6.27.2022
<Technolalia> focuses on Philosophy, Culture, and Tech and how those three categories interact. The content stems from original pieces to curated links and the occasional podcast.
Thanks for being a subscriber to <Technolalia> Newsletter. Last week’s Newsletter can be found below, as well as some of the things I’ve been reading lately:
On Grace, Beauty, and Math
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Math has been appropriated by science to “describe” reality. Making math appear dry and empty, defacing it of what it truly represents; Sublime Beauty.
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We need to think of Beauty, Grace, and other virtues or qualities on par with physical laws. The project of modernity has completely demoted these as subjective and robbed the universe of that which completes it. We have narrowed the way we perceive the world around us.
Completely blinding ourselves to the abundance of existence.
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The most common self-affirming narrative asserts a “will to power,” kin to Byung Chul-Hans's “You can” subject. This “cartoonish “will to power,” which usually plugs into a grind-core mindset, is the newest form of Slave Morality. There’s nothing essentially wrong with trying to find ways to live under capitalism but embracing it and its liquifying effects on values is not what Nietzsche meant by affirming one’s will. I would argue it’s the opposite.
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I find despair is sobering, and as Kierkegaard says, it’s that which pushes us to be that which we can become; it’s a force. We come out of pessimism through nihilism into positivism. I believe this “force” is what Simone Weil meant by “affliction,” This affliction and emptiness open us up to receive.
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To empty oneself is to temper the soul. One commits suicide every time we open ourselves to take things in. When we receive, we take in that which is external and integrate it into our being. To know oneself is to destroy oneself.
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I genuinely don’t think that we have an abundance of Eros. I think there’s a scarcity of it. We genuinely don’t remember what Eros means.
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A negated-Aesthetic is that which creates a vacuum. It annihilates beauty. It doesn’t have a representational form, for it has no content, absolute lack. Plugging itself to anything producing 0 sum.
~Links~
“The unconscious does not coo sweet lyrics or unroll immaculate and measured prose, it howls and raves like the shackled and tortured beast that our civilization has made of it, and when the fetters are momentarily loosened the unconscious does not thank the ego for this meagre relief, but hisses, spits, and bites, as any wild thing would.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism
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-C.N.