The Universe Does Not Exist: Conspiratorial cosmology - the case against the Universe

German physicists Jörg P. Rachen and Ute G. Gahlings have recently discovered evidence of a Universal Conspiracy and have just published their results in a brilliant exposé in the highly esteemed Journal of Comparative Irrelevance:

Abstract: "Based on the cosmological results of the Planck Mission, we show that all parameters describing our Universe within the ΛCDM model can be constructed from a small set of numbers known from conspiracy theory. Our finding is confirmed by recent data from high energy particle physics. This clearly demonstrates that our Universe is a plot initiated an unknown interest group or lodge. We analyse possible scenarios for this conspiracy, and conclude that the belief in the existence of our Universe is an illusion, as previously assumed by ancient philosophers, 20th century science fiction authors and contemporary film makers.

It's like this, only BIGGER

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Breaking: Godwin's Law Refuted By Finnish Ecofascist

Today, I have observed a clear violation of Godwin's Law. To compare this man to Hitler would be an understatement. It's a good thing he's older than dirt and will never get into a position of power, since it is an indisputable fact that Pentti Linkola would be FAR WORSE THAN HITLER.

Certified Worse Than Hitler

At least he's honest?

In his own words:

"If the present amount of Earths population is preserved and is reduced only by the means of birth control, then:

• Birthgiving must be licenced. To enhance population quality, genetically or socially unfit homes will be denied offspring, so that several birth licences can be allowed to families of quality.
• Energy production must be drastically reduced. Electricity is allowed only for the most necessary lighting and communications.
• Food: Hunting must be made more efficient. Human diet will include rats and invertebrate animals. Agriculture moves to small un-mechanized units. All human manure is used as fertilizer.
• Traffic is mostly done with bicycles and rowing boats. Private cars are confiscated. Long-distance travel is done with sparse mass transport. Trees will be planted on most roads.
• Foreign affairs: All mass immigration and most of import-export trade must stop. Cross-border travel is allowed only for small numbers of diplomats and correspondents.
• Business will mostly end. Manufacture is allowed only for well argumented needs. All major manufacturing capacity is state owned. Products will be durable and last for generations.
• Science and schooling: Education will concentrate on practical skills. All competition is rooted out. Technological research is reduced to extreme minimum. But every child will learn how to clean a fish in a way that only the big shiny bones are left over."

From ― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail? - A Radical Approach To The Environmental Crisis:

"If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating, if it meant millions of people would die."

“I could never find two people who are perfectly equal: one will always be more valuable than the other. And many people, as a matter of fact, simply have no value.”

“I believe that human brilliance manifests itself only in flashes, among rare individuals. For this reason, humanity as a whole is enormously destructive: the creation of something as devastating as Western culture, which is now allowed to spread throughout the world, offers sufficient proof of this fact.”

“The coming years will prove increasingly cynical and cruel. People will definitely not slip into oblivion while hugging each other. The final stages in the life of humanity will be marked by the monstrous war of all against all: the amount of suffering will be maximal.”

Suck it, Godwin.

The Vacuum Metastability Event: New Evidence

"If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Joseph Lykken said at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Monday. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself."


The first thing I see on my facebook feed this morning: If Higgs Boson Calculations Are Right, A Catastrophic 'Bubble' Could End Universe. Recent work in the world of physics provides new evidence that something far worse than "the nothing" ought elicit our cosmic angst, as I wrote in: Ex nihilo nihil fit: Heidegger's Vacuuity and False Vacuum Decay.

Georges Bataille: On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death (video)

Today, we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Georges Bataille. I wrote and recorded the following lecture for presentation at Acephalia Encyclopaedica: Conversations on Georges Bataille, which was held today in Portugal. 

My reflections take Bataille's final text, the preface to The Impossible, as their point of departure. The preface was written with a sense of great urgency during January of 1962, as his correspondence with the publisher indicates. During the time between then and the appearance of The Impossible in print that spring, Bataille at last overcame his propensity to "erect artificial obstacles [and] without even knowing me yet, was trying through me to forbid himself from rejoining Laure [his lover, whose death in 1938 profoundly changed him], nevertheless lost forever." After years of delay, Bataille contacted the author of the preceding lines, Jérôme Peignot, the nephew of his long-lost love, expressing his strong desire to meet him (again; they had met while the latter was a child). Of their meeting, Jérôme Peignot wrote only the following poignant words: 

When I arrived at the Pont-Royal bar, there was a man with gray hair waiting for me. What we said to each other then is not important. What is, on the other hand, were the tears I saw rolling down his cheeks. (Jérôme Peignot, "My Diagonal Mother")

In the vocabulary of Buddhism, by publishing The Impossible and at last meeting the nephew of his lost love, Bataille was able to relinquish the last attachments that bound him to this world of the living. Approximately three months later, he died like a cat: peacefully in his sleep, while his wife and young daughter were vacationing in England. I imagine that Georges rejoined Laure in death, and that perhaps, in another life, they would find one another once again.





Other writings by Prof. Rowan on Georges Bataille:
In Memoriam Georges Bataille: (2012; a version of the text of video lecture)
Friendship d'après Georges Bataille (2011)
The Logic of the Lost Moment (2009)
Communism in an Economy of Excess: Toward a General Economics of an Enduring Communist Society (2009)
Par-délà la Poésie (2007)
On Bataille and Desire (2005)


Translations by Prof. Rowan
Schizogenesis (La Scissiparité): Part 1, Part 2
The Oresteia (L'Orestie), Manuscript Version

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Philosophy Begins In Terror: Aphorisms for a Philosophy of Happiness in (our) Time

The Truth of Transience: A Philosophy of Happiness

I.

I have never believed in anything, not even and much less myself. I have always felt as though selfhood, identity, kept me, keeps us, in fetters, shackled to the lie of transcendence. I lied, just now. I believed in deliverance, escape, in the pleroma of the apocalypse of love.

II.

Reflecting upon the man I've become and the stark contrast in which I stand to my past, I can only find it insufferably presumptuous to speak of myself in the present tense. Even today I have not ceased to live ahead of myself. Whereas you, my friends, can see me as I am,  I can only see myself within images of the past, in the reflections of memory's mirror.

III.

When I write, I write as an author of quotations without context, excerpts drawn from non-existent books.

IV.

Happiness in love is elusive for the very same reason as its simplicity: one must affirm (to eternity) that nothing is necessary, and that the origin of love lies in absolute, radical contingency.

V.

The Analyst: You know, love is just a Romantic fantasy, a mask for our every retrogression into primal, neurotic behavior. These aggressive, self-destructive drives masquerade as expressions of a noble emotion, when in reality, they respond to the trauma of intimacy, the anticipatory grief of knowing that the beloved will one day disappear. On occasion we attain mastery, only by becoming agents of the feared dissolution.

The Analysand: Can't it be otherwise? Can't love inspire progress?

The Analyst: Why, then, is it you on the couch and not I? 

VI.

Why must we reproach ourselves for ephemeral happiness as it recedes into the past? Wouldn't this amount to sour grapes on the part of my present existence? 'I must have been mistaken. Had I been or had reason to be happy it would have lasted.' In so doing we forget that transience is indissociable from the very idea of happiness.

...to love to let go.

VII.

Hope is impossible. Despair is doubly impossible. To genuinely let go: impossibility raised to the power of infinity.

VIII.

At that moment when at last I felt at home in the cosmos, a multitude of previously unseen stars illuminated the sky.

IX.

Perhaps every turning point is in accompanied by a palpable uncanny aura. I can feel the coexistence of what was and what will be in the now.


How to be in the world, to unite my time into a now?


In (Our) Time:

I.                        

The non-identity of self and self is time itself – without which we could not exist. Existence is neither eternal, unchanging Being, nor bound, teleologically, to absolute annihilation, eternal non-being. It is rather their unending, non-dialectical synthesis: the stream of Becoming.

Experience does not admit of non-existence, only being-in-time: becoming. genesis and phthora, birth and death, the passage of time: none refute existence. Universal transience and impermanence refute only our fantasies of eternal self-identity – fantasies tantamount to suicidal ideation.

II.

Nostalgia is an addiction to the past, to that which is not - or is no longer. It is the apotheosis of neurosis.

III.

Ennui is a lack of faith in the reality of the future, which makes the present recur eternally without change: the prison of time.

IV.

The time of hell is not, as Walter Benjamin wrote, the time of Eternal Return; it is the timeless time of the endless end.

V.

Absolute zero: a juxtaposition that signifies the unity of being and nothingness and the final kenosis of Spirit in Time

VI.

Marx says that historical events are subject to repetition, they come first as tragedy, then as farce. What Marx left out is that, when events recur thrice, they then come in drag.

VII.

