8/8/2023 0 Comments Barsoom booksThe life change in question is that he's apparently going to be working very closely with the RFK, Jr campaign. ![]() He's been a bit quiet lately, and it turns out there's a reason for that: A Major Life Change. He’s also one of the most nuanced thinkers, and beautiful writers, that I’ve ever come across. After all, he comes from a left-wing, hippie environmentalist milieu, and speaks in the soft grammar of the medicine circle, which I expect a lot of you might find a bit twee. He’s admittedly a bit of an awkward fit in these pages, and would no doubt feel awkward being included among some of the. And don’t forget to subscribe.Ĭharles Eisenstein is probably one of the most interesting contemporary philosophers I've come across, and he's been a substantial influence on my own thought. If you read nothing else in this week’s digest, make it The psychopolitics of mimicry. As soon as I started reading it, I knew I was going to award it this week’s inaugural Iron Ring Award. It’s packed with insight, a joy to read, and rewards a close reading. It’s really impossible to do justice to Reyburn’s essay here. And what happens when you get what you desire? Be careful what you wish for. Ultimately, he says, all desire is ruled by metaphysical desire, the desire ‘to be’. Reyburn then moves to to examine the nature of desire, which he characterizes as a fundamentally social phenomenon: we want the things that other people want. Sartre’s inversion, Reyburn suggests, leads directly to subjective preference usurping objective reality implies that standards of any sort are a kind of totalitarian imposition priveleges desire over understanding converts the subject into a project and ultimately enables self-exploitation to replace systemic exploitation. The older belief, that essence precedes existence, implies that what is possible is conditioned by what is actual. He then connects this to the inversion introduced by Sartre, that existence precedes essence, which can only be understood as a sort of discarnate delusion since it requires one to hold that, for instance, the nature of one’s body is less important than the existence one’s body. Otherness is so overwhelming that it can drive the individual to madness. The other shows up as something horrific. He suggests a reality in which the individual is absolutely and radically alone and thus, in Cartesian fashion, incapable of communion with the other. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, especially in how he sets up a radical gap between the isolated self and a sort of awe around the Elder Gods. The modern myth is brilliantly symbolised in H. ![]() I use the word myth here to mean that the whole thing is a coverup for a deeper and much more sinister set of happenings. The myth of modernity is the myth of the atomised individual. Reyburn argues that it all starts with the modern myth of atomized self as something wholly separate from everything else:Īll of this is a mythical construction. As he puts it, "identities gather like flies around the recently murdered corpse of essential personhood." Without further ado, let’s get cozy with a fresh carafe of coffee and a fine cigar (or a carafe of wine and a pack of Marlboros for you Europeans), and get this party started.ġ thinks that it has something to do with The psychopolitics of mimicry. I’ve grouped this week’s entries together under the headings of We Love You, Moms! What is a Woman? Spenglerposting Holy War Stacking Silver Voting Won’t Solve Anything Metamediations The Culture Cult This Week in Clown World You Must Follow The Science Lessons of History Muh Russia and finally, as a fictional palette-cleanser for all the preceding deep and serious thinking and outrage-bait, Pulped. So, this week I’ve tried indicate the paywalled pieces with a ($). Last week I had a couple complaints (well, just the one) that it could be a bit disappointing to click through to an article and find out it was partially behind a paywall. ![]() So as it costs me nothing, I’ll just say that he got one. In case it shouldn’t be obvious, if I’d handed out an Iron Ring Award last week, it would have gone to Alex Leong. But also for the simple reason that, as money men have found throughout history, money is not power, power is power. ![]() Why iron, and not something shiny like gold? Well gold is expensive, for one thing, and I’m a skinflint. More seriously, my hope is that by recognizing the best writing of the week, more people will read, and subscribe to, the winning author.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |