/lit/ - Literature

Badiou diagnosed the philosophical climate of the 20th century as a "hunger for the Real": the closure of the subject is what produces the Outside that haunts: transcendental FOMO. The more the subject gives into its recursion arc, the darker its presuppositions become, like the way the cities blind the stars. It's because things are close that they can shield the sun. The unconscious is the excrement of an already excremental principle: consciousness: brains operate through/as the epistemic blind spots of biological systems, brains are engines that burn no-thing, in that Internality is non-deducible from mechanism, the /unity/ of an organism scales in proportion to an intensity of self: the hylic/psychic/pneumatic distinction is real. Brains, as the central CPU, instantiate the metaphysical principle of oneness /just as/ its immanence to the causal processes that determine it: it's because we're on the inside that we are free, because freedom is only thinkable on the inside, all senses refer to an affective first-person singularity in virtue of which they are senses, to dismiss the love and affection of a dog bred for it is also saying a mother's love for her child is artificial for being biologically programmed, it's actually that her love is just that which is adequate to that determination, on the inside. "GOD EXISTS ONLY FOR THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN HIM." It's all about the event horizons you skate. Which mouths you want to be fed too, Gods are the most beautiful teeth. Then comes the social as the negation of the self-fascinated, narcissistic subject, man is the social animal just because he is here, here-ness is a loneliness: social recognition is constitutive of the Hegelian subject: Hegel explicitly rejects the self-sufficiency of the Buddhist arahant. The West sided with Hegel: the unconscious is the libidinal run-off of the rational order, it all comes down to an ontologization of a question about knowledge. To the question of what is the truth behind appearances, posed by antiquity, Kant answers the appearances themselves, and the nothing from which they spring, appearances being able to think their groundlessness means that groundlessness must internal to appearances: Hegel swallows Kant's noumenal = x into the cycloidal repetition of its own Notion, geist as the auto-articulation of a Beyond that is not transcendent to thought but immanent to its own movement, /alongside with it/, like vacuoles jostling in the amnion of the void, thought and contingency are at each other's throats, Hegel's Idea doesn't float hazily above substance, but is /substance in the mode of an Idea/: the Real is Rational, the Rational is Real, whatever we can refer to in reality must conform to the conditions in virtue of which a reality /can/ refer to itself: contingency sublimated by its own necessary continuity in time, the reflexivity of Being is the condition of both death and deathlessness.

Founders of a religion are like stones thrown in the Waters, centers of revelation exhausted by their diffusion into a medium. The 30 Year Old Boomer meme proves Hegel is right: it's only after boomers have officially arrived into their own notion /as/ boomers, only after their legacy in history has become determinate enough, can we meme on them: it's only as a process rigidifies in preparation for its death can we name it, enough distance between now and then must elapse to make possible the benefit of hindsight. But it's also true that the act of memeing on boomers will, itself, arrive at its own notion, and we all know what that is: meme fatigue, the co-opting of "NPC" by NPCs themselves, the rote mechanical raucous of "cuck", "soiboy", "jew", etc. by those who ape the first spark. Example: mainstream studies about, say, health and nutrition were gospel before the internet counterculture spearheaded by /pol/ took it upon itself to debunk them, until eventually, they became suspicious of these studies /just because/ they are mainstream, as processes go on they're eroded into the nub of purely formal repetition. This has its parallels with the Spenglerian understanding of history /and/ the decay of religious ideals, of traditional structures whose umbilical link to their original, vitalizing centers are sundered by time: Christ was a sunburst whose rays could only have darkened into the Catholic Church. For the Buddha the transmission of the dharma was fundamentally thermodynamic: /because/ the dharma is transmitted, that it decays: the original immediacy of a revelation becomes progressively /mediated/ by time, like playing telephone with Zoroaster, for precisely /this/ reason mysticism is the reflexivity of the origin. Only if the Beginning is constantly kept in mind, can we close the circle going forward: the West linearizes time as the urge-to-progress, by disavowing its origin it only re-affirms its need for a center as the auto-sophistication of desire: capitalism quite purposefully represses its Origin so it might fill the resultant vacuum with its own devices, capitalism /is/ that vacuum, and the winds that blow in it blow for no one.

Founders of a religion are like stones thrown in the Waters, centers of revelation exhausted by their diffusion into a medium. The 30 Year Old Boomer meme proves Hegel is right: it's only after boomers have officially arrived into their own notion /as/ boomers, only after their legacy in history has become determinate enough, can we meme on them: it's only as a process rigidifies in preparation for its death can we name it, enough distance between now and then must elapse to make possible the benefit of hindsight. But it's also true that the act of memeing on boomers will, itself, arrive at its own notion, and we all know what that is: meme fatigue, the co-opting of "NPC" by NPCs themselves, the rote mechanical raucous of "cuck", "soiboy", "jew", etc. by those who ape the first spark. Example: mainstream studies about, say, health and nutrition were gospel before the internet counterculture spearheaded by /pol/ took it upon itself to debunk them, until eventually, they became suspicious of these studies /just because/ they are mainstream, as processes go on they're eroded into the nub of purely formal repetition. This has its parallels with the Spenglerian understanding of history /and/ the decay of religious ideals, of traditional structures whose umbilical link to their original, vitalizing centers are sundered by time: Christ was a sunburst whose rays could only have darkened into the Catholic Church. For the Buddha the transmission of the dharma was fundamentally thermodynamic: /because/ the dharma is transmitted, that it decays: the original immediacy of a revelation becomes progressively /mediated/ by time, like playing telephone with Zoroaster, for precisely /this/ reason mysticism is the reflexivity of the origin. Only if the Beginning is constantly kept in mind, can we close the circle going forward: the West linearizes time as the urge-to-progress, by disavowing its origin it only re-affirms its need for a center as the auto-sophistication of desire: capitalism quite purposefully represses its Origin so it might fill the resultant vacuum with its own devices, capitalism /is/ that vacuum, and the winds that blow in it blow for no one.

