Thursday 28 February 2013
Embracing contingency: knowedge Vs. identity politics
This is a Nietzschean analysis of "identity politics" as ressentiment. I present the necessary alternative way to view things.
Mike spots an ant and looks around him somewhat
Enjoying the strangeness of nature is part of shamanism
Wednesday 27 February 2013
To collapse the subject with the object
Even though our brains don't like to grasp it this way, reality is...actually the collapsing of the subject with the object.
Intellectual shamanism, feminism and self-knowedge
Many people embrace identity politics INSTEAD OF self-knowledge. These two tend to be inimical in many ways.
anti-feminist stupidity
This stupidity does not occur in isolation. This is where it helps to understand the nucleus of the attack. The anti-feminist ideology that is currently gaining strength resides in the notion that women somehow retain their coy, ultra-feminine (read: helpless) natures, whilst demanding to have the privileges and entitlements traditionally due to men. The people, mostly men, who buy into this ideology believe that women don’t change their traditional natures when they become feminists. They just use feminism as a vehicle to get what women traditionally have wanted — that is, male sacrifice, material goods, praise for doing nothing, and children.
The current push is to get feminists to renounce the term, “feminist”, and accept in its place the term, “humanist”. This push also requires them to protest in the streets for men’s rights, in order to prove to disinterested bystanders {/sarcasm} that they are truly egalitarian.
I don’t know why so many have come to believe that feminism is a vehicle for advancing the interests of traditional femininity (helplessness and taking without earning something). That, however, is the substance of the current anti-feminist ideology.
Stealing the lifeforce from death
Please turn up the sound. I had my finger a little over the microphone for the first half....
Tuesday 26 February 2013
Monday 25 February 2013
Intellectually broke
It's very important to find the central points from which ideas are being disseminated, if one wants to have a chance to change the direction of their flow.
I admit to having found a very key one, but I also admit to being entirely flummoxed at to how to come up with any effective answer or solution.
YouTube is currently more important, I think, than blogs, because it gives people information in a form they find easily digestible. It is easier for illiterate people to listen and view something than it is for them to read something.
It is very important to have a look at the current anti-feminist gibberish put out on YouTube, because otherwise one has not idea whence the strange ideas and false 'truisms' emerge.
To update those who may not know, currently there is strong consensus in the minds of the illiterate that "feminism is an ideology of hate". The echo chambers resonates this notion quite strongly. If one believes that anything is "an ideology of hate", one feels justified in condemning anything that so much mentions the word, "feminism".
There are other "truisms" floating around that have a psychological ring of truth, but are actually at best half-truths, and certainly misrepresent feminists and intellectuals and others.
Sunday 24 February 2013
Part 2. Why I am against identity politics
Anyway, this was the start of my shamanic initiation - being torn apart, as it were, by spirits.
Sorry I look tired today. I am.
Why I am against identity politics Part 1.
Identity politics can be a means to prevent, undermine and destroy communication.
I know its adherents mean well, but they do not always do well.
On emotion and gender
The men who went to war were considered deep. I wasn't and I didn't claim to be. For many years, after migrating, I sought to find my depth. Eventually, I found it by crossing over into what had been denied me in the past -- knowledge of the male modality.
Because "emotion" is gendered "female" in contemporary Western society, nobody had any idea what I was doing (making myself whole by integrating more emotional knowledge and experience). It was assumed by quite a few people that my job ought to have been to try to move away from slushy, feminine "emotion" and into the realm of rationality and logic. However, the opposite was the case -- I had been brought up into the realm of rationality and calm logic, but without much scope to experience or express emotion.
It was a struggle for me to break the hard shell of my character so that some knowledge of emotional life could enter.
I struggled with the same project for years and years -- about ten to fifteen actually.
Finally, I've reached the point where emotion seems to be fully integrated with the way I live my life, at least on an individual level.
The problem is with Westerners who understand my project at cross-purposes and think I was writing as a means to become more stupid and frail. No, not at all, because emotion was defined by masculine freedom in my experience. Women in my culture were not permitted much or it, apart from the cultural attribution of stereotypical weakened states, for instance if they happened to not from here.
Change can happen, but it is hard.
Also, in terms of Western culture and its expectations, I have an inside-out personality. The more threatening I find a situation, the less emotional I am, even to the point that I actually lose touch with my emotions in very threatening situations, and become a stone.
