How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow—or rather, to make it impossible.
Everything's been a flux, but isn't it always? It's been a number of months since I've resolved to write a blog post, here where I'm allowed to imagine I have something to say. I've been doing a lot, but I haven't been writing about it. Jesus, it's been since August. Forgive me if I appear a little out of practice.
Allow me first to speak of the books I've started but I've yet to finish. There's three that I've tried recently. First, I tried Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction from Ray Brassier. I found out about it from skimming through the Wikipedia article on Speculative Realism. Previously I came across some philosophers from that milieu and I wanted to learn more. I wanted to read Nihil Unbound because I've been growing increasingly pessimistic about everything under the sun. I wanted to stretch that pessimism to cosmic dimensions. Essentially, it reorients philosophy by placing its basis not on the analysis of the classical philosophical category of Being, but on Non-Being, specifically because there's nothing we can do about not only the extinction of our species, but the annihiliation of our planet when it's swallowed by the sun. It advocates a position of transcendental nihilism
that I wanted to poke around with and see if it could be turned into the philosophical basis of rigorous political or even revolutionary philosophy. The focus on extinction led to a focus on death, and I thought it might make a good pair with Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe. Truthfully, I also thought reading Necropolitics might be a good thing to read for a review/analysis of the game Cruelty Squad and Ville Kallio's work more broadly.
Another book that I started but didn't manage to finish was Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti. I've been on a big pessimism kick lately and between other books I've been enjoying his short stories. I don't want to glaze myself up too much but as I read his short stories in Songs of a Dead Dreamer I thought to myself that these are the kinds of stories I could write if I actually bothered to practice writing more. I got through the first chapter which I considered a good stopping point in case I ever want to pick it up again later. Alongside that I tried to start Simulacra and Simulation from Jean Baudrillard because I thought his analysis of simulations and hyperreality would help sharpen up my writing on the video game Harvester. I still intend to finish it I just got very, very sidetracked by a much denser book, something that'll probably take me weeks. Recently I've decided to undertake the challenge of trying to re-read Difference and Repetition from Gilles Deleuze. According to myself (I don't trust them) I've already read it twice in French. It's such a difficult book that I remember very little upon attempting to read it in English, but I'm enjoying my time with it. I always love reading Deleuze regardless of whether or not I feel like I truly understand his writings, I have a very similar fascination for the writings of Hegel. I have a weird project in mind with one of his writings. I have a roommate who's really into Lolita and J-fashion and I decided that I want to try to write about Lolita fashion through the lens of Deleuze's writings on Leibniz. It could end up being a mess of a writing. I essentially want to try to understand the metaphysics of Lolita fashion through discussions of Leibniz's monadology, Deleuze's concept of the fold, and the nepantla weave of Aztec metaphysics.
Lately I've been a bit depressed so maybe that's why I haven't been working on my website much or doing much of anything, other than reading and watching French YouTube. Occasionally I've also been watching the French dubs of South Park and Steven Universe. I have no reason to be depressed other than still being unemployed. I have friends, I talk to people. I get out of the apartment. Maybe it's a certain dissatisfaction. I'm getting older and watching my sexuality slip away from me is like watching the last death throes of a dying animal. All that's left is heartache and a pit where pleasure used to be. But other than that, it's been nice since the end of winter break. I've been getting to bug professors like I normally do, asking Dr. E about Deleuze and the univocity of being, and asking the others what they've been up to. The other weekend I went to a monastery to visit cloistered Dominican nuns. There were around 15 to 20 of them in a single room, dressed mostly in white. All of us in my church group were allowed to ask them any question we wanted, so I asked about Duns Scotus and scholastic philosophy. They gave me a primer on Thomas Aquinas and his relationship to Aristotle. One thing that stuck with me is that they told me Aquinas was fairly radical for his time since he was engaging with Aristotle who they painted as a marginal figure in Christian philosophy during his era. I wanted to ask about Spinoza but unfortunately we didn't have enough time together. I hope that one day I can return. Maybe next year. I got to spend a little bit of time walking around the monastery grounds, so I chose to walk by the big stone walls all the way down to a babbling creek that I sat at for a little while before we went into their chapel to listen to their singing prayers.
Since the few months of my absence in writing I've managed to finish a few books, but not many. I'm too lazy and I get easily distracted. I finally finished Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia and it's quickly become one of my favorite books, but my physical copy is currently in the possession of a friend of a friend. I believe the entire month of October I spent reading a combination of Christian and Satanic works. I spent a bit of time reading the literary output
of the Satanic Front as well as Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible for the first time since I initially bought (then lost) my first copy in high school. I was as disappointed by the Satanic Bible now as I was then. I was expecting legends and fables, and all I got were essays and rituals lacking any mythic context. During most of November I was really into reading works of esotericism, so I got through an introductory book on the Qabbala as well as a couple books of Chaos Magick. There's a few others I still want to read on the subject of Chaos Magick but I don't know when I'll ever try to make the time for them. There was one called This is Chaos edited by Peter J. Carroll that I remember being a rather remarkable collection of essays. Structurally it reminded me of Hostia from the Order of Nine Angles but with much longer pieces that were much better written. Around that month I think I finally finished reading Stephen King's On Writing for the first time, which I initially received as a loan from an ex-girlfriend. I still don't like to talk about it. The book itself was lovely, I appreciated the balance of King's writing advice with his autobiographical portraiture.