Does the rejection of anthropocentrism (and the Copernican revolution in general) necessarily entail relegating humanity to utter insignificance, that is to say: nihilism?

VIII.

Skepticism that is not skeptical of itself is called nihilism.

IX.

Unknown shores: almost in sight

The felt presence of the unforeseen

Unforeseeable yet already present

Optics of the unconscious

Blindsight.

What power has the "light of truth" over blind Tiresias?




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In Memoriam Georges Bataille: Truth, Love & Death

Portrait of "Dianus" by Alberto Giacommetti

“As I sought it out I have never found it.”

Truth. Comprehending the truth of love, of death, of laughter and tears: such experiences disclose the Impossible. This truth is strictly speaking ungraspable. It exists inextricably bound by a relationship of complementarity, a discordant accord, with that other side of truth which is the business of lucid scientific rationality, i.e. the production of knowledge as an objective description of the world of things, of what is possible. Irreducible to objectivity, such experiences as love, laughter and tears are no less real and no less a part of the world in which we live and die. They escape the grasp of knowledge, properly speaking, and yet without the perspective given therein, truth would remain forever incomplete; and what's more, the unknowability of death itself guarantees the necessarily incomplete status of life, of history, of the world, and of the totality of the universe.

Georges Bataille à Oréans, 1961

“Science is silent about the moment in which reflection loses its moorings within the impossible.”

The truth of love and of death, viz. the impossible can only come into the purview of objective knowledge (whether according to the methods dictated by scientific reason or by philosophies such as phenomenology or logical positivism) by means of a reduction: any objective description and knowledge of love, of death, is possible only from without and après coup: to mistake love or death for merely biological phenomena amounts to an amputation of all that arises from (inner) experience. While a work of decidedly broader perspective and (in my view) greater intellectual rigor and honesty, P.-L. Landsberg's Essai sur l'expérience de la mort remains the fruit of a project doomed in advance, one that could only fall short or fail utterly: one simply cannot have knowledge the experience of death from the perspective of the one who dies – for death is essentially the permanent disappearance of the very subject of knowledge.

Laure and Georges: once again united by death.

“In so may ways, the ensemble of mankind has fallen into a trap. This much we can grasp.”

Our inevitable, final fall into the impossible is our common destiny: slipping beyond the bounds of meaning into absolute senselessness, every being does finally escape from the twin prison-houses of self and world; likewise from that of language. That final destiny which we share with every living being is to at last venture beyond every possibility, to transgress the most distant of limits. We are bound to joyously disappear into that unknown domain to take leave of the world, of knowledge, without so much as a shadow of self. Dissolution into boundless immanence is our final destination, for the world in which we live is that of false, reified – deified – transcendence. The lie of transcendence is supplanted by truth in the final reckoning, for “the totality of the world rests finally on my precarious self, and on death.” In truth, we are bound together by the universal and inevitable disappearance of our selves.

Would this then not be the “nothing of transcendence?" 

No, let us not be seduced by the thought of nothingness. Human existence is always in suspense of death: beneath the surface there is an inconceivable abyss into which, one day, we will fall. Does the end of all possibility and knowledge signify or reveal nothingness, non-being, as the ultimate truth of life, of being? No, for we can only speak of nothing as poets, as dupes, or as liars: for nothing exists only as the abstract negation of the something that is. There is no nothing: no experience of nothing. What's more: even in the vacuum a sort of creation ex nihilo takes place - an ephemeral creation destined to return to its origin and to repetition.

"Experience is immeasurable," and the universe is inconceivable. When we confuse our impossible destiny with absolute annihilation we succumb to the seductive, cold comfort of nihilism: we suppose that we have attained absolute knowledge, an immutable, ultimate truth, and thereby forget that human existence is of its essence an unanswerable, open question, forever incomplete(able). 

"We are never within our rights in preferring seduction: truth has rights over us. Indeed, it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must, respond to something which, not being God, is stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights, only by accepting disappearance.”

The preceding reflections, composed on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death (7 July 1962), are to a great extent inspired by the final expression of the thought of Georges Bataille, the preface to The Impossible. This text was written with a sense of great urgency, as his correspondence with the publisher indicate, and the book had been in print less than three months before he died peacefully, like a cat, in his sleep, while his wife and young daughter were vacationing in England. With the exception of the last, which concludes the published preface, all quotations are drawn from the manuscript version found in Tome III of his Oeuvres Complètes (my translations).