However, it is often assumed that as a female I must inevitably be very much in touch with "feeling".
It has taken me a long time to realize that the majority of people have been taught to reason about gender differently from I.
Because "emotion" is gendered "female" in contemporary Western society, nobody had any idea what I was doing (making myself whole by integrating more emotional knowledge and experience). It was assumed by quite a few people that my job ought to have been to try to move away from slushy, feminine "emotion" and into the realm of rationality and logic. However, the opposite was the case -- I had been brought up into the realm of rationality and calm logic, but without much scope to experience or express emotion.
It was a struggle for me to break the hard shell of my character so that some knowledge of emotional life could enter.
I struggled with the same project for years and years -- about ten to fifteen actually.
Finally, I've reached the point where emotion seems to be fully integrated with the way I live my life, at least on an individual level.
The problem is with Westerners who understand my project at cross-purposes and think I was writing as a means to become more stupid and frail. No, not at all, because emotion was defined by masculine freedom in my experience. Women in my culture were not permitted much or it, apart from the cultural attribution of stereotypical weakened states, for instance if they happened to not from here.
Change can happen, but it is hard.
Also, in terms of Western culture and its expectations, I have an inside-out personality. The more threatening I find a situation, the less emotional I am, even to the point that I actually lose touch with my emotions in very threatening situations, and become a stone.
However, it is often assumed that as a female I must inevitably be very much in touch with "feeling".
It has taken me a long time to realize that the majority of people have been taught to reason about gender differently from I.
Part 2. How to "fall from grace": method, madness and rationale
Mike says this is my best video yet. What do you think?
Saturday 23 February 2013
Friday 22 February 2013
Nietzsche's THREE METAMORPHOSES
This is just more evidence that you need to read Bataille deeply and not in a glib fashion, as Sartre tried to do.
Part 2. How to "fall from grace": method, madness and rationale
I have to shoot indoors on cloudier days. Here are some points perhaps missing from PART ONE on this topic.
Thursday 21 February 2013
How to "fall from grace": method, madness and rationale
This is one of my better videos -- at least in terms of explaining the substance of contemporary intellectual 'shamanism'. A shamanic type wishes to fall from grace, as that is the only way to learn.
I'm sorry, but today I was suffering from hay fever.
What "use" is philosophy?
It's quite understandable that some people find no "use" for philosophy -- and why not?
Wednesday 20 February 2013
Tuesday 19 February 2013
Cultural comparisons of gender roles
If gender is fixed and immutable, why do different cultures attribute different characteristics to the same genders?
Colonial society Vs. Western individualism
Western ideas of personality and character are not universal. Our historical memories are short.
Communicating .... without words: Nietzsche and Bataille
Did postmodernists fail to grasp the message about language formulated by Nietzsche and Bataille?
Monday 18 February 2013
Sunday 17 February 2013
The psychology of fascism & the response of the far left
This video recounts the response of some far left intellectuals to right wing (militaristic) agendas.
Saturday 16 February 2013
Mystical experience?
So when Bataille strips away all transcendental meaning and intellectual support structures, he basically slips down to this level of relating through primary processes, or object relations (aspects of the infantile psyche still persisting in adulthood, facilitating dependency and blind revolt). There he encounters his own foundational character structure, full of incoherence and merging elements. It is, for all that, his true "self", rather than the superficial structure of ego, that rests above it.
I'm not sure it's always good to encounter oneself at this level of being.
On the positive side, it can make you see through a lot of illusions and observe the superficiality of all attempts to adapt to the world by using rationality.
At the same time, it is like encountering one's own volcanic and destabilizing processes. One can certainly learn from observing these -- but one can also, if not careful, be destroyed by them..
Thursday 14 February 2013
Identities --- & colonial society Vs. Western individualism
If you're not aware of these issues, perhaps you should be?
Tuesday 12 February 2013
Adventuring into the wilderness with an Altered State of Consciousness
Please bear with me. I had come back from training, after injuring my knee.
Training in the heat.
Free from authorities?
Clarissa's Blog
Hohumdiddlidum. Being against authorities can [as well as producing depression] produce euphoria, supposing one handles one’s rebellion well. I take Georges Bataille and Marechera as examples. There will always be authorities, that’s the case. The point is, As Nietzsche might say, “Are you ‘against authorities’? If so, show me your RIGHT to go against authorities! Are you a new strength and a new right? A first motion? A self-rolling wheel? Can you even compel the stars to revolve around you?
