/lit/ - Literature

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."

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.

Hegel set out to save Kant from himself: Hegel had to ontologize Kant, reason shut up within the formal conditions of its possibility becomes a self-swallowing Ouroborous. The antimonies attest to this: metaphysics can't be approached apodictically, it thrives on analogy and metaphor, over and over the authors of the Upanishads stress the subtlety of sacred truth. "The Gods scorn what is evident": the gods scorn Descartes. The Cartesian fetishization of "clear and distinct principles" was thought in regress, not in exaltation. Hegel radicalized Kant's subconscious Parmenidean sympathies: if thought and being mutually entail one another, then the closure of thought must be the closure of being. Or, thought is just being negotiating its difference with itself - a difference that takes the form of thought. All subjects tarry with their immanent limit: the voice speaks to this. Why are some people weirded out by hearing their voice on a recording? Because you hear yourself as object. Something about it betrays the boundlessness of the interior: the Christian injunction to love another as yourself means to love another from the inside-out, to love one as they must be inside themselves prior to what they are: as bodies, as animals with animal appetites, strung between care and nothing. Giving someone the same benefit of the doubt that you're own Inside gives you. Loving someone in excess of their appearance: to love their nothingness, to love them AS nothingness. Beyond what they can be for you in this world. Hegel located the beginning of the subject's development in a remote, prereflexive past, but he can hardly be accused of reducing the subject to just an appendix of the process, indeed it is its very dialectical consummation. Hegel's point in transposing the limits of thought onto being is to get you to realize, arguably, his Copernican turn: that contradictions are not what threaten Thought but are actually constitutive of it. That beings always-already arrive at odds with themselves, that they subsist just as the negotiation of their inner impasse. No, that Mind itself is nothing but the gauging and overcoming of limits: Spirit is the stomach that digests itself. Don't you get it? We're a turbulence in the void. God flapping his arm on the surface of the Waters. One of the Upanishads opens with the call to harmonize thought and speech: to close the gap in yourself where the ego thrives like a spider colony. Hume was right there is no bridge between the "is" and "ought": the entire arena of human struggle has been erected to build that bridge, to throw a rope across what I am in myself to how others perceive me. Mysticism is a going into the desert of your self beyond social recognition until it sticks. Until you are convinced it's the social that must peel away, and not silence. Philosophy is a dress rehearsal for death.

On the Path, the system that I am identifies with a paradigmatic version of itself that could not exist outside the very reflexivity that my consciousness is: the immortality of the atman is precisely its interiority, my interiority. In other words, I identify as the unity of my organism, myself as One, because the One is also the Good, as Proclus proved. What I'm saying is that the One is both the Good and the principle of individuality, the Monad contains the Dyad latent within itself because it is oneness that delineates being into intelligible form, unity just is intelligibility, universality is guaranteed by the diversity of its self-same content, just as with Kant it's the very fact of apperception itself that imparts intelligibility to experience. Both Plotinus and Hegel stress this: the mind must have some access to the Forms/absolute if it can think them (although their paths ultimately diverge, Plotinus takes the elevator the roof while Hegel re-decorates the lobby). There's no such thing as a formless one, a formless object: except for Satan. The more an individual self-actuates, the more he approaches his principial image in the Intellect: the more he grows to embody his virtual existence in the source. He becomes that lucidity, that deathlessness, of his identity with himself in the self-thinking Thought. I never die, I die only to the objective world, and it dies to me, but I continue. Mysticism is a self-integration that is a self-negation. What is being integrated? What subsists in the absence of your habitual modes and desires, precisely because something has to: Hegel's great insight. Something always catches our fall. Something always has to be Here, or else there's nothing, no harm, no foul: you can thank Parmenides for that one. Doesn't sleep refute him? Sleep is only unconsciousness for the man who wakes up in the morning. The Night is only dark for the Sun that shines in it.