Philosophy Begins in Terror: Reflections on Loving and Living

Fragments & Notes 

(26, September 2011 - 14, March 2012)

1.  Countless times I've heard it said: love yourself if you wish to be loved by another. Now, as the essence and apotheosis of love is the ecstatic loss of self – in which the two are no longer one, without thereby creating any unity but co-mmunity – countless times I denounced this dictum as a diversion, or as naught but an incitement to narcissism.

As the fault of Narcissus lay not in self-adoration but in the neglectful self-abnegation arising of attachment to misrecognition, so I failed to detect that destructive, self-negating nature that lay  concealed – and was revealed – in my denunciation.

Self-loss without self-love is only death. Self-love is laughter of complicity with oneself.

Only this complicity can prepare you to let your heart be consumed in love.

On the Anxiety of Everything and of Nothing: Learning to let go

"Whoever believes in reason has to be able to excuse it as a believer excuses his god. After all, because not everyone believes in reason." 

Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses The River

Is there such a thing as “anxiety?” Or do you transform an experience of your existence in a world, a life – neither entirely your own – into something to be possessed (by), grasped (by) – that you can at least perceive and know as an object. It is by turns a burden, an affliction, an essential part of your self, and finally, a threat: anxiety, does it not sometimes appear as a menacing, overwhelming force, from which there is no escape, that threatens the integrity of the “I” and the self you know?

And yet, it seems that anxiety has been so close and continual a companion to you – virtually ever-present – that it escapes you at the moment you wish to write. Anxiety, in other words, could just as well have been the object of Augustine's meditation on Time in the Confessions: “What this is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know...” Perhaps "anguish is the horror of time” (Bataille) precisely the fact that “if the present is only time, because it flows away into the past... For it is, only because it will cease to be.... [and] that time is only in that it tend toward not-being.” [1] Like our existence in time, anxiety accompanies experience so closely that you know it without knowing precisely for what you take it.

Images of Happiness: The Tragic as Farce

I. After the End

Beyond the eight o'clock blue of August twilight

Lies the truth we now see, that in our grandeur and temerity,

We have outlived the <fin de notre Histoire>, and in our sur-vival

we bypassed this end, and yet stand suspended above the abyss that it is.

I have ever lacked the sense of endings, death and departure are the unknown

to me;

in me;

The deep blue sky, as it prepares to erupt, whispers to me,

that the end was always already completed, and elevates me

to that apex of poetic grandeur, from which I can see that

at the end of History, every ending has touched my heart, inscribing

seductively this truth – that every ending has been dear to me.

A crack of thunder shatters the immense silence of this kingdom of ends

Illuminated by the lightning bolt, this silence is exposed as refusal

– As an obscurantism of ends –

And shattered, torn to pieces, a new truth is born; that each and every ending

Has been but the inverted image of nascent beginnings waiting to be born.

The sense of our hypertelic Histoire will never again be the same,

for the lies of stillborn worlds have been exposed – even if

our Histoire was finished before it ever began, it is now possible

to inscribe on my heart, on our Histoire, a new truth – that the end

was no more than a beginning, and that death and departure have no sense,

are the absence of sense,

    except as rebirths in joyous non-sense

Modern Gnosticism: Surrealist Revolution & Death by Sex

Modern Gnosticism: Surrealist Revolution & Death by Sex

Fuck you André. You just look silly. 

And Bataille, instead, was awarded the Legion d'honneur

Boring excitement, exciting boredom... “The time of the eternal recurrence is, then, not the 'eternal present' of a goalless revolving in which past still becomes and future always was; it is rather a future time of a goal that liberates from the burden of the past and arises from the will to the future.” [1] Surrealism, in “its revolutionary phase – the analogous universe is destroyed... the world with itself and the ego with itself are disunited, and both equally are smashed to pieces. The surrealist allegory orchestrates the worldlessness [Weltlosigkeit] of a nihilistic experience, that initially joins itself to the postulates or a revolutionary communism... [this aspect of] the surrealistic experience “repeats” in modernity the nihilistic worldlessness of Gnosticism in late antiquity... The Gnostic pneumaticist is [much like Baudelaire] the dandy of antiquity.” [2] To cite Benjamin: "A reconciled humanity will take leave of its part -- and one form of reconciliation is gaiety. '...The last stage of a world-historical form is its comedy... Why does history follow this course? So that mankind may take leave of its past gaily.' Karl Marx. Surrealism is the death of the nineteenth century in comedy." [N5a,2]

