Post-Foucault
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"Have you not seen your own kind gradually being slaughtered? and yet
you resort to sleep, like a buffalo near butchers.
With paths blocked in every way, while the Lord of Death watches,
how can you enjoy eating? how can you enjoy sleeping in this way?"
Śāntideva; Entering the Conduct of a Bodhisattva
you resort to sleep, like a buffalo near butchers.
With paths blocked in every way, while the Lord of Death watches,
how can you enjoy eating? how can you enjoy sleeping in this way?"
Śāntideva; Entering the Conduct of a Bodhisattva
❤7
"Bataille [...] compares the asceticism of Hinduism to that of Christianity, distancing himself from both in the name of excess, and pretends to no affinity with ‘the naïvety— the purity—of the Hindu’.
Perhaps most important of all is the affirmation of mess and inadequacy implicit in the words: ‘I do not doubt that the Hindus go far into the impossible, but to the highest degree they lack that which matters to me; the faculty of expression’. It is because he is a writer that Bataille disdains to be a mystic.
In what he understands of the Hindu religion—and he lays claim to no intimate knowledge of it—there is one tenet alone to which he unconditionally subscribes: ‘[o]nly intensity matters’.
Inner experience translates mysticism into a vagrant vocabulary at the scurf-edge of tradition. As the initial gesture of a Summa Atheologica, it begins amongst the ruins of God. Echoing Céline—that other wretched tramp of nihilism—he calls experience ‘a voyage to the end of the possible of man’, and thinks interiority not as the secret recess of the self, but as a plane of contact and contagion.
The core of inner experience is not personal identity, but naked intensity, denuded even of oneself, and jutting from the refuse of Christian dogmatics as a broken lurch into the unknown.
He insists: ‘inner experience is ecstasy’ whilst ‘ecstasy is…communication, opposing itself to then subsidence onto oneself subsidence onto oneself.
It is the order of the object that organizes inner experience as private reverie, and as a detachment from relation. Above all it is the God of monotheism—the supreme or absolute being—which reproduces the prison of individuation at the scale of the cosmos.
This is why the ecstasy of the unknown, which gnaws away the last landmarks from Bataille’s voyage, contests any possible resurrection of theological edifices.
as he remarks:
'I hold the apprehension of God, even when formless and without mode…for an arrest of the movement which carries us to the more
obscure apprehension of the unknown...'"
N. Land; Fanged noumenon (passion of the cyclone)
Perhaps most important of all is the affirmation of mess and inadequacy implicit in the words: ‘I do not doubt that the Hindus go far into the impossible, but to the highest degree they lack that which matters to me; the faculty of expression’. It is because he is a writer that Bataille disdains to be a mystic.
In what he understands of the Hindu religion—and he lays claim to no intimate knowledge of it—there is one tenet alone to which he unconditionally subscribes: ‘[o]nly intensity matters’.
Inner experience translates mysticism into a vagrant vocabulary at the scurf-edge of tradition. As the initial gesture of a Summa Atheologica, it begins amongst the ruins of God. Echoing Céline—that other wretched tramp of nihilism—he calls experience ‘a voyage to the end of the possible of man’, and thinks interiority not as the secret recess of the self, but as a plane of contact and contagion.
The core of inner experience is not personal identity, but naked intensity, denuded even of oneself, and jutting from the refuse of Christian dogmatics as a broken lurch into the unknown.
He insists: ‘inner experience is ecstasy’ whilst ‘ecstasy is…communication, opposing itself to then subsidence onto oneself subsidence onto oneself.
It is the order of the object that organizes inner experience as private reverie, and as a detachment from relation. Above all it is the God of monotheism—the supreme or absolute being—which reproduces the prison of individuation at the scale of the cosmos.
This is why the ecstasy of the unknown, which gnaws away the last landmarks from Bataille’s voyage, contests any possible resurrection of theological edifices.
as he remarks:
'I hold the apprehension of God, even when formless and without mode…for an arrest of the movement which carries us to the more
obscure apprehension of the unknown...'"
N. Land; Fanged noumenon (passion of the cyclone)
❤5👍2💘1
Post-Foucault
"Bataille [...] compares the asceticism of Hinduism to that of Christianity, distancing himself from both in the name of excess, and pretends to no affinity with ‘the naïvety— the purity—of the Hindu’. Perhaps most important of all is the affirmation of mess…
"The relation of the known to the unknown is unilateral not reciprocal, following the pattern of the difference between restricted and general economy. Zero is exploded into general economy, in which ‘[d]eath is in a sense a deception’ because there is no privacy at zero, only the undifferentiable cosmic desert, impersonal silence, a landscape touched upon only in the deepest abysses of inhuman affect.
‘Despair is simple’ Bataille writes, ‘it is the absence of all hope, of every lure. It is the state of desolate expanses and—I can imagine—of the sun’. This is the terrain of immanence or the unknown; positive death as zero-intensity, unilaterally differentiated from ecstasy or naked sensation. It is the whole ramshackle complex associated with the taste of death in Bataille’s writings, leading him to remark in Inner Experience, for instance: ‘I remain in intolerable unknowing, which has no issue other than ecstasy itself’."
N. Land; Fanged noumenon (passion of the cyclone)
‘Despair is simple’ Bataille writes, ‘it is the absence of all hope, of every lure. It is the state of desolate expanses and—I can imagine—of the sun’. This is the terrain of immanence or the unknown; positive death as zero-intensity, unilaterally differentiated from ecstasy or naked sensation. It is the whole ramshackle complex associated with the taste of death in Bataille’s writings, leading him to remark in Inner Experience, for instance: ‘I remain in intolerable unknowing, which has no issue other than ecstasy itself’."
