The resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
I fear that the animals consider man… the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.
Let us therefore be natural.
And will your culture and cultivation. And will in language find your fairest utterance. And will, and will them.
The one another - the ego ideal encountered in the other, an Other, another Other, anOther. What does it mean that the space is retracted, desevered? Deseverance is the jouissance of spotting anOther. We are enjoiyed (enjoined to enjoyment) at the sight of another screaming “Oh, oh God!”
Our organism is an oligarchy.
His will to infect and poison the fundamental ground of things with the problem of punishment and guilt so as to cut off once and for all his exit from this labyrinth… his will to erect an ideal… and in the face of it to feel the palpable certainty of his own unworthiness…
In New York everything has a story. New Yorkers celebrate the quotidian because it is quotidian: this is one’s use value. To be oneself - and with a story. Two sources of repression and misknowl–
Suddenly all their instincts were suspended… reduced to consciousness… at the same time the old instincts had not suddenly ceased to make their usual demands… subterranean gratifications…
Affect: driving away a pain unendurable to the system perception-consciousness.
Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction - all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the “bad conscience”….
Jouissance is unrepressed prurience. Bliss.
There is among them an abundance of the vengeful disguised as judges, who constantly bear the word “justice” in their mouths like poisonous spittle, always with pursed lips, always ready to spit upon all who are not discontented but go their way in good spirits.
—
Living in the midst
gives me
and how much
every moment
—
There is a difference, tween sees and ceases, a letter tacked on - if you will, the one is a bottleneck, the other a bottle. Liquid gathers in the One.
Master race: beasts who impregnate everything with their progeny - immediate Othering. “Wherever they appear something new soon arises, a ruling structure that lives“…
What is the Oneself. The agglomeration of ideals picked up from the confident utterances of others. And it congeals with itself in a rottenness, a foul odored tendency to apprehend, to say Yes, that does go there; to exclaim Indeed, I heard of that just last week. A place for all - all in its - a place found right - a in its place - a place right its - in right the should have been - peacebone got found in the dinosaur wi–
Schopenhauer praises philosophic contemplation for liberating the will from the reproductive drive: but is not prurience the necessary correlate of the active intellect?
Oriented: how can orientation be understood as a ‘looking-eastward’? Why does symbolic orientation cause us to look east? What is it that is in the east? Enlightenment, escape, colony? Will to power moves to crusade. Crusade as the necessary result of repressant ressentiment.
The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
Being unable to put situations to words… a repression of signifiers because prurience seen in everything… only simple naive language utilized because * is seen so far that any description in ordinary terms is precluded. Preclosure: Ubiquitous prurience.
Proceed: procede. Correspond: corespond.
We stand before a discord that wants to be discordant.
Let us conclude. The two opposing values “good and bad,” “good and evil” have been engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years; and though the latter value has certainly been on top for a long time, there are still planes where the struggle is as yet undecided. One might even say it has risen ever higher and thus become more and more profound and spiritual: so that today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of a “higher nature,” a more spiritual nature, than that of being divided in this sense and a genuine battleground of these opposing values.
Another other, another.
You are merely weary. “Foolishness, not sin! do you grasp that?”
Just wanted to let you all know that although I’m disappearing for a while, I’m still reading. I hate the feeling of putting work out there and not knowing if people are reading/looking at it seriously, so I thought I’d tell you that I am. I especially enjoyed this piece, TTL. “I fear that the animals consider man… the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.” A striking line, and it’d make a great first line, if you’d consider switching it with your opening. Sorry I don’t have time for more comments! Love, Inga
January 28th, 2008 | #
yes! this has some great pieces. If I wrote something like this, i’d be copy-and-pasting pieces of it into everything I write for the next eight months. The beginning I like especially because of its optimism, and because the writing is most succint and powerful. You’re not writing with ideas there, but with felt realities. and the reality of language; your examples are wordplays. I haven’t read it through closely yet, but it seems like you lose both the optimism and the tone. Actually, it seems like you have a concious tone-shift at the break (which is a brilliant four lines): Are these two different pieces in your mind? that would change my reading a lot. your academic writing seeps in. which is good; you do it well, you explain, you bring the reader with you into the ideas, but it’s a tone shift and you lost me there on the first read-through. And it seems much darker philisophically at the end; I wonder if you don’t contradict your first line, in a way. Not logically, but emotionally? Or is this intentional?
great great shit. this might be a huge presumption on my part, but i feel that this is when (in your life) your book begins (but don’t think about it like that!)
January 30th, 2008 | #
I’m all for posting quarter-finished pieces on the blog. One of your lines inspired a structure for things I’ve been trying to say but unable to convey fully.
“Our organism is an oligarchy”
ruled by myriad addictions. sometimes an iron-fisted rule of a declaring paranoiac, sometimes a silent, even decrepit council of elders that believes in laissez-faire. Always an empire that can only expand to exist. Always schized into an unrecognizable array of identities, each set against all the rest.