If we are to foreground certain more-or-less secularized elements drawn from the tradition of Gnosticism, it should be emphasized that, as Jacob Taubes notes, in his rejoinder to Hans Blumenberg during their discussion of Surrealism and Gnosis, Gnosticism in Late Antiquity could hardly be called a monolithic doctrine. If it is true that eschatological and apocalyptic thought is rooted in gnosis, it is equally true that doctrines such as that of Marcion emphasized a rather more “modern” response to the evil of the world and demiurge – rejection and revolt against the established order, destruction of a corrupt world in the hic et nunc. This radical opposition which refuses collaboration by having no particular vision of the immanent and imminent, improved world to follow the rupture, Taubes illustrates, is borrowed and explicitly acknowledged by Ernst Bloch.[3] Norbert Bolz, in “Erlösung als ob: Über einige gnostiche Motive der Kritischen Theorie,”[Salvation as if: On several Gnostic motifs in Critical Theory], makes the case for a gnostic element, not only in Bloch, but at the very heart of Critical Theory as a whole, and particularly in Karl Barth, Theodor Adorno (“es gibt kein rechtige Leben in dem Falsch,” and “die Ganze ist unwahr” and Negativ Dialektik, on the whole, evidence a gnostic acosmism) – including Dialektik der Aufklärung,with Horkheimer, and especially in Benjamin, from his earliest to latest works. Bolz writes that Baudelaire can be seen as an allegorical image of Modern existence:

          In Modernity, as the time of Hell, never appears identical to itself, rather the most recently named –                   

          this is infernal eternity... In great abbreviation, Benjamin unveiled the Gnosticism of Modern everyday 

          life in the necessary form: Nothing is boring to living people than the cosmos [4]

Here it would be apt to draw a parallel to Blanchot's politics of refusal and rupture, which, of course, is indebted both to Bataille and Benjamin; refusal is defined by Blanchot as “absolute, categorical... not discuss[ing] or voice[ing] its reasons,” refusal of “an offer of agreement and compromise that we will not hear. A rupture has occurred. We have been brought back to this frankness that does not tolerate complicity any longer.” This cursory glance alone demonstrates a remarkable kinship to Marcion's gesture of freeing man “from all that was of this world, while providing nothing better,” as Bloch wrote in Atheism in Christianity (1968), which “gave birth to that 'break' mentality which was always to militate against any idea of 'reception': history is devoid of salvation, and salvation of history.” [5] The only determination of refusal is gained in its extreme form, in the “right to insubordination,” which, as an exemplary instance, “designates the right that founds or maintains itself in this refusal and from this refusal: the right not to be oppressed and not to be an oppressor." [6] Whether gnostic in actual inspiration or not,[7] Blanchot's politics and the events of May '68 at large, point to the periodic repetition of gnosis – in its Marcionite form, in this instance – throughout history, which render an exemplary moment of crisis and revolutionary kairos visible and active. [8]

Klossowski's Illustration of Bataille's L'Abbé C.

Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001)

Pierre Klossowski, in an interview with Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, published in 1985, makes the startling revelation that: “Benjamin lent me his copy of Dokumente der Gnosis: the collection edited by Schulze.⁹ From there I began to study the great heresiarchs, Carpocrates, Valentin, Basilides, before the theologies of Catholicism or Calvinism. ”¹⁰ Gnostic allegory. “Allegory should be shown as the antidote to myth.” ([27], 179) “As soon as the poetic power of allegorizing leaves [Nietzsche], the whole decomposes into two contradictory parts, which only conflict holds together. For the tendency to eternalize that has become ephemeral does not enter into the circuit of the eternal cycle of the natural world – unless the temporal will of human existence that has become eccentric were to fly in a superhuman fashion into the heaven of the pre-Copernican world, in order to circle along in the middle of being.”¹¹ Allegory in late antiquity: “In the course of such a literature the world of the ancient gods would have had to die out, and it is precisely allegory which preserved it. For an appreciation of the transience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory.”¹²

He later became Cardinal and died in a whorehouse.
There is a word for death by orgasm: epectasis or epecstasy

