The context of the original Youtube exchange, to Iam. who asked for some context concerning it: the context is, some fuckwad said something dumb and I replied to him. Moving on:
“So Parodites, ten years after joining my society, you are finally coming the insight that such a society is required.”
Here’s the thing Fixed, if you thought I had not adequately appreciated that aspect of your thinking, (I did appreciate it, I just differ on what the nature of a philosophic society is. Likewise, I had predicted similar events in the 2010’s, including Trump’s winning at his very announcement of a campaign run. I have predicted exceedingly further into the future as well, many things that have not yet come to pass.) calling me a treacherous fuck (as to the word traitor, such a thing may, to an average person, be a mere insult, but to a philosopher it is more than an insult, because you’re implying my having betrayed my own political and philosophical ideals, and therefor, my higher self) for an insignificant political disagreement with you isn’t the correct way to go about it, nor is doubling down on that unnecessarily assholish tactic after I requested some recognition and an apology. I had never treated you with similar animosity before, and I’ve known you for quite a long time.
However, the nature of such a society is something else, to my mind. Its nature is a ‘non-society’, an ‘ensemble of non-beings’, to borrow the expression of a certain writer. It is constituted by the Negative, by its own absence, not its presence. As I write here:
" The Negative gathers unto itself an ‘ensemble of non-beings’ in a kind of bound transcendence,- pitting, in fact, the bound transcendence of the
Shadow against the unbound transcendence of worldly wisdom glittering monstrous with the identificational images of Law, [James R. Watson,
1994: In the Monstrous Shadow of Worldly Wisdom; From Whence We must Speak.] in whose earthly guise the idols of a new pantheon have
been ushered forth in ‘scientific’ mockery of the Pleroma. Such identificational images, as the final expression of Law and therefor likewise of
Theory, are expressed elsewhere [See Giusseppe Stellardi, 1995. The Death of Philosophy and the Future of Thought; History of European Ideas,
Vol. 20.] as an intuition of “the destiny and central engine of philosophy”, that is, a wish,- on the part of philosophy,- to exhaust itself and finally
die, while being unable to in any way consummate such a deadly wish as spurs it ever onward."
[size=85](The two works I cited above are hard to locate, so I will include the relevant passages:
Stellardi: “Is philosophy finally surrounded… ready to give way to science, technology, marketing, etc.? Is philosophy dying? Perhaps. But what is death? It is possible to believe that philosophy can and even must die, or rather that it intimately requires death, and, still, this would not mean that… it will actually end. I would like to suggest that this movement of controlled suicide, far from being only a little trick in the twentieth-century philosopher’s survival kit, corresponds to the innermost power, resource and justification of theory itself. Often philosophy has shown, and still shows, suicidal tendencies. There is, for instance, the Hegelian death, coinciding with the total accomplishment of System; or the Positivistic suicide, in which philosophy gives finally way to positive science. To state that neither of these two ‘deaths’ has actually managed to put an end to philosophy, is to state the obvious. Less obvious conclusions can result from asking ourselves why those deaths did not work.” …)
Watson: “We have seen faces turning away from one another, but only by the light of the annihilating flames of all-consuming worldly wisdom. The wise ones, with their gods of mockery, have represented everything and everyone- every deed, every utterance- submitting all of it under wisdom’s law- the Law of annihilation and the pure identity of death. Are there today even the slightest indications of possibilities, shimmering horizons for something other than the mocking representations of worldly wisdom? Are there possibilities taking form within the agonizing field of our impossible rebellion against this mimetic nihilism and its incessant rejection of a Law which cannot be represented? Perhaps, a wretched ensemble of non-peoples who, in rebellion against worldly wisdom and its pure identity of death, somehow recognize and affirm each other. here, then, within the shadows facing the event of annihilating thought and its administration are connections and forms of thinking otherwise than worldly wisdom. The bound transcendence of the shadow dwellers is otherwise than the unbound transcendence of worldly wisdom and its easy but deadly identificational images.” )[/size]
That is why, instead of looking to branch out and, as Aurelius said, carve a mask, a public face, with which to form new alliances with living people,- I did and am doing the opposite. I am forming new gaps, discovering new scissure, new absences, creating new gulfs within which to “un-connect” (not disconnect) people, or more precisely, within which to un-connect other philosophers. The ultimate “un-connection” would be thought’s thinking thought’s own impossibility at the precipice of the supra-modern, that is, at my precipice; that would be, citing the two authors above again, the “central engine” of philosophy mobilized by philosophy’s own impossibility.
