle: to subordinate is not only to alter the subordinated element but to be altered oneself. The tool changes nature and man at the same time: it subjugates nature to man, who makes and uses it, but it ties man to subjugated nature. Nature becomes man’s property but it ceases to be immanent to him. It is his own condition which is closed to him. If the places the world in his power, this is to the extent that he forgets that he is himself the world: he denies the world but it is himself that he denies.”
—Georges Bataille, Theory Of Religion
“There is undoubtedly a measure of falsity in the fact of regarding the animal as a thing. An animal exist for itself and in order to be a thing it must be dead or domesticated. This the eaten animal can be posited as an object only provided it is eaten dead. Indeed it is fully a thing only in a roasted, grilled, or boiled form…But to kill the animal and alter it as one pleases is not merely to change into a thing that which doubtless was not a thing from the start; its is to define the animal as a thing beforehand. Concerning that which I kill, which I cut up, which I cook, i implicitly affirm that ‘that’ has never been anything but a thing. To cut up, cook, and eat a man is on the contrary abominable. It does no harm to anyone; in fact it is often unreasonable not to do something with a man. Yet the study of anatomy ceased to be scandalous only a short time ago. And despite appearances, evened hardened materialists are still so religious that in their eyes it is always a crime to make a man into a thing - a roast, a stew…Insofar as he is spirit, it’s mans misfortune to have the body of an animal and thus be like an thing, but it is the glory of the human body to be the substratum of a spirit. And the spirit is so closely linked to the body as a thing that the body never ceases to be haunted, is never a thing except virtually, so much that if death reduces it to the condition of a thing, the spirit is more present than ever: the body that has betrayed it reveals it more clearly than when it served it. In a sense the corpse is the most complete affirmation of the spirit.”
—Georges Bataille, Theory Of Religion
“This continuity, which for the animal could not be distinguished from anything else, which was in it and for it the only possible mode of being, offered man all the fascination of the sacred world, as against the poverty of the profane tool (of the discontinuous object). The sense of the sacred obviously is not that of the animal lost in the midst of continuity where nothing is distinct…Moreover, the animal accepted the immanence that submerged it without apparent protest, whereas man feels kind of impotent horror in the sense of the sacred. This horror is ambiguous. Undoubtedly, what is sacred attracts and possesses an incomparable value, but at the same time it appears vertiginously dangerous for that clear and profane world where mankind situated its privileged domain.”
—Georges Bataille, Theory Of Religion
“In a sense, the world is still, in a fundamental way, immanence without a clear limit (and indistinct flow of being into being -one thinks of the unstable presence of water in water). So the positing, in the world, of a “supreme being,” distinct and limited like a thing, is first of all an impoverishment. There is doubtless, in the invention of a supreme being, a determination to define a value that is greater than any other. But this desire to increase results in a diminution.”
—Georges Bataille, Theory Of religion