I finally made the time to try to read some of the Order of Nine Angles's literary output
in the form of their Doefel Quartet (or Quintet depending on who you ask). Dr. Chris Giudice gets a hell of a lot more out of them than I could. The collection that I have is called The Sinister Tales and it has a white cover. At some point it was sold on Amazon along with other collections (in black) like The Sinister Tradition and the single volume Hostia collection that I also have in my possession. I started with Eulalia: Dark Daughter of Baphomet and I thought it was really sophomoric and poorly written. I don't know how you could take an idea as good as hot goth women committing domestic terrorism and turn it into something so uninteresting. That should be illegal. The most frustrating aspect was that there was a sentence describing a corpse that was used verbatim at least 10 different times in the entire short story. When I read the Book of Daniel in the Bible I noticed that in scripture there's also a lot of what feels like pointless repetition, but I guess I'm more forgiving of Nazarene texts that do the same thing (and less often). Falcifer: Lord of Darkness was a lot better, Temple of Satan I remember being a lot worse. I've yet to read anything in The Sinister Tales that feels like a true masterpiece, mostly shoddy attempts at fiction writing that I think might've been saved in a second or third draft. Truthfully, I'm afraid I'll make the same error in my own fiction writings. I never take the time to revise at the level of the sentence or the paragraph, all my revision seems to be purely conceptual, at the level of how I think about the piece itself however the writing ends up.
Falcifer overall is still my favorite, it had a basic structure that I think could lend itself well to an Order of Nine Angles tale, of rivalry between competing magical factions and their attempts to destroy one another. Temple of Satan, if I recall correctly, mostly revolved around the romance of the two main characters, but I don't think the author did a particularly good job of depicting any kind of real chemistry between them. Better romances have been written for grandmothers. The other week I finished Iron Gates as well as all of my notes on it. I think part of the reason I wrote so much about it was because I read someone else's analysis and I thought their interpretation was so fucking stupid that I took it upon myself to try to write my own. I think I still want to write about Iron Gates—not in the sense of trying to either tear it down, something that could be accomplished by anybody, or building it up, something that could only be accomplished by someone with poor reading comprehension—but a writing on Iron Gates that serves as a defense of transgressive fiction itself. By this defense I mean of truly transgressive authors that I've come to love, whether Georges Bataille, Peter Sotos, or maybe even Marquis de Sade. A work of a pervert, for other perverts and degenerates. I want to write a lot of things, and I get pulled in a lot of different directions. I've yet to learn to surf the cosmic waters of eternal return to focus on the works that are to make up my destiny.
Another book that I managed to finish recently was Eros and Civlization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud by Herbert Marcuse. A long time ago I tried to read Anti-Oedipus from Deleuze and Guattari but I didn't get particularly far into it. It turns out the book that I wanted Anti-Oedipus to be was already written by Marcuse, and around 20 years before either of them ever got around to it. I still don't think I know enough about Freudian psychoanalysis to try to tell you the specifics of why I found Marcuse so fascinating, but I can try my best. In it, he tried to paint a portrait of a non-repressive society, at least in the sense of being able to do away what what he calls surplus repression, which is all of the repression needed in excess in order to maintain capitalism (what he calls industrial society
) as our social order. I remember enjoying most of the book but thinking that the second chapter in particular was rather odd because he spends most of his time talking about Freud's last work, Moses and Monotheism, which I imagine very few people would try to call his best. My copy of Eros and Civilization was given to me as a gift from Dr. C, it was printed in the 70's, and by the time I finished reading it the spine collapsed and I'll probably have to try to get it rebound. I want to reread it, not just once, but forever. It's a utopian novel for dystopian times.
I'm really bad at writing about philosophical works and it's probably a combination of never taking notes and not writing enough. Part of my thought process here is that I only really feel like I'm reading a work of philosophy properly when I've already read the entire body of text at least twice. It feels pointless or gratuitous to try to write my thoughts on a philosophical work when I'm barely in the process of getting acquainted with it. A better thing to do is underline what captures my attention, and maybe two or three readings down the line I'll have something interesting to say about it. I was telling Dr. E that I really like Difference and Repetition because you get these incredibly dense paragraphs of detailed philosophical exposition, but then Deleuze lets his guard down and allows himself to write beautiful sentences with almost poetic resonances. He strings me along through his explications of Aristotelian logic, or the univocity of being, or Bergsonian time, and shows me sentences which display his evocative imagination in all of its power. I think the other part of it is that I think that part of philosophical work is being able to enter into the mind of another philosopher through reading their works, and this requires an element of rehearsal. I've heard something similar when people describe a good concert pianist as someone who's able to perform a similar penetration into the depths of the mind of the composer. I imagine that after enough readings of the Phenomenology of Spirit and surrounding works, I'll be able to perform Hegel's writing like Glenn Gould renders Bach. Or better yet, like Miles Davis on Agharta.