Bataille was already interested in and familiar with Gnosticism, having published “Base Materialism and Gnosticism” in Documents, in 1930. His friend and theological interlocutor, too, Fr. Jean Danièlou, S.J., a scholar of patristics, in particular of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, later lectured on the topic of Gnosis for the Vie Spirituelle circle, on the topic of Gnosis: “Revelation is apportioned out by the gift of God, and this transmits itself in secrecy. Human beings are divided by predestination into somatics or psychics, and it is impossible during the course of life to pass from one category to another. Only the pneumatics can attain salvation.”¹³ While Bataillle, in 1930, did not mention Marcion, using Basilides as touchstone instead, the Gnosis he describes is rooted in materialism, that is, insubordination:

Abraxas, from the Gnosis of Basilides

It is difficult to believe that on the whole Gnosticism does not manifest above all a sinister love of darkness, a monstrous taste for obscene and lawless archontes, for the head of the solar ass. The existence of a sect of licentious Gnostics and of certain sexual rites fulfills this obscure demand for a baseness that would not be reducible ...Gnosticism, in its psychological process, is not so different from present-day materialism. I mean a materialism not implying an ontology... it is a question above all of not submitting oneself, and with oneself one's reason, to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a borrowed authority to the being that I am, and to the reason that arms this being. This being and its reason can in fact only submit to what is lower, to what can never serve in any case to ape a given authority. Also I submit entirely to what must be called matter, since that exists outside of myself and the idea...”¹⁴

In view of Bataille's marriage of Gnosticism to materialism, we must at least entertain the hypothesis that the theology which, in Benjamin's “Concept of History,” is both the puppet-master and secret weapon of historical materialism, might in fact be neither Christian nor Jewish – and rather more Gnostic than Kabbalistic. In the first instance, Bloch's discussion of Marcion casts an intriguing light upon Benjamin's reference to the fact that “the Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar presents history in time-lapse mode. And basically it is this same day that keeps recurring... in days of remembrance.”¹⁵ Bloch writes that by designating the year of Marcion's birth as Year Zero, the Marcionite calendar marks “the beginning of a new time-series which in itself has no real place, but only an apparent one, in history... the only real parallel lies in the Jacobin calendar, whose year naught was 'also' intended as a totally new beginning, with its break from the entire 'old testament' of history.”¹⁶ In the context of this admittedly inexact parallelism, the content of Eingedenken, and of the whole of history, would be the nullity and nullification of that which has been transmitted and passed off as history “the way it was.” Just as Marcionite Gnosis sought to “wrest tradition from the conformism [of the ruling classes] that is working to overpower it”¹⁷ and to start anew, Benjamin substitutes the practice of redemptive memory for the “general system of redemption by forgetting – or forgetting conceived as an apocalyptic event (this is one of Basilides' theses that I discovered in reading Schulze's collection,”¹⁸ in which Eternal Recurrence and the figure of the Antichrist, which “is not just a word, except in pure criticism, such as that of Lotze, which binds together the history of christianity”¹⁹ inhere. However, in the damnatio memorae of the redemption – in taking leave of the past following victory over the Antichrist – the Gnostic superposition of redemption and forgetting remains.

1Karl Löwith, Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, Trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87.

2Jacob Taubes, “Notes on Surrealism,” From Cult To Culture, 101-2.

3Jacob Taubes, “Notes on Surrealism,” & “The Iron Cage,” From Cult to Culture, 118-20 & 139-142.

4Norbert Bolz, “Erlösung als ob: Über einige gnostiche Motive der Kritischen Theorie,” Jacob Taubes, Ed., Religionstheorie und Politische Theology: Gnosis und Politik (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984). 264-289. 267. Translation R. Tepper.

5 Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, Trans. J. T. Swann (London & New York: Verso, 2009), 176-7.

7Blanchot, “[The Declaration (of the 121) … is not a protest manifesto],” PW, 23.

8 See Sur-Representation: Revolution & Repetition (R. Tepper).

9Wolfgang Schultz, Dokumente der Gnosis (Jena: Eugen Diedrichs, 1910).

10Pierre Klossowski & Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, Le Peintre et Son Démon, (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 184. Trans. R. TEpper

11Löwith, 83.

12Benjamin, Origin, 223.

13“Père Danièlou: la gnose, Vie Spirituelle, seance n° 8, 7 mars 1942,” Digraphe 86-7, 45-6. Trans. R. Tepper

14Georges Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” Visions of Excess, 48-51.

15Benjamin, SW 4: 395.

16Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, 177.

17Benjamin, SW 4: 391.

18Klossowski & Monnoyer, 184. Trans. R. Tepper

19Klossowski & Monnoyer, 184.