You invoked the concept of a “speculative ethic” Fixed, as is necessary for many reasons in the formation of a new society, be it of the form you envision or the one I do. This speculative ethic I write of as an ethic that, over the centuries, has been thoroughly lost on the account of a “separation of existential and ethical reality … which thereby becomes an indifference to the world and the question of existence in general”:
" The dissolution of the intuitive and purely intellectual dimensions of inspirited and
contemplative life, of the Delphic “Know Thyself” inscribed upon the heart and the moral
commandments inscribed in the Abrahamic tablets, achieved on the part of transcendental
philosophy, delivers the questioning spirit to a peculiar ossification of a consciousness
previously mobilized by the various life-processes; delivers the questioning spirit to a
hypostasis of this separation of existential and ethical reality which has been achieved
through the mere conviction that it has been achieved- a separation which thereby
becomes an indifference to the world and the question of existence in general that, at first
glance, seems to be situated wholly historically, to be discovered in hindsight to have
existed since before even the production of the Plotinian Enneads, namely as a kind of
non-opposition to which the philosopher is returned by his meditation when it has been
carried over into its furthest bent- as the ousia or transcendent, pure being. For the man
who has willingly estranged himself from this entire state of affairs, and now would aim
to judge it, it can be said that this backward glance into the philosophical literature in an
attempt to find a justification for the basis of the transcendent, in the attempt to further
delineate the boundary of the Delphic proclamation and the Abrahamic one, is a gesture
which speaks of nothing more tellingly than it speaks of the death-pangs of a tradition
grown hopelessly sterilized and tired. The moment the mone of reflective self-consciousness
and the epistrophe or inward re-cognisance of the ego in the face of Being,
as is expressed repeatedly in the contemplative traditions, was divorced from the
procession of an external expansion into the ideal series of recollections, to use a Platonic
term, belonging to the epistrophic revelation, the real heart and soul of philosophy had
been stung with the most poisonous barb; this was the moment knowledge began to
degenerate into mere power, that the fiery Delphic lettering began to lapidfy into the
Decalogue, and power began to take itself for knowledge, began to justify itself as
knowledge, as power does so merrily today among the men of science, whose mastery
over the forces of nature is taken as an explanation of nature, and whose purely
descriptive laws are taken as truths. For my part, I speak to truth in the old, the oldest
sense of truth- therefor, also, in the supra-modern sense."
It is not my own personal death for which I am so obsessed, but death itself. Shored against the ruin of time, I have endeavoured to transubstantiate as much of myself into words and tones, into undying forms, as is possible. But a little is always left behind, a psychic remainder like that which troubled Schelling; the daemon, in whose furious circulus our own Eros were captured and brought back down ceaselessly into the mire of Flesh and Matter, into this obscure passion, a secret instinct Freudo-Lacanian theory names the death-drive; a regressive call back to the inorganic and the perfect requiescence of the un-created. It were a theme served well by the poets, but none could truly mourn- not their own death- but Death itself, as the Philosopher can.
PENSEROSO,
A Poetic Interlude.
1.
Encircled, as when in the ring of flames
the scorpion does plunge into its breast
the fearsome barb: so Time does swallow up
its very potency,
and quaff the dusty glass of life;-
that from whose bitter pharmacy
we had so long abstained to seek
alleviance for all our ills in Death.
Befouled with earth’s o’er-childed mass,
Time’s the rat that nips at the heel of man
which Death drives out, when it does purge
the overrun sullage of generation
from which it feeds- and gives us peace. 1
Speak of the dead’s justice, or their virtue,
for the living but drain their cup of life,
their philosophy unmade in heaven,
their deepest moral were mere confession.
Immortal longings ingress upon the mortal heart,
to comprehension’s failure; till life’s ailing flood
bank at heaven’s shores. Save for life and death,
all can be forgiven. The soul still further mounts,
that all life’s seeming seems to fly as we do seek
its current prodding ceaseless, thus to smooth
the pebble-soul of love and loss in quiet deep.
The fevered heart does anguished keep,
when pleasure’s secret lies still undiscovered.
Thus yearning immortal does itself beseech
the ever-bearing thought of the eternal;
thus strange presage our soul makes ere we do sleep
with device of symbol, thus to announce,
amidst our youth, high case of love and crime,
and war, which age but does allegorize,
that all the world’s show is cast upon,
and like trembling stars in the pale waters
whose light wavers with the dithering wind;
the whole plethory of man is list upon,
his passions vincible, and kingdom’s pomp,
his love, all the glory of his raving tribe,
and bend all the more, the more gently urged
with the quiet thoughts of death,
and these thoughts wandering, still onward plod
unto the dim clime of high philosophy;
till’ love and pain, hope, and ambition’s lost,
amidst the wreck of time and sense,
for changed, they are what they were not. 2
Thus the beasts plod on, who upon their course
find neither love nor hope, and no remorse,
while man, in all-comprehending avarice complains
that fearsome war did not secure his name,
nor brazen monument did mark his progeny.