Theurgy is ritualized anamnesis: the things of this world are used to jog our memory of the one beyond it. See, the modern can't think the transcendence of form, he can wrap his mind around atoms but not around the fact that the patterns and properties these atoms exhibit need ideality to be intelligible. Ritualized consciousness is magical consciousness. Magical consciousness is just an action performed in full identity with itself, paradoxically, this means non-action, because action reflexively concerned about its results is always impure. This is why karma isn't some moralistic meta-language, there really is no way to objectively judge the actions of myriads of individual beings acting according to immanent criteria, karma is simple causality: the action performed thoughtlessly, without full presence of the mind, commits you to the mechanism operating in its stead. Internal to desire, I experience being as wanderlust, movement, poetic longing. Outside the round, desire isn't becoming but fixity, objects are filtrated through the virtual = x that makes them more than what they are, what makes obsession possible and turns faces into vortex. Everything is a mouth. God is a mouth with his tonsil in the stars. Mysticism is the love of the devourer: being reconciled to the sacrificial act of breathing.

>Certain phenomena may be much bigger than I am but I am the one who notices these phenomena and they only exists in as much as I am aware of them, I see them and experience them. They don’t exist in any other sense. I am always more than what I see.

>tfw the motor of the dialectic is the fact that Spirit, as seeing, is always more than what it sees precisely by its seeing it

holy shit where were you when Hegel finally clicked bros?

This is what Hegel did: for the first time in the history of philosophy thought gazed at its own gazing, Mind became the self-seeing eye. Hegel wanted to break out of the Kantian straitjacket of the subject: for Kant the apperceptive "I think" cannot exist independent of the object it cognizes. The "I" that all the thoughts you've ever had in your life have in common is nothing apart from this activity, there's no substantial cogito to excavate, no diamond ore Self, the pre-representational ground of representation is a hollow void, and the ring of subject-object codependency tightens. Kant didn't believe you could infer the existence of a self-subsistent self from the "I think" - strictly taken, the "I think" is simply the formal, abstract unity of experience, but what he couldn't understand was that its self-subsistence just is this formal guarantee: meditation is an abiding-in the constancy of self, in the simple fact one is (without giving into the urge to thematize that emptiness with thought). And so the "divine darkness" of the mystic is shut off forever. Kant says this "I" can never make itself its own object, an eye can't turn around to see itself seeing (what it finds are only blood and nerves and the Lacanian horror of the Real). A dilemma: the eye must either identify with what it sees or the fact that it sees. The former is the worldly consciousness, the latter the mystical. What you are is not your thoughts but the space they occur in, you are not content but the form, the autodifferentiation of content. This is what anatta is: mundane ego emptied of all contingent attachments, identification with the apperceptive frame (the sky) over content (the clouds). The certitude of flux over its moments. No two clouds have ever been alike but they have always have been clouds: the claustrophobia of the absolute. Nirvana is what extinguishes the pull objects have over you. Drugs. fucking. her. food. Kant locked the subject in the prison of his own finitude. The mass couldn't think the God of a transcendental = x so we kicked capitalism into high gear. Capitalism is a defense-reaction against the non-predicability of God, the void without stimulus. Capitalism is intelligence accelerating towards recursive explosion/singularity. That is to say, Kant/s subject accepts the opacity of the noumenal without provoking it, his world comes to him pre-digested by his unique representational schema, he only has to sit and listen to a symphony played with one instrument and learn to love it and accept it and think it a proper substitute for the Sea he'll never sail that haunts, capitalism is the rape of this planet born out of our incapacity to think of a better way to organize the minds and bodies of billions of humans that isn't just the assembly line production of technological novelty. Capitalism is entropy, a species on autopilot, letting its ontological gut hang. Kant was a warden with a halo. Hegel was jailbreak.

Philosophy has been following the same dysgenic curve everything else has since the beginnings of language. Thought has been steadily immanentizing since Aristotle. Aristotle denied the non-predicability of the Good, he thought the Sun was just the Sun and didn't point to anything beyond itself, equating the Good just with the knowledge of the same. From Plato's vertical metaphysics of forms we get a world-plane constituted by logical relations. With modernity thought renounces its Outside, scholasticism filed down to the nub of the cogito. since then the cartesian self has been de-substantializing, first there was Kant and his purely formal apperception, and then with this: noumena and phenomena are mutually disclosive. the entanglement of subjectivity and objectivity orbit a noumenal = x in/dependent of this correlation. outside the ring of self and the world there's nothing outside. Kant elected to stay on the island because he feared Land's noumenal waters. Then Hegel tied the knot: God is the auto-productivity of Thought. God is two mirrors facing each other, dialectics as the reflexive spiral produced by/within cognition. now the ouroborous is getting tighter. Capitalism is self-swallowing jungle empire, ultraviolet sweepstakes. We're being conditioned on a mass scale and no one can smell it. The west can't digest sunyata so it does donuts in the void. You have no idea how internal you are the things that control you. Like trying to catch a glimpse of your own back. But I know you. You I know. Reading Proclus to Lil Windex. You shine like me now.

