"Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught."

— Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue

“Therefore turn to yourselves rather than to your gods or idols. Bring out from yourselves what is in you, bring it to the light, bring yourselves to revelation.”

……

“But one needs only admonish you of yourselves to bring you to despair at once. ‘What am I?’ each of you asks himself. An abyss of lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos without light or guiding star! How am I to obtain a correct answer, if, without regard to God's commandments or to the duties which morality prescribes, without regard to the voice of reason, which in the course of history, after bitter experiences, has exalted the best and most reasonable thing into law, I simply appeal to myself? My passion would advise me to do the most senseless thing possible. – Thus each deems himself the – devil; for, if, so far as he is uncon­cerned about religion, he only deemed himself a beast, he would easily find that the beast, which does follow only its impulse (as it were, its advice), does not advise and impel itself to do the ‘most senseless’ things, but takes very correct steps. But the habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are – terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils.”

— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

"As painful and embarrassing as it may be, the fact remains that we are confronted with a human structure that has been shaped by thousands of years of mechanistic civilization and is expressed in social helplessness and an intense desire for a führer."

— Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, eudemonism—all of these ideas that measure the value of things according to pleasure or suffering, that is to say, according to secondary states and side-effects, are foreground ideas, and naive. Anyone conscious of having creative energies and an artist’s conscience will look down on them not without mockery, but also not without pity. Pity for all of you! although it is not pity in your sense, to be sure. It is not pity for social ‘misery’, for ‘society’ and its sick and injured, for the perennially depraved and downtrodden who lie around us everywhere; even less is it pity for the grumbling, oppressed, rebellious ranks of slaves who are looking to be masters (which they call ‘being free’). Our pity is a more elevated, more far-sighted pity—we see how human beings are being reduced, how all of you are reducing them! And there are moments when we look at your pity especially with an indescribable anxiety, when we defend ourselves against this pity—when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any frivolity. If possible (and no ‘if possible’ can be more crazy) you want to abolish suffering! And we?—it seems that we want it to be, if anything, worse and greater than before! Well-being in your sense of the word—that certainly is no goal, it seems to us to be an end! A condition that would immediately make people ludicrous and contemptible—make us wish their downfall! The discipline of suffering, great suffering—don’t you know that this discipline alone has created all human greatness to date? The tension of the soul in unhappiness, which cultivates its strength; its horror at the sight of the great destruction; its inventiveness and bravery in bearing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting unhappiness, and whatever in the way of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cleverness, greatness the heart has been granted—has it not been granted them through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In the human being, creature and creator are united: the human being is matter, fragment, excess, clay, filth, nonsense, chaos; but the human being is also creator, sculptor, hammer-hardness, observer-divinity, and the Seventh Day—do you understand this opposition? Do you understand that your pity is for the ‘creature in the human being’, that which must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, annealed, purified—that which necessarily has to suffer and should suffer? And our pity—do you not understand whom our reversed pity is intended for, when it resists your pity as the worst of all possible self-indulgences and weaknesses?

Pity versus pity, then!

But to repeat, there are more important problems than all those concerning pleasure and suffering and pity; and any philosophy that confines itself only to these is naive.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil (aphorism 225)

"what i pray for most is not the promised utopia of the jetsons but a world in which i can fuck whenever i want - and never get sick"