The most common addictions are productive, and drive the very core of society. Take the hipster of the council, Caffeine. under his reign, your our output goes up. Under his reign, the output of the latest wave of capital, the corporate wave (as I will perhaps call it) grew so far so fast that it even exceeded the vast human potential to consume. Of course, not only caffeine built this new Empire, but here I am, giving an example. And so, a network of production was built for coffee, tea—chief among the imports into the center of the Empire—then later bubbling black beverages that built found and lost the power of the Coca leaf, that later re-produced themselves as pseudo-scientific energy drinks, which are scientific in that they are unrecognizable chemicals.
or tobacco, which once was the plant of political peace. It doesn’t make you work faster, but it does kill you earlier, which leaves a lack for the desiring machines to fill.
But the most vital to the machine are the antiproductive addictions that grow over its synthetic skin like symbiotes. Everywhere there are great men held to mediocrity by addiction. Some of them lurk in corners, full of shame. Others only live at night, when they can be found on top of the world in bars and barfights. They are the bearers of the vacuum at the core of the Machine. They are the livers of Lack. They are not faceless: I have been there, on all levels, and that’s you and I met each other, and we’ll battle ourselves all our lives.
the mass serves as the sewers that addiction-substances run through, capillaries that absorb and exude product according to entropy alone.
February 2nd, 2008 | #
Hey guys I gotta admit something. I was very high one night and I said to myself “I have been writing a lot of things down in my notebook lately.” Thinking this, I opened my notebook and signed on to Pinko’s and deposited twenty pages worth of quotations and thoughts of my own. Most of the lines you like are quoted directly from Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann’s translation. All I did was organize it. The one Lacan line is the bit about the Unc. being the discourse of the Other. The four lines in the middle are mine, as are the bits about NYC and Otherness. I’ve actually done this scheme before… I was turning a lot of Lacan into poetry in Fall ‘06 — check out the postings called ‘Ten Thousand something something the Deluge,’ I forget what the exact name was. And there was another I remember with quotes from Agamben and Bergson and Devendra Banhart - Jed, I remember you liked that too. I just want to point out that this is an interesting method– lines taken out of context to make thought medleys. It’s like word jockeying, or something. It’s what I tried to do with the Welcome piece, combining their album with Tyler’s stream of conscious shopping bit. Inga, I’d be interested to know what you especially thought of that - given that you got me into Welcome in the first place (and that I now unabashedly apotheosize them). I think good music and good theory should combine forces to create a new art form. That’s what Nietzsche was, after all: the combination of Schopenhauer, Emerson, the Presocratics, Greek tragedy, and Wagner, the opera guy. Anyway - Inga, what did you think of the Welcome piece?
February 2nd, 2008 | #
I noticed the Animal Collective lines you used a while back (Peacebone), but I’m not familiar enough with Nietzsche or Lacan to have realized what was going on in this piece. Anyway, I still like it. I’ll check out the Welcome piece again when I get a chance, though I have to admit that I’m not all that familiar with Welcome. I have Sirs and I like it a lot, but I don’t think I’ve spent nearly as much time with it as you have. By the way, what are you listening to these days? I could use some fresh music…
February 4th, 2008 | #
before he gets a chance to answer, let me say ttl reccommended the album “tago mago” by can and it was a sweet awesome recomendation. It starts out like pretty good but normal-sounding indie rock then it goes crazy and great.
The organism is oligarchy piece i posted was premature to post…working on it, but really it’ll sit in my notebooks until I get on the road.
February 4th, 2008 | #
jed, are you still in pvd? where’re you headed?
February 4th, 2008 | #
Oh, i donno. i’m in colorado, working on a local campaign for now: joan fitz-gerald for congress. But tomorrow is the caucus, and I’m getting tired of the home life, so I’m gonna hit the road. my first stop is to visit our David in tucson, so I’ll let you know how he’s doing when i find out. Then I figure I’ll mosey out California ways. Thinking about coming back to providence around spring-weekend time.
February 4th, 2008 | #
Inga:
Silje Nes “Ames Room”
Juana Molina “Son”
-Can “Delay” or “Tago Mago” (however indie they may at times sound, these albums are from 1968 and 72 respectively, so they’re indie in the sense that velvet underground are)
-Songs of Green Pheasant “Songs of Green Pheasant”
-Sturge turned me on to Battles, you might have their album already; they’re a little too mathematic for my sober mind, but let me tell you, enjoined with a glass of absinthe, those crazy math riffs get your inner primate fluttering.
-Animal Collective “Spirit They’ve Come, Spirit they’ve vanished.” Not sure if you like them or not but this album is beautiful in a post smashing pumpkins sort of way.
February 4th, 2008 | #