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Sur-Representation: Revolution & Repetition

Sur-Representation: Revolution & Repetition

“Philosophical writing [must] continually confront the question of representation.” [1] – Walter Benjamin, Ursprung der Deutsche Trauerspiel

The question of representation must indeed be confronted and the impossibility of making do without representation entirely. For, even in the least representative poetic evocation there remains the fact that even Wortsalat has as its building block words that in principle do represent objects. Moreover, the logic of total escape or opposition presupposes the binary logic of mutually exclusive alternatives, which we now know in light of quantum mechanics and subsequent developments in physics to be entirely superseded. Except in human language and quite possibly the forms of human thought. Perhaps there is way to think and to write that can resist the reduction of the infinite richness of experience that all representational-conceptual thought has as its price. A revolutionary possibility whereby experience might break through, within representations themselves, whereby experience would be, to borrow one of Blanchot's formulations, “affirmed in a negation that, while opening a void and stopping time, also point[s] toward the future... a transgression: an innocent transgression.”[2]  Such a possibility for thought and language makes representations of experience transgress their own limits, and the surplus over representation, its sur-representational excess, would no longer represent or signify, but mark an instance of the exemplary. Of course these instances in the course of a “treatise” on time will be ephemeral, and representative discourse remains as an instrument of thinking, but they indicate and articulate that which is to come. It is to make use of “representation as digression.”[3]

Logomachia: The Altar of the Real

Logomachia

Consecrate then desecrate the whiteness of the page:

a film noir murder scene

erases - replaces

and fills in the blank

with sacrificial crimes committed in the name

of the Verb, upon this stage.

Traces of logomachia inscribed in lingual debris

struggle sans origin, sans end writes the script

from which I read

voicing and enacting my ownmost role

in this parody

of "liberty."

Silence, Spirit these words away (from me)!

Sacred lines written in secret and in silence

can only be dis-connected - fragmented

by all-devouring Time.

Never erased - Never effaced,

but by the turning page of History overturned

whence, without recompense,

white sacrifice will ever recommence.

Jailbreaking Language: Elegies for Realities Bygone and Yet to Come

By Prof. Rowan
dialdfordialectic (at) gmail


8-5-8

Who were we to cut time in two?
To place a hand outstretched between two infinities
Digits fingering the supernumerary infinite of time
enumerating, denumerating,
digitally devolving,
continuum contracting
i n t o
wind-blown desert-sand-seconds
counted and counted, once and eternally again
by three anthropomorphic clock-hands
grandfather-clock-hands
the clock
deified, itself now digital
clutching, counting,
sand-seconds
passing
sur-viving the dis-aster of man
two infinities of time once again become one
one-not-one
number-no-longer
analog continuum

Friendship (d'apres Georges Bataille)

By Prof. Rowan

At the most fundamental level, and the foundation of the world, we are one, and yet we are unable to overcome false transcendence to catch sight of this truth. It is a truth of death, or the unity of life and death, of the fundamental ambiguity of the world, which we avert our eyes to turn away from our eventual dissolution. And yet some, among us have the courage to bear this truth. But can we ever be certain of our endurance? On the contrary, this truth is unbearable: we attain this impossible truth only blind and burning, in that moment in which we surrender to self-loss and are as one, consumed in moments doomed to disappearance, by the conflagrations of love.

Elves of the Apocalypse: "Machine Elves" and the Self-Sabotage of Psychedelic Research

By Prof Rowan
(Note: Someone tried to scrub this from Wikipedia (restored as of 6am Friday) yesterday. Hopefully this makes it all the more futile to try to make this little gem go away.)

I guess when getting worked up over whether "beings exist and not nothing at all" or whether "the nothing is really nothing" just isn't enough, you can always get worked up over the "clockwork [sic] elves" who control the global elite promising them "eternal life, total power, total control, everything you could ever want, just kill everyone [...] friendly little guys..."

Right. Most if not all mythologies include creatures resembling elves. Therefore the archetypal image must be based upon encounters with the Machine... Er... Clockwork Elves. As with all paranoid logic, this argument is easily felled by Occam's Razor, which advocates that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity," in short, that the "simplest answer is most likely the correct one." It is much more plausible to propose that the entities encountered during the DMT-experience could very well bear some measure of resemblance to elves (elongated and angular shapes are common); that one comes to think "if they look like elves, they are elves" at least makes sense!

THERE ARE NO FUCKING MACHINE ELVES!