adumbrating urchins

the given character of life is political in so far as politics is a tensor field of power, not as a question of optimism or pessimism, theism or atheism, state or anarchy but rather always has been of recognizing the cybernetic necessity of violence. all of morality and political posturing about the "larger" questions of way of being is a farce in so far as it is devoid of its diachronic or synchronic contextual ground of history and culture. cybernetic imagination renders nothing as imperfect or sinful but merely incomplete and inadequate. injustice is not a question in law or morals but question in incomplete and inadequate complicity with God's intellect. this God has 2 faces. formal and infinite on the transcendent side and cybernetic and finite on the immanen inadequate or incomplete complicity with god is the life is of injustice.t side. and in so far as the society of political encounters and occurrences is not in complicity with the cybernetics of power, but rather seeks a ethico-fascist notion of moral purity under the garb of liberal pacifism, justice cannot be formulated.

In speaking of modernity we acknowledge that an insatiable historicization has befallen the Earth; a shock-wave of obsolescence has swept away all perpetuities. Far from escaping the frenzy of abolition, thought has been sublimed in the white heat of its outer edge, functioning as the very catalyst of history. What is new to modernity is a rate of the obsolescence of truth, although it is still (as I write) possible for a good idea to last longer than an automobile. It is natural enough, therefore, that critique is an instrument of dissolution; a regression to conditions—to the magmic power of presupposition—upon which all order floats. Cultures that become critical are rapidly intoxicated by lavish metamorphic forces. Reality becomes soluble in the madness of invention, such that it seems as though critique were luring nature into our dreams. Anything is allowable eventually, as long as it is extravagant enough, and nothing that is allowable may any longer be avoided. A critique only dates in the way capital does: cunningly. Both are names for metamorphosis as such, reproduced in their own substitution.

Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation

After all, fear is the passionate enthusiasm for the same.

Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation

Schelling's naturephilosophy posited against Kantian anti-metaphysics, in Philosophy of Nature after Schelling by Iain Hamilton Grant

Reason can act against its own phenomenal situation in an emotional-perceptive world - reason can act as that which reformulates and even obfuscates/negates the smooth fluidity and efficient continuity of perceptual existence. Take the example which Merleau-Ponty gives of watching a foreign film that has been dubbed (i.e. for which the audio, but not the visuals, has been re-recorded) into one’s native language. This dub allows the viewer to experience the film, to understand and to react to it - as would otherwise have been impossible if one did not understand the dialogue of the film itself. With this foreign-language dub, however, a new issue arises: a lack of synchrony or of regularity between the facial movements of the speaking characters and the (translated) words being registered by the viewer. Where this un-evenness or discontinuity between what is seen and what is heard becomes apparent, the viewer thinks not about the film as such, but about the breaks and inconsistencies emerging in the production as a whole. They watch for silences in dialogue where the mouth of the actor continues moving, dubs which fail to convey the correct emotional expression to match the actor, and other abnormalities which dispel the mechanism of the film as a whole. The viewer watches not for any meaning beyond audio-visual continuity, but for the gaps and anomalies in the audio-visual surface itself. Their experience of the film is reworked through the knowledge that is guided by an understanding of the consequences of dubbing a foreign-language film. Reason may be a conscious/logical extrapolation of emotional or physical information, but it is so only insofar as it reworks this information at a distance. Reason inserts itself within an otherwise continuous and non-contradictory perceptive register, and in so doing it ‘makes something different’, it extracts inconsistencies, in this register. Without emotions, it is true that we lose reason, yet with the appearance of reason, emotions adopt a new quality - their ‘meaning’ becomes contingent on the formations of reason which sees in emotions, in the bodily, in the physical, more than there is.

In other words, emotions are what they are only by the intervention of reason. Reason is a recognition of emotions only insofar as it is also a misrecognition of these emotions. Reason allows for a new register of things to be understood, yet in so doing it fundamentally misunderstands them too. What is disputed here is not Damasio’s fundamental claim that the role of emotions in reason must be recognised - in other words that emotional impairments contribute to faulty reasoning. It is the consequences of this dependency which Damasio misses. The ground of reason is in emotions, yet in a Hegelian theme of the instance which reverts the all to which it belongs, the formations of reason appear to become irreducible to the corporeal ground from which it emerged. Human agency can make emotions mean more than they are. Reason can formulate its knowledge and the effect of emotions according to its rational capacities - misery or joy is for the stoic a very different thing than what it is for the utilitarian. Emotion is a condition of reason that is in turn altered by this very achievement.

https://rafaelholmberg.substack.com/p/reason-against-emotion-a-critique

Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of life from Process and Reality

When something mimes something else, it becomes like it, but without resembling it according to any criterion of conceptual equivalence. Thus mimesis is an index of non-identity: it marks a register of indifference or indistinction operating independently of any conceptual criterion for registering identity or difference. Consequently, mimetic phenomena threaten both social order and conceptual order, exchange and subsumption. Yet the identitarian fear of mimesis is mirrored by the terror which mimesis itself provokes. For Adorno and Horkheimer, both mimesis and subsumption are intimately connected to fear: a nexus of terror links civilization’s fear of regression, the individual’s fear of social disapprobation, the fear provoked by conceptual indistinction, and the prey’s fear of its predator. Whether sameness is established conceptually through the synthetic subsumption of particularity, or organically via the imitation of the inorganic, it remains bound to terror. More precisely, the terror of mimetic regression engenders a compulsion to subsume, to conform, and to repress, which is itself the mimesis of primitive organic terror.

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound

"The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner—state or private power—but coded figures—deformable and transformable—of a single corporation that now has only stockholders." https://t.co/xW3zDyjPxJ

Alfred North Whitehead on Plato's Timaeus and Newton's Scholium in Process and Reality