Because consciousness understands phenomena, that it eventually mistakes phenomena for this understanding. Time speeds up as you age because you're thinking more about life, in a way that is also thinking less: life accelerates towards the event horizon of death just as its self-habituation, something in the analytic ego feeds itself to the abyss like a lodestone, dreamers burn like candles against the void of mundanity because the true death is always boredom, true for the mind now as it was for Rome and Adam. Nietzsche was the first to predict that Enlightenment rationalism will enslave humanity to the vector of heat death: the more capitalism optimizes local energy expenditure, the more it homogenizes the global distribution of energy: what makes Nietzsche so fucking radical is he's saying that the thermodynamic tendency of all objects to seek rest finds in the Last Man a /physiognomic/ expression, what distinguishes the Overman from the bugman is the former's joyous appropriation of the negativity of God, of God as the eternal flow of death and the heroin kick of rebirth, the Overman stares at the sun and forces himself not to blink, the bugman buys curtains. In alchemy the Philosopher's Stone is /not/ the cutting of the Ouroborous of self-identity but its coming into its own, the fallen self is two snakes that devour each other's principle: I drink because I am thirsty, I am thirsty because I drink... last men are mind in love with the power of matter to narcotize, capitalism as strobe lit nescience: lower types, exhausted with the world, resign themselves to the slopes of their gravity and are fed to Sleep like moths, higher types are carried by an upward falling, religious experiences are shifts in magnetic fields, now the base repels, not the sky... The final nightmare of the masculine (Logoic) consciousness is being swallowed by the womb again, which is why incest is so repellent, it is a thirst for a return to that from which God so graciously hurled you like a boomerang with all his might, the Self is a hand that must be played... Western thought gets caught on its (Parmenidean) axioms like a flytrap, the more it thematizes its captivity the more the jacket tightens, because its captivity just is that thematization, like trying to clean a spill with a wet mop, even postmodern cynicism feeds the impulse to draw on a blank canvas.

Because consciousness understands the reasons behind phenomena, that it will eventually mistake phenomena for these reasons. Time speeds up as you age because you're thinking more about life, in a way that is also thinking less: life accelerates towards the event horizon of death just as its self-habituation, something in the analytic ego feeds itself to the void like a lodestone, dreamers burn like watchtowers against mundanity because the true invader is always boredom, true for the mind now as it was for Rome and Adam, Nietzsche was the first to know that Enlightenment rationalism will enslave humanity to the vector of heat death: local optimizations of energy expenditure accelerate the global homogenization of energy: what makes Nietzsche so fucking radical is he's saying that the thermodynamic tendency of all objects to seek rest finds in the Last Man a /physiognomic/ expression, what distinguishes the Overman from the bugman is the former's joyous appropriation of the will to power as pure becoming, of God as the suicide addicted to the guarantee of his rebirth, the Overman /owns/ death while the Last Men closes the curtains, in alchemy the true self is /not/ the cutting of the Ouroborous of self-identity but its coming into its own, the fallen self is two snakes that devour each other's principle: I drink because I am thirsty, I am thirsty because I drink... last men are the consummation of entropy, mind in love with the power of matter to narcotize, capitalism as strobe lit nescience: lower types, exhausted with the world, resign themselves to the slopes of their gravity and are fed to Sleep like moths, higher types are carried by an upward falling, religious experiences are shifts in magnetic fields, now the base repels, not the sky... The final nightmare of the masculine (Logoic) consciousness is being swallowed by the womb again, which is why incest is so repellent, it expresses a thirst for a return to that from which you are hurled like a boomerang by a golden Arm, the Self is a hand that must be played, you don't take your ball and just go home because where will you go? The master lends his servants money so that it might be spent... Western thought gets caught on its (Parmenidean) axioms like a flytrap, the more it thematizes its captivity the more the jacket tightens, because its captivity just is that thematization, like trying to clean a spill with a wet mop, even postmodern cynicism feeds the impulse to draw on a blank canvas...

The Fall was the collapse of the first wave function. Begin: Kant's inversion of classical time prefigures Einstein's relativistic turn in physics: time is no longer determined by the natural cycles of the seasons and stars, but becomes subordinate to the pure form of its movement. Temporality becomes perspectival, unhinged from the eternal return and devoured by Kant's machine, nature liberates itself from itself by positing time as an a priori condition of experience, as naming time as nothing else but the surety of its own becoming. Against Hume, Kant had to prove the laws of our understanding - like causality - are not generalized from a mass of atomistic experiences assembled willy-nilly, but from experientiality as such, from the very /form/ our experiences must take to be intelligible as experience. Kant discovered that mathematics, that gray area between the universal and particular that's haunted Western thought since Pythagoras, is founded on synthetic a priori grounds that are inseparable from their structuration in space and time: that is to say, the concepts of "a line" and "that which is the shortest distance between two points" can /only/ coincide in space and time, taken strictly (analytically) by themselves there is no way to make the jump from one to the other: it is our experience being one and the same with a (unified) spatiotemporal field of presentation that such a thing as mathematical laws can be derived from it: the triangle exists only "for-us", as the necessity of an isomorphism between a witnessing subject and what it witnesses: the world makes sense because it /has/ to pose this question, not because it was /ordained/ to: time goes on not because its leash is being pulled by the seasons, but because it pulls its own leash. What that means is, there's something about being present to myself as a Subject that will forever remain irreducible to the concept, because it is only through that self-presence that something like Necessity can even be thematized: I'm not saying the subject by some divine power constitutes the universe, rather, a universe as such can only be /constituted for a subject/. Nature becomes usurped by its own issue: the circle of the Whole, of the beginning's identity with the end, of the end as nothing but the beginning accomplished in reverse, is short-circuited first by: brains as recursion machines that repress (their identity with) their own causality, and then, by self-consciousness, Western apperception's metaphysics of presence, of truth being lifted out of Heraclitean flux and crowned with the apodicticity of the transcendental, there's no longer a Platonic essence behind phenomena pulling the strings of its logic, its essence IS its logic.

