impressive and touching, Cioran’s recollection [interview with Jason Weiss] of his last meeting with Paul Celan; one November night, near Luxembourg Gardens, he notices someone coming in his direction, looking at the ground, making gestures, talking with himself. Cioran feels startled and frightened-they know each other very well-when realizes the poet doesn’t see him; that, in fact, he doesn’t see anyone. ‘it broke my heart because I understood, he’s not well’
The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment
matrix is twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or
focus. Students’ incapacity to connect current lack of focus with future
failure, their inability to synthesize time into any coherent narrative, is
symptomatic of more than mere demotivation. It is, in fact, eerily reminiscent
of Jameson’s analysis in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. Jameson observed
there that Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia offered a ‘suggestive aesthetic
model’ for understanding the fragmenting of subjectivity in the face of the
emerging entertainment-industrial complex. ‘With the breakdown of the
signifying chain’, Jameson summarized, ‘the Lacanian schizophrenic is reduced
to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of
pure and unrelated presents in time’. Jameson was writing in the late 1980s -
i.e. the period in which most of my students were born. What we in the
classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical,
anti-mnemonic blip culture - a generation, that is to say, for whom time has
always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.
“Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Muhammad—all these big scoundrels, all these big despots of our ideas knew how to bond their concocted divinities with their immense ambitions. Certain of captivating nations with the sanction of their gods, these villains, as we know, took care either to question their deities at an appropriate moment or to have them answer only whatever they believed could serve their purpose.”
In the final analysis, the only consolation that remains to us is that there is no hope… . It has all been a hoax. When you look at it closely, our whole life has been nothing but a lousy tear-off calendar containing the dates of our various ceremonies, with all the pages finally ripped away.
“Man must be a fallen god who feels an immense desire to return to the sky. Perhaps a poet’s nostalgia is nothing more than the yearning for a lost Paradise, where man is the image of divinity, not its caricature.”
— Otto Rahn in Crusade Against the Grail (via tesserariussx)
“Analytical philosophy has, correctly, held onto the idea that there must be something in philosophy that counts as ‘getting it right’. In this, it properly rejects Richard Rorty’s model for the future of philosophy (or rather, as he sees it, of what used to be philosophy), the model of a conversation. Unless a conversation is very relentless - for instance, one between philosophers - it will not be held together by ‘so’ or ‘therefore’ or ‘but’, but rather by 'well then’ and 'that reminds me’ and 'come to think of it’, and it is simply unclear who will stay around for it, and why. in fact, it is tempting to think that the conversation model is secretly an ally of professionalisation: the only people who will take part in such a conversation are those who are paid to do so.”
— Bernard Williams, On Hating and Despising Philosophy” Essays and Reviews, 367
“Within leftist and liberal political circles, the cancerous trajectory is often accepted as unchangeable reality. We are encouraged to grasp at crumbs of inclusion thrown to us by the systems that maintain this ongoing fantasy of human superiority and technological utopia. Mass Society and it’s movements boil down our passions and convictions into one monolithic voice, with a fall of capability at the forefront. Our desires for sanity and balance are constantly co-opted by the “Spectacle” - the all - encompassing world of mass media and conformist and consumerist values that tell us who we are and why we are alive. To date to live outside of it becomes either a matter of social privilege, or just sheer luck.”
— Terra Greenbrier, Against Civilization, For Reconnection to Life!