art by wuret

“All those moral codes that are addressed to individuals, aimed at their so-called ‘happiness’—what are they but behavioural guides in relation to the degree of precariousness that the individual feels about himself; recipes to counter his passions, his good and bad tendencies, if he possesses the will to power and would like to play the master; large or small titbits of shrewdness and affectation, infected with the musty smell of old home remedies and old wives’ tales. And all of them in a form that is grotesque and unreasonable (because they are addressed to ‘everyone’, because they generalize where one ought not to generalize); all of them in unconditional language, taking themselves unconditionally; all of them seasoned not only with one grain of salt, but only becoming bearable and sometimes even tempting when they learn the trick of smelling overseasoned and dangerous, above all when they smell of ‘another world’. By intellectual standards, none of this is worth very much, and it is certainly nothing like ‘science’, let alone ‘wisdom’; rather, to say it over and over again, it is shrewdness, shrewdness, shrewdness, combined with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity. It may take the form of indifference and a marble-column-coldness against the heat of emotional folly, the remedy advised by the Stoics; or then again it may be Spinoza’s laugh-no-more and weep-no-more, the destruction of the emotions by analysing and dissecting them, which he advocates with such naïveté; or else a toning down of the emotions to a harmless mean, where their satisfaction is permissible—moral Aristotelianism. It might even be morality as enjoyment of emotions intentionally diluted and spiritualized through the symbolism of art, as music, for example, or the love of God and of mankind for God’s sake (for in religion, the passions have their civil rights again, assuming that …). And finally it might even be that very welcoming, wanton devotion to the emotions as it was taught by Hafis and Goethe, a bold dropping of the reins, the exceptional case of spiritual-carnal licentia morum to be found in wise old eccentrics and drunkards who ‘can’t do much harm any more’.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil (aphorism 198)

(and also femininity)

(und die Weiblichkeit auch)

Fleiß und Arbeit lob′ ich nicht.
Fleiß und Arbeit lob′ ein Bauer.
Ja, der Bauer selber spricht,
Fleiß und Arbeit wird ihm sauer.
Faul zu sein, sei meine Pflicht;
Diese Pflicht ermüdet nicht.

Bruder, lass das Buch voll Staub.
Willst du länger mit ihm wachen?
Morgen bist du selber Staub!
Lass uns faul in allen Sachen,
Nur nicht faul zu Lieb′ und Wein,
Nur nicht faul zur Faulheit sein.

— Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Die Faulheit

19.

Every purely moral value system (that of Buddhism, for example) ends in nihilism: this to be expected in Europe. One still hopes to get along with a moralism without religious background: but that necessarily leads to nihilism.— In religion the constraint is lacking to consider ourselves as value-positing.

20.

The nihilistic question “for what?” is rooted in the old habit of supposing that the goal must be put up, given, demanded from outside—by some superhuman authority. Having unlearned faith in that, one still follows the old habit and seeks another authority that can speak unconditionally and command goals and tasks. The authority of conscience now steps up front (the more emancipated one is from theology, the more imperativistic morality becomes) to compensate for the loss of a personal authority. Or the authority of reason. Or the social instinct (the herd). Or history with an immanent spirit and a goal within, so one can entrust oneself to it. One wants to get around the will, the willing of a goal, the risk of positing a goal for oneself; one wants to rid oneself of the responsibility (one would accept fatalism). Finally, happiness—and, with a touch of Tartuffe, the happiness of the greatest number.

One says to oneself:
1. a definite goal is not necessary at all,
2. cannot possibly be anticipated.

Just now when the greatest strength of will would be necessary, it is weakest and least confident. Absolute mistrust regarding the organizing strength of the will for the whole.

21.

The perfect nihilist. — The nihilist's eye idealizes in the direction of ugliness and is unfaithful to his memories: it allows them to drop, lose their leaves; it does not guard them against the corpselike pallor that weakness pours out over what is distant and gone. And what he does not do for himself, he also does not do for the whole past of mankind: he lets it drop.

22.

Nihilism. It is ambiguous:

A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism.

B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.

23.

Nihilism as a normal condition.

It can be a sign of strength: the spirit may have grown so strong that previous goals (“convictions,” articles of faith) have become incommensurate (for a faith generally expresses the constraint of conditions of existence, submission to the authority of circumstances under which one flourishes, grows, gains power). Or a sign of the lack of strength to posit for oneself, productively, a goal, a why, a faith.

It reaches its maximum of relative strength as a violent force of destruction—as active nihilism.

Its opposite: the weary nihilism that no longer attacks; its most famous form, Buddhism; a passive nihilism, a sign of weakness. The strength of the spirit may be worn out, exhausted, so that previous goals and values have become incommensurate and no longer are believed; so that the synthesis of values and goals (on which every strong culture rests) dissolves and the individual values war against each other: disintegration—and whatever refreshes, heals, calms, numbs emerges into the foreground in various disguises, religious or moral, or political, or aesthetic, etc.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power