Any /Lit/huanians here?

Western rationality bootstraps the closure of the void out of the surrender of biological facticity to self-optimizing virtualization. Technology and transcension are the self-identity of the Ain confirmed across the axis of time, thought sucking its thumb in the deep: capital is an engine that burns dead time as the question 'what now?' metastasizing out of Eden into Mad Max zones of futility and despair where incels become the first conscious barnacles of the ship called Progress and no one takes photos, it's not that God doesn't exist but that he doesn't care, we're designer bodies ex nihilo, mystic aloneness with the One becomes horizontal freefall, replace Lacan's ex-timate core with the idea of immanent exteriority: it's not that I carry my Outside in me as my ground but my ground can only be an Outside. I am posited alongside an Other's self-positing, I am caught on actuality's web like a fly, the gnostics were right and it's so much worse, the real lie in the Matrix was the history of the Machine War itself, that there was ever a time the humans weren't thermodynamic livestock, consciousness is just not the passenger of a machine but the machine creating its own passengers. Everything is a singularity pushing out, self-awareness is a gradient isomorphic to organizational complexity, as soon as a bundle of cellular components has distinguished itself sufficiently from its environment to become a self-sustaining whole, there emerges an internality adequate to that cell's interactions with its environment. At that instant substance becomes subject, Crowley's magus was a lipid membrane, witness-consciousness isn't so much a Lacanian torsion of the universal field as it is a twisting inside-out. Nature becomes short-circuited by its own rules, consciousness - as the rote functioning of the nervous system - is accidental but internality is not, internality can fly off on a tangent into the blue, otherwise planets are "caught" on self-propulsive recursion drives that culminate in the regime of capital. Greek rationality was the dawn of apperception just as it was also the dusk of what came before, humanity was fallen the instant it had the first notion of a Tradition, of somewhere it had to get to. Monads are fundamentally perspectival: God "contracts" into the Subject, but in antiquity thought retains an umbilical link with its matrix. And here comes Plato with the scissors.

Western rationality bootstraps the void's closure out of the surrender of biological facticity to self-optimizing virtualization. Technology and transcension are the self-identity of the Ain confirmed across the axis of time, thought sucking its thumb in the deep: capital is an engine that burns dead time as the question 'what now?' metastasizing out of Eden into Mad Max zones of futility and despair where incels become the first conscious barnacles of the ship called Progress and no one takes photos, it's not that God doesn't exist but that he doesn't care, we're designer bodies ex nihilo, mystic aloneness with the One becomes horizontal freefall, replace Lacan's ex-timate core with the idea of immanent exteriority: it's not that I carry my Outside in me as my ground but my ground can only be an Outside. I am posited alongside an Other's self-positing, I am caught on actuality's web like a fly, the gnostics were right and it's so much worse, the real lie in the Matrix was the history of the Machine War itself, that there was ever a time the humans weren't thermodynamic livestock, consciousness isn't just the passenger of the machine but the machine creating passengers for itself. Everything is a singularity pushing out, self-awareness is a gradient isomorphic to organizational complexity, as soon as a bundle of cellular components has distinguished itself sufficiently from its environment to become a self-sustaining whole, there emerges an internality adequate that cell's interactions with its environment. At that instant substance becomes subject, Crowley's magus was a lipid membrane, witness-consciousness isn't so much a Lacanian torsion of the universal field as it is a twisting inside-out. Nature becomes short-circuited by its own rules, consciousness - as the rote functioning of the nervous system - is accidental but internality is not, internality can fly off on a tangent into the blue, otherwise planets are "caught" on self-propulsive recursion drives that culminate in the regime of capital. Greek rationality was the dawn of apperception just as it was also the dusk of what came before, humanity was fallen the instant it had the first notion of a Tradition, of somewhere it had to get to. Monads are fundamentally perspectival: God "contracts" into the Subject, but in antiquity thought retains an umbilical link with its matrix. And here comes Plato with the scissors.

