Symptoms

Antonin Artaud, Fragments from a Diary in Hell (1928)

Some of the titles I bought over the last few months.

Some of the titles I bought over the last few months.

Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial & Post-Colonial Histories (1993) The dialogue is excerpted from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's Kamalakant's Jobanbandi (1885)

An early exchange between Gandhi and Ambedkar. From Dhananjay Keer, Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission (1962)

Bhagat Singh, A Letter to Young Workers (1931)

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)

Lev Shestov, Apotheosis of Groundlessness (1905)

After a few discussions with rms (Richard Stallman), I have been said that the FSF would love to collaborating with lawyers who can help them in fleshing out their AI/LLM policy. If anybody here works or knows someone who works in law and believes in free/libre software, please reach out to me. I will connect you with rms and Krzysztof who leads the FSF Licensing & Copyright Compliance team. We really need to collaborate on this as an united front before more of our free software gets affected by it.

And finally we have people like Marc Andreessen who last year published a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” which – in contrast to what the title points at – is mostly a document based on his demand to not be regulated or laughed at by people smarter than him. But it’s not just the somewhat reductionist views on what “AI” and other technologies he is invested in can do and will do for the world, the document is remarkable because it directly and openly quotes and bases its reasoning on the writings of Italian fascists and other right wing reactionaries such as Nick Land and because it explicitly marks “the enemies”: The communists, the luddites and those who want to regulate tech. Basically the go-to enemies of fascism since its inception.

Finally someone calling out Nick Land for what he is.

Here is perhaps why until now pathology has retained so little of that character which disease has for the sick man--of being really another way of life. Certainly pathology is correct in suspecting and rectifying the opinion of the sick man who, because he feels different, thinks he also knows in what and how he is different. it does not follow that because the sick man is clearly mistaken on this second point, he is also mistaken on the first. Perhaps his feeling is the foreshadowing of what contemporary pathology is just beginning to see, namely that the pathological state is not a simple, quantitatively varied extension of the physiological state, but something else entirely. Georges Canguilhem', *On the Normal and the Pathological* (1966)

Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (1966)

What is a symptom without context or background? What is a complication separated from what it complicates? When an isolated symptom or a functional mechanism is termed pathological, one forgets that what makes them so is their inner relation in the indivisible totality of individual behavior. The situation is such that if the physiological analysis of separated functions is known in the presence of pathological facts, this is due to previous clinical information, for clinical practice puts the physician in contact with complete and concrete individuals and not with organs and their functions. Pathology, whether anatomical or physiological, analyzes in order to know more, but it can be known as pathology, that is, as the study of the mechanisms of disease, only insofar as it receives from clinical practice this notion of disease, whose origin must be sought in the experience men have in their relations with the whole of their environment. Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (1966)