For with the earth, thy sacrificial fire,
equally is prepared the first-born of man,
the high cast of the world’s infancy;
the melancholy ocean, whose intimation
of mute age, and endless time do pierce
the brooding soul; statesmen just and mighty,
young beauty, with all her fledgling virtue;
the ruined column of the stony earth,
whose prized mountains crumble, the golden sun
and his companion stars, grown pale with time;
kings, princes, learned men and benefactor- all
without distinction perish thus to feed
that all-embracing fire, nor with pride
the nobler lot to shame the commoner,
but with the only justice known in heaven
or on earth, to bend and pass, that others
in their stead may do the same. 3
Till in the strange accent of recorded time
our favorite phantom 4 cleaves the rounded way
to dusty death, 5 into the long twilight
the murmuring steep of years rolls onward,
into that plaintive vale the living sweep
o’er like shadows. Till light dispel us;
the living, but the first born of the dead,
of clodden field, immense of empyrean,
and puissant sun. Thus we live;
the bitter will mock, while the somber weep,
while bud of Sephalica, or aliment
make of Lotus flower, the soft-hearted
shall glory in the temple of the flesh;
those whose yearning were braced upon a flower’s head.
Though who could endure but that single tear,
if not to fall? Yielding upon the heart,
in what peerless bower oft taken solitary witness,
ere we read the weight of things: its beauty is its descent.
For the beauty that cannot be endured kindly spares us
the grief of all we could endure.
It is but our thoughts, that are the ages
of our life, by which we do measure out
passion horary, till action’s stifled
that no moment but could be filled by it,
and the brim of life spills to indiscretion.
Life’s but a nascent sun, 6 that illumines
the shadowed dream; and this light we share,
the world, and but all we know of it,
till we pall of knowing. Then thy image
is undone, in the first morning of the world,
left nothing of its memory to the blear seas
as yawn wearily over their wasted kingdoms,
nor any of the Houses, and darkness
only is the universe. 7
The margin of thy subtle frame is lost;
by a flower’s root thy cast is broken,
and by a drop of rain thy human pride
discovered. Survey the earth, thy great tomb:
this dust in which you shall be laid
which itself once lived and breathed;
or suffered, rejoiced, and prayed,
yet no more weeps, or laughs, or bleeds.
So form, but with thy human speech,–
mere hissing sputum in thy chest,–
a word to cast upon the coruscant sea;
search thy soul’s deepest ecstasy,
and from thy mortal conceit thus confess,
to name all this choiring beauty
of the world- death.
- Francis Thompson: “In a little peace…”
"Death, that doth flush
the cumbered gutters of humanity…"
- An adaptation of Propertius.
- Emerson.
- “Favorite phantom” , Bryant, Thanatopsis.
- Dusty Death, phrase in Macbeth.
- Browne: We live by an invisible sun within us.
- Byron: “… And darkness was the universe.”
- Play on Yeats:
Crying amid the glittering sea,
Naming it with the ecstatic breath,
Because it had such dignity,
By the sweet name of Death.
“Again, unless he is only being ironic. In other words, playing this character who is in fact exposing this sort of “serious philosophy” gibberish.”
Satyr can only be ironic or serious. I, however, am meta-ironic. My most convoluted ontological treatise slash gnostic cryptotheological sermons slash mythopoetics slash kabbalistic digressions slash slash slash slash … is so much of an irony of irony, and therefor quite serious. But also not serious. But the fact that they’re not serious is what makes them serious and is serious about them, except that … "
" The central engine of philosophy mobilized by philosophy’s own impossibility": that would be the great irony, the irony of irony, the meta-irony about which I have been speaking.
As far as my TOE: I don’t have or want a Theory of Everything. I have a theory of theory. The philosopher does not look outward, only inward; the philosopher extends himself and the seed-shukra of his secret Thought into a genuine [b]kshanikavada /b like widening ripples across a quiet body of water grown cold and still, living his life in progressively more comprehensive circles. The great philosopher finds himself within a circle large enough to encompass all reality. It is beneath him to explain things, that is for mere scientists. Hell, even mathematicians do not stoop so low as to ‘explain’ things, well at least pure mathematicians, or those invested in the kind of stuff I’m interested in like information-theory, Teichmuller theory and Heyting algebra.