As cultural time accelerates its moments become more inane. Movements must be accomplished in slow, patient cycles. Eurocentrism as teleological bubble built up out of the temporality of inner sense. Desire can't exist without the linearity of thought, or rather, thought is linearity, memory, progression. See: the ontological value of memory in Weininger's thought. A powerful memory means you're more "here", more alive, than most, because you remember things more when they happen, but that lucidity commits you to its inherent vector. Essence becomes the appearance of appearance with time: the Idea of the tree is just its consistency in duration. Spirit as the retroactive narrativization of being, Minerva's Owl, contingency strained into sense only by hindsight. Addiction is this temporality at its purest, wanting to get high is wanting to give body to a memory again. Life is addicted to its own being and death is the tolerance break. The cogito is Western consciousness waking up into its own reflexive vector, a merely epistemologized atman: Hegel's Spirit as the "contingent dawning of [the truth of] contingency". Teleoplexy spirals boil out of placidity and back again. Western historicism is the (self-)negation of the cyclicity of nature, the circle cut and forcefully straightened into a line, but the ends will always retain that lust for closure, capital tries to clamp them down but they will meet again in either collapse or transcension, either the ground-state or this ground-state at a higher potency - Production optimized by CRISPR, real usurped by hyperreal. Self-movement of the Idea becomes the (Deleuzian) self-movement of the Medium. In Deleuze, Nature becomes a detour to (and in) pure acephalic potential, we disagree with Deleuze on one fundamental point: these Laws are cephalic, the root-axioms of the universe comfortably account for the rise and fall of materialistic civilizations. Their failure is the ultimate sign of the benevolence of those laws, as Zummi says.

Non-being is negated by nature, nature is negated by consciousness - that is, congition is only operative as the repression of its ground, the causal processes that underlie it. Bakker's blind brain: the self just is the ignorance of its self-causation. A brain is just what's needed for consciousness to "get here" believably, evolution has nothing but the function of verisimilitude. Metaphysical solipsism is true, the soul is drawn with a compass. Life occupies the infinite number of points at the periphery in convergence on a common (read: virtual) center. For Schelling freedom could not exist outside God, or (fully) within him either. The Son is Lacan's fantasmic core in a lower potency: the goal of psychoanalysis isn't to get you to own your inner fantasy life in spite of its impossibility, but to see through that impossibility as constitutive of it. In other words, even the quality of your inner life is something not intrinsic to you, the Subject is the self-relating of a void that arbitrarily produces fantasmic content as the correlate of this movement: the Father as ungrund is transfigured by the reflexivity of the Son. The irreducibility of your experiences is as much estranged from you as your own black box. And it's in this cut that magic has power, the cut between seer and seen. Shestov achieved CHIM. A world is only possible if it is experienced from the "transcendental aloneness" of one's selfhood. Eckhart said Nothing is a fountain. That he had no reason to be thankful for God's love, God loved the world as unconditionally as gravity. Voluntarism enacts the gap between form and content, seer and seen, in God: the absolute is something than self-identical intelligibility, intelligibility is just a mold which His will arbitrarily fills. At least until the inversion, and divine caprice becomes intensive, Bataillian prime matter. Proclus believed attributing will and movement to the One made it a creature like all the rest, a monster in fact. And that has happened.

Philosophers of substance, of oneness and identity, they man the watchtowers of the universe. Bataille, Land, Deleuze, they're somewhere else. As Subjects we are derived from an ungrund that precedes determinacy, this frame asks us to marry that energy with its soil. As bodies, the eggshell is the copula. Deleuze says Identity is the power of the infinite to self-distinguish, to short-circuit A by the detour of A = A, the Word as the metastability of the vacuum, Milton's hyaline stomach: language, like the cellular membrane, equates inside and outside just by being the mediatory between them. As with Hegel's radicalization of Kant: the cut between appearance and reality can only be performed as the constitutive condition of our asking after it. The prereflexive closure of the ground becomes the closure of apperception, becomes the closure of language. Words can only denote the symbolic identity of an object if they also mean object's oneness with respect to itself. The Father = the original, self-enjoying One, haunts the symbolic after his 'death' as Lacan's objet petit a, my blind spot/apperceptive shadow. My inclusion in the world is what mobilizes my being as care. I am related to the impossibility of my ever being placed outside this relation. Osiris dismembered becomes the God of the dead. Spirit is what clots the cut that it is. Thought sliding down its own event horizon. Formalism is the fatigue of intelligibility, content becomes the arbitrary placeholder of transcendental categories: Zizek's priority of frame over content: it is because phenomena are distinguished against a background that they are destined to return to it, their finitude is what gives body to the void they conceal. Hierarchy is being narrativized: or, porn is the empty form of all narrative, the clinamen of desire and climax, the Bildungsroman as both the circle and the step-pyramid phallus of narrative tension and release. Male sexuality is the spirating deferral of the zero-point; female sexuality embodies it. "There is no coming to the One with one jump, and none without going about": magical consciousness is the Lacanian drive, desire begins to desire its own deadlock, the impossibility of a full, cathartic release that is not death, the groundless that yawns in the failure of all schematization: this space is real superiority. The Abraxas interior, Jungian Star, youth as the self-beholding Origin, your center of gravity corresponds to your occult center which as you age descends into your body, into sexuation. Rational thought is no more a refutation of pre-Enlightenment "superstitions" than being an adult is a refutation of childhood. In both cases our attitude is a function of time alone. In children is found life's infinite power to renew itself. Life's novelty is the novelty of forgetfulness. The Golden Age that will follow this Kali Yuga will just be the survival euphoria of a thinned herd. The body leans, the spirit is androgyne.

