square white world » pique-assiettes

from island to volcano

simon — Sat, 19 May 2012 23:06:32 +0000

unyielding insularity takes itself to
the arena of its own closure, the quasi-incantatory expending of the ‘I’ towards the
crossroads of its own necessary undoing, an over-exhaustion of the Self to the point of its
irrelevance, its self-excising, its reflexive desolation. Moreover, annihilation would by right
represent the most volatile engagement with sacrifice by virtue of conjecturing a province of
consciousness that executes its own fragmentation, seizing upon the force of self-destruction
so as to renovate terminality not as a distanced and alien negativity but as an invariably
creative manifestation of the desire for ungoverned cessation/resurgence. In this sense, the
transition to the chaotic via annihilative subjectivity would also drastically reconfigure the
concept of finality, wrenching it away from its conventional standing as a ruinous juncture of
the mortal condition, an inevitable descent towards nothingness, and instead casting it into
the dynamic region of a becoming. Beholden to a performativity that extends beyond the
abstractions of idealism and transcendentalism, the unreality of annihilative subjectivity, in its
accelerated open-endedness, in its eternal ambiguity, can then convert itself into the very
hallmark of existential resistance, the site of an ultimate confrontation with the ordered, self
devastation now a battlefield upon which consciousness orchestrates its own erosion as an
act of cataclysmic transgression. In consideration of this combative stance, the assertion will
be advanced that such an unmediated experience of the end projects consciousness into an
unruly sphere of suspension whereby its own fading enjoins an irreparable blurring of the
demarcation between possibility and impossibility. From here, with the concept of the Self
now disenfranchised, the work will elaborate an involved analysis of ‘divine fatality’ as a
transformative happening through which subjectivity assumes a godlike disposition only
then to be consumed by the fury of that very state

- Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, extended abstract to The Chaosing: The Annihilation of Consciousness, Shadow-Becoming, and the Midnight of the Unreal, Columbia University, 2004

cf. Brad Brace’s island project

thigein & conatus

simon — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:10:53 +0000

What is important is that this
contemplation without knowledge, which at times recalls the Greek con-
ception of theory as not knowledge but touching [thigein], here functions to
define life. As absolute immanence, a life . . . is pure contemplation beyond
every subject and object of knowledge; it is pure potentiality that preserves
without acting.

- Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” p. 164

Spinoza’s theory of ‘striving’ (conatus) as the desire to persevere in one’s
own Being, whose importance Deleuze often underlines, contains a possible
answer to these questions. Whatever the ancient and medieval sources of
Spinoza’s idea (Harry A. Wolfson lists a number of them, from the Stoics to
Dante), it is certain that in each case, its paradoxical formulation perfectly
expresses the idea of an immanent movement, a striving that obstinately
remains in itself. All beings not only persevere in their own Being (vis
inertiae) but desire to do so (vis immanentiae). The movement of conatus thus
coincides with that of Spinoza’s immanent cause, in which agent and patient
cannot be told apart. And since conatus is identical to the Being of the thing,
to desire to persevere in one’s own Being is to desire one’s own desire, to
constitute oneself as desiring. In conatus, desire and Being thus coincide without
residue.

- Ibid., p. 166

non-d’hors-nom

simon — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:38:48 +0000

Drawing upon the set-theoretical ontology of Alain Badiou, the computational theory of Stephen Wolfram, the physics of Frank Tipler, the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan, and the genius of Georg Cantor, the author works to demonstrate that the universe is a computer processing the divine Name and that all existence is made of information (the bit). As a result of this ontic pan-computationalism, it is shown that the future resurrection of the dead can take place and how it may in fact occur. Along the way, the book also offers compelling critiques of several significant theories of reality, including the phenomenological theologies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion, Process Theology, and Object-Oriented Ontology.
Reality in the Name of God explores how the concepts of Jewish mysticism can be articulated and deployed…

- from here

Bifo, Franco Berardi, on Guattari, a snap taken at intro’s end

simon — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 23:58:22 +0000

having been erased before ever being mapped, freedom

simon — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:43:15 +0000

As concerned global citizens, we urge you to immediately drop the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Our democracy and civil liberties are under threat from the excessive and unnecessary Internet surveillance powers it grants. The Internet is a crucial tool for people around the world to exchange ideas and work collectively to build the world we all want. We urge you to show true global leadership and do all you can to protect our Internet freedom.

- Avaaz

in the wake of everything that has happened, David Byrne’s “Get It Away”

simon — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 23:07:39 +0000

“The true poet, he said, should abandon the coffeehouse and take the part of ‘the sharpshooters, the lonesome cowboys… the spat-upon supermarket shoppers in their massive individual collective disjunctives’ – the cunning, the lonely, the unnoticed and despised”

simon — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 05:39:59 +0000

- from Natasha Wimmer’s “Afterword,” to Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, trans. Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2009, p. 579

for five days we swam at the beach, read in the shade on the porch in hammocks that hung from nails and gave way little by little until our backsides touched the floor, drank beer, and took long walks around a part of La Loma where there were lots of cliffs, and also locked fishermen’s huts, there on the edge of the woods by the beach, which a thief could have broken into with an expedient kick to one of the walls, a kick that we were sure would knock a hole or make the whole thing collapse.

The fragility of those shacks, though this only occurs to me now, gave me a funny feeling more than once, not of precariousness or poverty but of obscure tenderness and foreboding…

- Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, trans. Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2009, p. 424

the same thing happened to them that almost always happens to the best Latin American writers or the best of the writers born in the fifties: the trinity of youth, love, and death was revealed to them, like an epiphany.

- Ibid., p. 468

In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we’d all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realised that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn’t a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn’t proof of our idle guilt but a sign or our miraculous and pointless innocence. But that’s not it. That’s not it. We were still and they were in motion and the sand on the beach was moving, not because of the wind but because of what they were doing and what we were doing, which was nothing, which was watching, and all of that together was the wrinkle, the moment of superlucidity. Then, nothing. My memory has always been mediocre, no better than a reporter needs to do his job. Iñaki attacked the other guy, the other guy attacked Iñaki, I realised they might go on like this for hours, until the swords were heavy in their hands, I got out a cigarette, I didn’t have a light, I looked in all my pockets, I got up and went over to Quima, only to learn that she’d quit a long time ago, a year or an eternity. For a moment I considered going to ask Piña for a light, but that seemed excessive. I sat next to Quima and watched the duelers. They were moving in circles but they were slowing down. I also got the impression that they were talking to each other, but the sound of waves drowned out their voices. I said to Quima that I thought it was all a farce. You’re absolutely wrong, she answered. Then she said that she thought it was very romantic. Strange woman, that Quima. I wanted a cigarette more than before. In the distance, Piña was sitting in the sand like us now, and a trail of cobalt blue smoke issued from his lips. I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up and went over to him, going the long way around, to keep out of range of the duelers. A woman was watching us from the hill. She was leaning on the hood of a car and shading her eyes with her hands. I thought she was looking at the sea, but then I realised that she was watching us, of course.

Piña offered me his lighter without a word. I looked at his face: he was crying.