Zizek is right about Hegel: the originary lack just is being's self-enclosure. Boredom, staring into space for hours, solitary confinement, these things are intolerable, because the ground-state of consciousness is intolerable. Culture is the recoil from nothingness. Hegelian absolute knowledge is an ouroboric dialectic's knowledge of itself from the inside, God as "self-immersed" light. Here particulars are mediated by the conceptual identity of the whole, where mediation is just substance relating to its difference with itself - which is nothing other than this relating. Spirit is fully processual. Hegel inadvertently consummates Descartes: the apodictic certainty of the cogito mutates into God as himself Thought, schematization wedded to matter. Hegelian Spirit is the constant traversal of circles. The totality of human subjects comprise God as his intellection within finitude: God is nothing but the subjects that think him. Humans becomes participants in the self-revelation of God just as they are the auto-comprehension of chaos. God is not a personal being but the assimilation of a Sense to itself. Thought itself is the articulation of what is thought about: consciousness is explicable only as differentiation. Mind is the interrogation of the impossibility to achieve full self-transparency. Eden is always-already lost. Mysticism is the cutting of the knot and the welcoming of the devourer. What you consume is what consumes you in the afterlife. Angels are an efficiency of consumption, God is a stomach. The universe exists to transform flesh to love, as Nietzsche turned fruit into fire. Capitalism parasitizes the corkscrewing of thought when abundance deprives it of the urgency of goal-oriented struggle. Everything but negation is debasing. All of your fuckin strawberry pop tarts and Nutella sandwiches and jackoff folders. debasing. only struggle has the power to make gods in this world. but you know this. those of us who are left now. reading Spinoza to Lil Windex. Whose nights still burn. you know this. We're all in together.

So I'm in a bit of a bind. I need a scholarly video source about William Wymark Jacobs, but I can't find anything anywhere. It can be about The Monkey's Paw specifically too, but I haven't been able to find that either. Everything is either a dramatic reading, or is something stupid about how all his works had to do with aliens... One would think this would be easy, since it's a pretty famous story.

What are some of the best war novels? Fiction or nonfiction doesn't matter.

What the FUCK was he thinking when he published this??

With the frequent questions about what postmodernism is, I'm surprised to find that Wikipedia has a pretty straightfoward description, allegedly based on the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which reproduces a lot of the stereotypical answers:
>According to Brian Duignan of the Encyclopædia Britannica, many postmodern claims are a deliberate repudiation of certain 18th-century Enlightenment values. A postmodernist might believe that there is no objective natural reality, and that logic and reason are mere conceptual constructs that are not universally valid. Two other characteristic anti-Enlightenment postmodern practices are a denial that human nature exists, and a (sometimes moderate) skepticism toward claims that science and technology will change society for the better. Postmodernists also believe there are no objective moral values. Postmodern writings often focus on deconstructing the role that power and ideology play in shaping discourse and belief. Postmodern philosophy shares ontological similarities with classical skeptical and relativistic belief systems, and shares political similarities with modern identity politics.[1]
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_philosophy
What's wrong with this?

A close family member suffers from a mental condition that makes it impossible for them to be around and very offensive. They were once someone I looked up and saw the dominant father figure in my life. I am heartbroken by this. Can you recommend some good literature on the topic, or something like that?
Sorry for the English.

after watching the show and being freely given the books, I'm reading the books. Really enjoy it so far.

Possible spoilers I guess. Not trying to ruin anything for /lit/

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>Topics to start the convo
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>biggest badass
Grey Wind

>really want to skip this person's chapter
Sansa

>lolz
Hot Pie didn't reeeally kick that boy in the balls to death

>coolest banner
Purple Lightening!

>old-school theories
curious to hear some

Why is Walt Whitman considered America's leading poet again? What about him appeals to the American psyche? And why not Eliot, Frost, or Stevens?

It's funny how when a true intellectual writes a novel, it doesn't need one single bit of obscurantism. It's funny how it doesn't use the references / depth as a passport to keep people out / "challenge them" (as DFW put it) but to add extra enjoyment to people who happen to have the knowledge, while doing nothing to deter more casual readers (similarly to The Simpsons, kek).