Even Evola falls for the nihilist trap: in his essay on Mithras he denies the Platonic harmony of the cosmos, his universe sounds like Nietzsche and Hegel's closet occultism had a baby: the world is the free play of "blissful and terrible" centers of will. Spirit is the auto-organization of chaos. Metaphysics is what you get when a mind optimizes its self-modeling. Look at some of these things, these towers people build in their heads. Who gives a shit about the Sefer Yetzirah when your girl snapchats you sucking dick? self-realization is whatever it takes to kill the gravity of needing to ask. Oneness is t = 0 exploding into space /just as/ the implosion into finitude: △ contracts as it bursts outwards. The former tendency is the will to remain in one self, the holy copula of A = A, the latter the will to be ramified by otherness. God is a black hole only in the approach, behind us, as the fertility of the prenatal void, that darkness is the Fountain. Genius is the power of hammering contradiction into unity, but strictly speaking there's no such thing as religious consolation. The resolution is the impossibility of resolution: Weil's Cross is the agony of the divided itself at its keening pitch. You are this thing. Thought climbs out of koans and moon spirits to candy crush and hashtag rhizhomes. You are this thing. The actual phenomenological texture of reality has changed since the Golden Age, video recordings make it impossible to believe in anything like a god-king again. Gurdjieff's Ray descending into denser and denser simulacra, into asphalt laws and archonic triangles. Shestov said being contented with the real is what feeds you to it. Mediocrity lubricates the gears. Negativity is the perpetuum mobile: what you sacrifice to the system you are answerable to lets you bask in a proximate immortality. You're a mountain climbing itself. You're a hand played in the biggest house there is. What are you but what sees it. The butterfly is distilled from the caterpillar. Ares was the deification of an endorphin rush. Capital is appearance hijacked by its own redoubling: Plotinus as the prophet of Times Square, whose God was always the power of the virtual to haunt, this One as je ne sais quoi, blue star always on the tip of the tongue. The world blooms in the longing between Shiva for Prakriti. Schelling's first principle is dark, his God vomits nature into time in his relief from the rollercoaster "annular drives" of eternity, in Plato the Ideas fall like a rainbow.

Aristotle can't think the Neither P nor P' of the formless jhanas: something is either a thing or it isn't, it can't be both or neither, that would be a contradiction. The principle of non-contradiction was an arbitrary line drawn in the sand for thought as discourse - the discourse, in fact - to be effective: thought represses its groundlessness only for it to sneak in through the backdoor as philosophy's progressive recognition of the arbitrariness of the world proper. We see this finally coming into focus with the voluntarism of the late Scholastic period, the distinction in God between his will and his being, that is to say, between what God does and what God is: what God does is create, but he something other than his creation, or rather, the form of his creations is at the mercy of divine caprice, reliant on a law either outside of him or internal to him, which he can mold at his will. Voluntarism finds its culmination in the thought of Descartes and Schelling, for Descartes, God could have made 2 + 2 = 5 in a way that unthinkable for us stranded in a universe where it equals plain old 4. In Schelling, God is divided within himself between his existence and the basis of that existence, his own prereflexive longing for Himself that haunts God in a time beyond time. The logicity of being as something ultimately separate from being itself and therefore contingent. The point is this: the Platonic identity between God and the intelligibility of existence is shattered, an object's properties do not reflect, however dimly, the splendor of some hidden essence but merely the contingent coming-together of these properties in time. The irrational becomes the ground of the irrational, Plato's Sun necrotizing into the Landian Black Sun (but the Ground has snake eyes only for those who deny it: the mystics come to love what the rationalist abhors). Then comes Kant: intelligibility is merely the correlate of subjectivity. But Kant reflects only a larger movement: as the universe unfolds - as space expands - we, as loci of thought, shrink, into our minds and bodies. Subjectivity comes into itself from "the outside", from its own groundlessness: the irreducible particularity of human cognition - which it was Kant's great achievement to prove - can only be an object for that which lies outside it: consciousness is the instantiation of the primordial void in matter: "consciousness is Brahman".

Time is the infinite regress of the witnessing self. This is gonna take some work. Begin: the Self, proper, is that which performs the movement of dis-identification with everything not responsible for this movement: anatta is the "infinite regressus" of thought. The Self must precisely be that which always says and can always say: this is not I, this is not my Self. That to which the merely nominal self is disclosed - if the self is an illusion, just who or what is it that's being tricked? Even Hume had to struggle with the consequences of his rejection of the phenomenal self, precisely because it committed him to that - apparently transcendent, or at least apparently transcendent to the horizon of his empirical philosophy - consciousness which must exist to perform the dismissal. For the West the Seer has always been a logical inference ("I think -> therefore, I am"), and as such is "optional". For Vedantists it is axiomatic. But you already know this. Here's where it gets tricky: the Vedantists deny an infinite regress of Seers seeing Seers (the first Seer illumined by a second Seer illumined by a third, etc.) because, at this very moment, it's clearly not happening. Now for the rabbit hole: Vedantists deny an infinite regress, but Hegel, in his own way, doesn't: it is just what happens in time and /as/ time. Time as the infinite dialectic regress of witness-consciousness. The atman as sense-certainty, absolute knowing as ramified presence. Now it's true Hegel isn't so subjectivist - he explodes the transcendental boundaries of Kant's thought - what is true for the subject as the self-mediation of its noumenal Outside is proven to encompass to being as well - but here's the kicker: Hegel's Logic is the speculative science of what must be true for there to be a science of intelligible being in the first place. In other words, the Logic only ever has a retroactive validity - the Logic is Hegel trying to determine what must have been (and is always-already) true in the eternally past history of God for subjectivity to be just what it is now, this infinite "tarrying with the negative", this ideality that digests its non-ideal ground to produce excremental Spirit, thought as the metabolism of the Void. Holy shit nigger don't you get it? God is an infinite series of meta-intelligences. The eternal turnover of witnesses, growth in eternity. Hegel's system is the spiraling inwards - of phenomenological sense-certainty: "the dialectic is movement, or rather, movement is the dialectic of all there is". Absolute Knowing confirms only the dialectical inexhaustibility of the Now that is always-already abolished by our being here to register it as Now. You, right now, are the tail end of a process stretching innumerable eons into the past. The Self is the angel that dances on the head of a pin. Round of applause for you: you clawed yourself out of the fucking void. And yet you didn't, that's just a fantasy, there's just this Now - and yet there isn't.

