““All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room”
Pénsees - B.Pascal
I would say with rhetorical aplomb that this is finest sentence ever written. That doesn’t mean I agree with it, or disagree. It seems to point to a precise conjunctions of knots and intractable lines which one could spend a life attempting to unravel. Here is a man, who recognising the full extent of the scientific encounters which are opening all up around men like voids, is haunted, by points, spaces, voids, vacuums, anxiety, the constraints of the thinking individual, finitude, temporality, infinitude (what sound exactly do our footsteps on this globe make in regards to vast silences of space?”)
When D+G wrote that “we are only lines” surely the thought of Pascal resonated within these spaces upon a page.
**Maybe this “existential” thought has lost the lustre of its chic sixties lapels…Maybe this is one huge narcissistic blow which should become an affirmation, we can can look forward to a future of highly complex neuromodification technologies which will actualise what a whole slew of 20th century radical politics attempted to enforce, namely the desire to build a new man(The French Revolution and the stitched figure of a giant are not coincident in their proximity), but which Badiou reminds us no mainstream political party would champion now, and yet capitalism and technology are configuring zones in which this will come to be. Transhumanism, the eliminativism of the Churchland’s the “smashing of the self model”, what will transpire?…There is no guarantee. And yet does this hard nosed, brutal realism of eliminativism bring with it any fantasmatic contours?
“ In that jaded century the absolute space that had inspired hexameters of Lucretius, the absolute space that had been a liberation for Bruno, was a labyrinth and abyss for Pascal.
“ According to Freud, modern humanity has endured three fundamental narcissistic wounds. Copernicus deprived humanity of its central role in the universe: Darwin showed that humanity is the result of long and complicated process of evolution-not the crowning achievement of divine creation, but only a better evolved species . By Freud’s reckoning, psychoanalysis is the third in this series of wounds. No much how much Darwin forced humanity to fundamentally recast its view of its origins, this did not stop it from believing that it coincides with itself as self-consciousness. The Freudian revolution puts an end to this naive belief. For Freud teaches us that man/women “is not master in his home”. The subject is not to be understood as essentially self-consciousness; instead, it is delivered over to unconscious forces that elude its grasp.
“ Your oppressor has but two eyes, two hands, one body, and has nothing that the least of your infinite number of citizens does not have - except the advantage you give him, which is the power to destroy you. Where did he get those eyes which spy on you, if you did not give him them? Would he have all those hands to strike you with, if he did not get them from you? Those feet which trample upon your cities, where did he get them if they are not your own? What power has he over you, if it is not power you give him?
Stuff I Like
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Videodrome (1983)
Nicki Brand: Come to me.
Nicki Brand: Come to Nicki.
Nicki Brand: Come on.
Nicki Brand: Don’t make me...
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John Coltrane - Blue Train
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I feel like I post really uncreative, whiny, shitty personal entries now.
I feel kind of emptied as of late, although I have been feeling a lot...
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Dilated Peoples -Worst Comes To Worst
Guru - “Word up, if worst comes to worst, I make whole crews disperse”
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“Voting is so obviously foreign to all truth (even in the sense of conservative opinion: it brings Hitler to power just as easily as Pétain or the...”
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I’m kinda shocked I’ve only managed to lose one follower today.
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Gerhard Richter
Funeral -
“I hold today with a death grip
and play hard to get tomorrow
so as not to look so fucking desperate.”— Sage Francis (via likeafloweranditsnectar) -
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I am the happiest woman, right now.