N. Land; Fanged noumenon (passion of the cyclone)
❤6
"i was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide.
not that what i was doing was suicide. in fact, it was the opposite of suicide. my hibernation was self-preservational.
I thought i was going to save my life.
[...] I loved Reva, but i didn't like her anymore.
We'd been friends since college, long enough that all we had left in common was our history together, a comple circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dresses i'd let Reva borrow, which she'd promised to dry clean and return but never did.
[...] She liked to come over to my place, [...] comment on the state of the apartment, say i looked like i'd lost more weight, and complain about work, all while refilling her wine glass after every sip."
O. Moshfegh; My Year of Rest and Relaxation
not that what i was doing was suicide. in fact, it was the opposite of suicide. my hibernation was self-preservational.
I thought i was going to save my life.
[...] I loved Reva, but i didn't like her anymore.
We'd been friends since college, long enough that all we had left in common was our history together, a comple circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dresses i'd let Reva borrow, which she'd promised to dry clean and return but never did.
[...] She liked to come over to my place, [...] comment on the state of the apartment, say i looked like i'd lost more weight, and complain about work, all while refilling her wine glass after every sip."
O. Moshfegh; My Year of Rest and Relaxation
❤6💅1
Post-Foucault
"i was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide. not that what i was doing was suicide. in fact, it was the opposite of suicide. my hibernation was self-preservational. I thought…
"[...] Reva had a thing for older men, as did I. Men our age, Reva said, were too corny, too affectionate, too needy. I could understand her disgust, but i'd never met a man like that. All the men i'd ever been with, young as well as old, had been detached and unfriendly.
"you're a cold fish, that's why" Reva explained. "Like attracts like."
[...]
"Are you getting enough proteins in your diet?" "I'm not a baby, Reva." "I'm just worried about you. Because i care. Because i love you," she'd say.
[...]
"She's no white lily" as my mother would have said. [...]
I'd known for years that Reva was bulimic. I knew she masturbated with an electric neck massager because she was too embarrassed to buy a proper vibrator from a sex shop. I knew she was deep in debt from college and years of maxed-out credit cards, and that she shoplifted testers from the beauty section of the health food store near her apartment on the Upper West Side.
[...] She was a slave to vanity and status, which was not unusual in a place like Manhattan, but i found her desperation especially irritating. It made it hard for me to respect her intelligence."
O. Moshfegh; My Year of Rest and Relaxation
"you're a cold fish, that's why" Reva explained. "Like attracts like."
[...]
"Are you getting enough proteins in your diet?" "I'm not a baby, Reva." "I'm just worried about you. Because i care. Because i love you," she'd say.
[...]
"She's no white lily" as my mother would have said. [...]
I'd known for years that Reva was bulimic. I knew she masturbated with an electric neck massager because she was too embarrassed to buy a proper vibrator from a sex shop. I knew she was deep in debt from college and years of maxed-out credit cards, and that she shoplifted testers from the beauty section of the health food store near her apartment on the Upper West Side.
[...] She was a slave to vanity and status, which was not unusual in a place like Manhattan, but i found her desperation especially irritating. It made it hard for me to respect her intelligence."
O. Moshfegh; My Year of Rest and Relaxation
❤5👍2
Forwarded from Forbidden Colors
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me and who
🫡15
"the men who worked at the bodega were all young Egyptians.
[...] they were relatively handsome, a few of them more than the others. They had square jaws, manly foreheads, bold, caterpillary eyebrows. and they all looked like they had eyeliner on.
There must have been dozens of them- brothers or cousins, i assumed.
[...] they worse jerseys and leather jackets and gold chains with crosses.
[...] they had absolutely no sense of humor. when i'd first moved to the neighborhood, they'd been flirty, even annoyingly so.
[...]
I could have gone to any number of places for coffee, but I liked the bodega. It was close, and the coffee was consistently bad, and i didn't have to confront anyone ordering a brioche bun or no-foam latte. [...] no sterilized professionals, no people on dates. the bodega was working-class coffee- coffee for doormen and deliverymen and handymen and busboys and housekeepers.
The air in there was heavy with the perfume of cheap cleaning detergents and mildew.
[...] nothing ever changed: cigarettes in neat rows, rolls of scratch tikets, twelve different brands of bottled water, beer..."
O. Moshfegh; My Year of Rest and Relaxation
[...] they were relatively handsome, a few of them more than the others. They had square jaws, manly foreheads, bold, caterpillary eyebrows. and they all looked like they had eyeliner on.
There must have been dozens of them- brothers or cousins, i assumed.
[...] they worse jerseys and leather jackets and gold chains with crosses.
[...] they had absolutely no sense of humor. when i'd first moved to the neighborhood, they'd been flirty, even annoyingly so.
[...]
I could have gone to any number of places for coffee, but I liked the bodega. It was close, and the coffee was consistently bad, and i didn't have to confront anyone ordering a brioche bun or no-foam latte. [...] no sterilized professionals, no people on dates. the bodega was working-class coffee- coffee for doormen and deliverymen and handymen and busboys and housekeepers.
The air in there was heavy with the perfume of cheap cleaning detergents and mildew.
[...] nothing ever changed: cigarettes in neat rows, rolls of scratch tikets, twelve different brands of bottled water, beer..."
O. Moshfegh; My Year of Rest and Relaxation
❤7👍2🆒2