If Kant was the straitjacket, Parmenides is the orderly: Parmenides was the first to equate being with intelligibility, that thought's activity necessarily presupposes its adequacy with its object. Thought can't think non-being because thought can't think what is outside its fundamental identity with itself as thought. The inaugural move of Western philosophy was the banishing of the very opacity it simultaneously establishes and deploys itself to excavate. Rational solipsism. The agreement of the mind with its object is a two-sidedness whose isomorphism is guaranteed by this very distinction: Hegel's great breakthrough. And so the Platonic God becomes the principle of intelligibility, because to be is to be intelligible. As Eric Perlman so brilliantly observes: see, it's not that because the One in Plotinus' system produces out of necessity that it is constrained by some law outside it, it's that the one is Productivity as such, the One's necessity doesn't contradict its primacy because at its level the One must be the principle of non-contradiction itself. What the gnostics do is demonize this principle, because as the principle of determination, it must also be the principle of finitude: death, matter, suffering. History is humanity's progressive repudiation of its base: even Plotinus chafed at the prima materia. We become sick with ourselves for the death that has to feed us. In our original immersion in nature, consumption was sacralized, we thanked the animal for the sacrifice of its body as just as we recognized beauty is the hourglass. Kant himself isn't so dramatic, but he still ties a cinderblock to the absolute: for him, the brain is the demiurge, that which imposes form on an unthematizable substrate: it's not that I, as subject, approach a medium always-already intelligible, but as the subject I am precisely that-which-makes-intelligible. If only Kant could have seen the occult ramifications of his breakthrough. Kant thinks the world only makes sense in reference to itself ("there is no metalanguage"), Plato, instead, thinks that the principle of intelligibility must itself be situated beyond it. Isn't there something of a (very attenuated) remnant of this in Kant's system itself? The irreducibility of the subject to either pole of his transcendental schematic: my self is neither noumenon nor phenomenon, but groundless hovering. The seeing-unseeing eye. Freedom is only possible within and /as/ my internality: as is magic.

Time is the lag of being: the self exists only as that which coincides with its sense-experience at any given moment: knowledge is possible only as the re-capitulation of this original immediacy at a later date - which itself, of course, being another moment in time, means I never achieve full self-transparency, I can only intuit myself as I appear to myself now, or rather, how a past moment appears to me now in this present one, never all at once, and this is the argument Kant uses to deny (what he erroneously assumes to be) mystical woo woo knowledge of the apperceptive self. Knowledge, then, is only possible with my being out-of-joint with myself, what I experience as temporality. If I never fully coincide with myself, I must be this noncoincidence first and foremost. In other words, I can never step outside my own positionality, and have to cope with this fact precisely within positionality: self-knowledge is almost always mistaken, partial, in progress. As Heidegger has it: man is not more than animal because he is rational, he is rational /because/ he is an animal. What I fundamentally am is not so much the back that I can't see, but the impossibility of my ever seeing it, or, nothing but the continuous craning of my neck to see it: the Hegelian dialectic, the infinite positing and overcoming of limits, of what thought initially assumes it can't access and then, miraculously, finds it has already accessed it by this assumption. As with the Buddhist mantra of "this is not I, this is not me, this is not my self": the practitioner is told to repeatedly bring to mind the nothingness of all prospective selves, the self isn't some substantial x but this ongoing, processual dis-identification with any and all substantial x's - the inability to endorse this movement is experienced as loss, grief, the irrevocable passage of time. Buddhism is the AA of the void. Ties in beautifully with Hegel's identity of identity and non-identity: I am not (fully) what I am identified with precisely by my being identified with it ("I am, and yet not I, but God is in me"). Because something is here, that it can't render itself as an object in its own field, and so everything eventually overstays its welcome: the Hegelian dialectic. The apperceptive field in which phenomena emerge and subside is both the only possible condition of their existence and what kills them: "... and man that hath Mind in him, let him learn to know that he himself is deathless, and that cause of death is love, though Love is all."

>The ontological relativity advocated here is inseparable from an enunciative relativity. Knowledge of a Universe (in an astrophysical or axiological sense) is only possible through the mediation of autopoietic machines. A zone of self-belonging needs to exist somewhere for the coming into cognitive existence of any being or any modality of being. Outside of this machine/Universe coupling, beings only have the pure status of a virtual entity. And it is the same for their enunciative coordinates. The biosphere and mecanosphere, coupled on this planet, focus a point of view of space, time and energy. They trace an angle of the constitution of our galaxy. Outside of this particularised point of view, the rest of the Universe exists (in the sense that we understand existence here-below) only through the virtual existence of other autopoietic machines at the heart of other bio-mecanospheres scattered throughout the cosmos. The relativity of points of view of space, time and energy do not, for all that, absorb the real into the dream.
>The category of Time dissolves into cosmological reflections on the Big Bang even as the category of irreversibility is affirmed. Residual objectivity is what resists scanning by the infinite variation of points of view constitutable upon it. Imagine an autopoietic entity whose particles are constructed from galaxies. Or, conversely, a cognitivity constituted on the scale of quarks. A different panorama, another ontological consistency. The mecanosphere draws out and actualises configurations which exist amongst an infinity of others in fields of virtuality. Existential machines are at the same level as being in its intrinsic multiplicity. They are not mediated by transcendent signifiers and subsumed by a univocal ontological foundation. They are to themselves their own material of semiotic expression. Existence, as a process of deterritorialisation, is a specific inter-machinic operation which superimposes itself on the promotion of singularised existential intensities. And, I repeat, there is no generalised syntax for these deterritorialisations. Existence is not dialectical, not representable. It is hardly livable!

Magic is the superfluity of (first-person) consciousness. We're gonna need Schelling, Zizek, and Hegel to unpack this. Begin: the groundlessness of God's existence is the groundlessness of subjective freedom. God is a looking-backwards into the abyss of his inexplicability, Uzdavinys' "ineffable Waters". Heidegger's Lichtung: what is disclosed is the formal reality of disclosure as such. Silesius' rose: the rose blooms to say only its "non-saying". God is the supreme magician who never reveals his tricks, but being God, he needs the subject to forget them in the first place. Because only mystery is worth anything in the void. Because being in awe of its ineffability is all the One has to look forward to in the Deep. Freedom derives from the opacity of being: something must remain obscure at the heart of the absolute if freedom is to be operative, or else everything collapses into skeleton rigidity. The beginning must be repressed if it is to be the Beginning proper. Now we segue into Zizek's inversion of the classical Marxist notion of ideology: ideology is not that which obfuscates the "real" reality behind it, as he says, but that which constitutes (meaningful) reality to begin with. It isn't a choice between the True and its ideological mystifications, but between competing sets of ideologies that more or less own their status as such. As with Buddhism: you can't just stop desiring full-stop, you have to first desire the end of desire, to learn to discriminate between those modes of being that motorize this negative movement and those that hinder it. Buddhism as ontological short-circuit, desire lacerated by its own logic.

Kant is terrified by the infinity of nature. If we can't get a grip on experience, we can at least settle for the formal structures that render it possible. This is Land's point in the opening essay of Fanged Noumena. If nature is the froth of particulars, then these particulars must still conform to the a priori categories that make possible their disclosure in the first place, and this is the house where reason can finally hang its coat. Kant wants to mediate - attenuate - the unknown with the conditions of its appearing, he wants to mediate the unknown with the very necessity of its being mediated - the subject represents to itself what is fundamentally pre-representational. Kant ties Hegel's noose for him: thought's intelligibility is only ever self-referentially grounded, self-derived, and what Hegel does is explode the boundaries of where this process takes place, this synthesizing function is not exclusive to the subject but (is the dialectical movement of) being itself. The subject, in a way, is always playing catch-up: first there is the synthesis (the intelligibility of apperceptive unity), and /then/ thought's flailing to meaningfully account for, well, meaning. Sense is solipsism. Spirit is the blindspot in its own field of vision: noumena are opaque only for thought, because phenomena are ephemeral apearances only for that apperception which subsists in and through them: atman and maya. The continuity of perception can't reconcile itself to the negativity of the moments that constitute it, and so reason locks itself up in Doubting Castle. Hegel takes it a step further: thought is nothing but this process of thought trying to account for the formal integrity of its (self-)accounting. Thought is the expenditure of its own excess. The incommensurability of mind and matter is, paradoxically, their mutual commitment: first the cut must be made before the bridge can be built. Kant's categories are the immanentization of Platonic Forms. The Platonic thirst for a Beyond consummates itself in the negative existence of the Kantian noumenon: the thing-in-itself is the unknowable = x, and what is left to the imagination is always more potent than what is spelled out. Kant blocks the exit to the cave because he thinks our eyes only evolved to see in the dark. Intelligibility doesn't irradiate from on high, like a Sun, the light by which all things are seen, intelligibility just is the presupposition of our seeing. The logic of things isn't out there but in here: God, before dying, signed the Logos over to us in his will, now become a prioricity. Spirits become qualia. God no longer but the intelligible Sun, but the Concept of conceptuality. As the human mind consolidates itself out of the primordial mud its Outside grows darker to compensate, the same way the light from a screen darkens an already dark room. Reason is a camp fire, the greatest of camp fires. Thought is a dog chasing its own tail. Hegel was the dog finally biting down.

Plotinus' One is t = 0. More to the point, God is the singularity of identity with Himself that all subjectivity participates in, to be subjectivity: Schelling's negative principle, the reflexivity of God is the reflexivity of the self. The arch-principle in Neoplatonism is unity because oneness is irreducible to its parts. Mysticism is self-integralization. Extension is otherness, the singularity inflated at the instant of beginning. All beings are derivative of a primordial sameness. 1 x 1 = 1. Parmenides' adequacy of thought and being signals the Kali Yuga: thought and being become co-dependent, what is thought is being, what is being must be thought. Sameness confirms itself in the neuro-architecture of naked apes. The absolute is thought naming its own groundswell. The corrollary of spatial expansion is the singularization of the "I" out of sense-certainty. Descartes and Kant inaguarated the subject in the ruins of Olypmpus. Christ was the Prometheus of the rabble. Heat death is the 9 - 5. We're a grenade blast in the 0 winding down to null. Movies exist because the night does. We're that which is infinitely clarified by the thinking of its own hollow back. Zen upends the Hegelian "identity of identity and non-identity" with the question: "what is there between the non-difference of birth and death?" Always mind bursting into new vistas. Always this reckoning. Enlightenment means exhalation. Nirvana is what extinguishes the magnetism of the Other. God sets up the symbolic economy of human relations to negate it, yes, spirituality is accidental, but accidental in a necessary way, and this is arguably Hegel's whole point: the Idea can only arrive as the negative. What Hegel is saying is that even if he's overcome there's a kernel of his thought that is always validated by that overcoming. Hegel is the fatigue of being: thought glimpsing its own self-movement, coming to terms with ontological addiction. DFW nails it, I'm afraid. Acceptance is fatigue. Hegel is thought's habituation to its own intelligibility. Transcendence is only possible for Plato because for the Greek mind the world still sang. The Golden Age was thought's morning, and Hegel is the guest who arrives at dusk. Now I hear the crickets chirping. Death is the greatest trip. That's what we're here for. God smoking us out of matter's bong. All this sweetness. Don't ya know. Your dreams are your afterlife. I'm here for you. You for who your eyes still burn

Schelling's haunted by the copula. "The bird is blue": how can one thing be what it is, but also something else? A question echoed by Kant's problematic: how do we account for synthetic a priori judgments? Mathematics proved that we could predicate outside of experience: 1 plus 1 /is/ 2. Kant couldn't - wouldn't - accept numerical givenness - he betrayed philosophy's (original) fidelity to being by his misguided fidelity to thought. Keep hacking away at the bird's properties and you get the void-kernel around which they all cohered. The bird's gone. The bird was a tautology. The bird was just its identity with itself as that individual bird. A= A. The bird is the Word. Oneness is a tautology: the principle on which Proclus' entire system is based. God is the irreducible singularity of individuation: God is the unity that subsists in and through the otherness of its parts. The dyad unspools out of the monad because it's the very act of the One's self-registration (of itself as One) that implicates the alterity of that which performs the recognition. Identity is constituted by the very gap set up to assert it: I must posit a cut between myself and some x to make my identity with it possible. This is what Hegel realized: identity is self-thwarting. The alchemical dragon: the same fluids that destroy are those that build up. The Son transgresses against the Father by revealing the (obscene) Father to himself: by being the self-reflexion of the father, by revealing to him(self) the void he was all along: after eating the fruit, Adam and Eve were ashamed of their nakedness because they were seeing it for the first time. The void haunts the space its self-effacement produced: as the groundlessness of subjective freedom, as Lacan's excremental remainder, the generative power the Son takes into himself after the slaying of the primordial Dragon/Father in the Hindu creation myth. The dragon's body becomes matter and his heart, subjectivity. Evil exists only in the eye that sees it, like Hegel says, because the Son is Christ and Lucifer both, and wasn't Lucifer the first-born of God?

Schelling's haunted by the copula. "The bird is blue": how can one thing be what it is, but also something else? A question echoed by Kant's problematic: how do we account for synthetic a priori judgments? Mathematics proved that we could predicate outside of experience: 1 plus 1 /is/ 2. Kant couldn't - wouldn't - accept numerical givenness - he betrayed philosophy's (original) fidelity to being by his misguided fidelity to thought. Keep hacking away at the bird's properties and you get the void-kernel around which they all cohered. The bird's gone. The bird was a tautology. The bird was just its identity with itself as that individual bird. A= A. The bird is the Word. Oneness is a tautology: the principle on which Proclus' entire system is based. God is the irreducible singularity of individuation: God is the unity that subsists in and through the otherness of its parts. The dyad unspools out of the monad because it's the very act of the One's self-registration (of itself as One) that implicates the alterity of that which performs the recognition. Identity is constituted by the very gap set up to assert it: I must posit a cut between myself and some x to make my identity with it possible. This is what Hegel realized: identity is self-thwarting. The alchemical dragon: the same fluids that destroy are those that build up. The Son transgresses against the Father by revealing the (obscene) Father to himself: by being the self-reflexion of the father, by revealing to him(self) the void he was all along: after eating the fruit, Adam and Eve were ashamed of their nakedness because they were seeing it for the first time. The void haunts the space its self-effacement produced: as the groundlessness of subjective freedom, as Lacan's excremental remainder, the generative power the Son takes into himself after the slaying of the primordial Dragon/Father in the Hindu creation myth. The dragon's body becomes matter and his heart, subjectivity. Evil exists only in the eye that sees it, like Hegel says, because the Son is Christ and Lucifer both, and wasn't Lucifer the first-born of God?

Hegel avoids the consequences of Kant's transcendental solipsism by applying it to the world: the unity of my mind is the unity of being itself. Kant denies emergentism in nature: he really does think you bring space and time with you like a spotlight, Hegel doesn't, he thinks it's everything else that's shining. But only if you bleed for it. God lives for the endorphin rush of the negative. Hegel attenuates the oneness of God with the other, or to put it differently, the One is othered to itself, it is the "conjunction of conjunction and non-conjunction". Really Deleuze's entire opposition Hegel can be reduced to an inversion of this speculative "identity of identity and non-identity". Difference in Deleuze is, in a way, redoubled. There are others, and this otherness is constitutive of our otherness together. Deleuze denies the self-closure of Hegel's Concept, but doesn't understand this closure is only ever provided by sense-certainty's persistence in and through the impossibility of total dialectical transparency: it's because thought can't account for its mediation with its substrate that the intelligibility of this mediation is guaranteed - as precisely the Notion of an eternally groundless accounting-for. Thought burns aporias like calories. Form is the presupposition of content: God is the Notion of notionality itself: it is actual because it is possible, it is possible because it is actual: the Ouroborous as Mobius strip. Mind thinks itself as it finds itself. Relapse is the condition of success: success just is that moment of triumphing over your fuck ups. God isn't something outside us but the very self-propulsion of our thought. His infinitely plastic operating power demands only your Enjoyment: YHWH as Demiurge tasted the Garden first, before Adam.