Alas! there is so much lusting for loftiness! There are so many convulsions of the ambitious! Show me that you are not a lusting and ambitious one!
Alas! there are so many great thoughts that do nothing more than the bellows: they inflate, and make emptier than ever.
Free, do you call yourself? Then I would hear your ruling thought, and not merely that you have escaped from a yoke.
Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? Many a one has cast away his last worth when he has cast away his servitude.
Free from what? What does that matter to Zarathustra! But your fiery eyes should tell me: free for what?
Can you give yourself your own evil and good, and set up your own will as a law over you? Can you be judge for yourself, and avenger of your law?
Terrible is it to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. Thus is a star thrown into the void, and into the icy breath of solitude. “
Hohumdiddlidum. Being against authorities can [as well as producing depression] produce euphoria, supposing one handles one’s rebellion well. I take Georges Bataille and Marechera as examples. There will always be authorities, that’s the case. The point is, As Nietzsche might say, “Are you ‘against authorities’? If so, show me your RIGHT to go against authorities! Are you a new strength and a new right? A first motion? A self-rolling wheel? Can you even compel the stars to revolve around you?
Alas! there is so much lusting for loftiness! There are so many convulsions of the ambitious! Show me that you are not a lusting and ambitious one!
Alas! there are so many great thoughts that do nothing more than the bellows: they inflate, and make emptier than ever.
Free, do you call yourself? Then I would hear your ruling thought, and not merely that you have escaped from a yoke.
Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? Many a one has cast away his last worth when he has cast away his servitude.
Free from what? What does that matter to Zarathustra! But your fiery eyes should tell me: free for what?
Can you give yourself your own evil and good, and set up your own will as a law over you? Can you be judge for yourself, and avenger of your law?
Terrible is it to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. Thus is a star thrown into the void, and into the icy breath of solitude. “
My goals again -- and what's changing them
Actually, what are my goals?
It is hard to say.
I've discovered so much about reality since I began my journey, that what were my goals are mine no longer.
Compared to 10 years ago, some of those discoveries that have radically altered my views are as follows:
1. People may complain about being miserable, but most of them are extremely happy the way they are. That is why there is no use explaining or complaining to other people -- they think you are just like them, griping to let off steam. Substantive reality escapes them.
2. Most people don't care what is true. They press forth with their ideological quests. I guess concern for truthfulness was my shamanic wound, imparted and bequeathed to me by Nietzsche. I'm all over it.
3. Most people do not have good emotional hygiene That means, if you befriend them, they might end up attributing negative qualities to you later, stemming from their personal frustrations. The same goes for people with an ideological bent: the more sincere you are with them, the more they will use you and abuse you. Even getting close enough to ask them questions can be a contamination risk, since they will label you with the elements of their personalities or experiences they do not like.
4. Ninety percent of the burden I've been carrying has not been my own, but that of others who emotionally blackmailed me with the suggestion, "If you carry this for me, you will belong, and at least everything will be well."
5. I have suffered for too long from post-traumatic migrant guilt. That is over.
6. American culture is responsible of a lot of oversimplifying meaning, through the anti-intellectual milieu of its media.
7. People are happy so long as they can breed. The majority of those who do not have an intellect or hobby enjoy breeding.
8. Capitalism now permeates everything. What can I get from that? If that sentence doesn't benefit me, why did I bother reading it. I am the almighty consumer. Bow down and give me tea.
9. Most people can be very normal at a basic level, quite logical and decent, one-on-one.
10. My African hopes are either fulfilled or dead. Many are fulfilled and others are dead. I can't bring back the past.
It is hard to say.
I've discovered so much about reality since I began my journey, that what were my goals are mine no longer.
Compared to 10 years ago, some of those discoveries that have radically altered my views are as follows:
1. People may complain about being miserable, but most of them are extremely happy the way they are. That is why there is no use explaining or complaining to other people -- they think you are just like them, griping to let off steam. Substantive reality escapes them.
2. Most people don't care what is true. They press forth with their ideological quests. I guess concern for truthfulness was my shamanic wound, imparted and bequeathed to me by Nietzsche. I'm all over it.
3. Most people do not have good emotional hygiene That means, if you befriend them, they might end up attributing negative qualities to you later, stemming from their personal frustrations. The same goes for people with an ideological bent: the more sincere you are with them, the more they will use you and abuse you. Even getting close enough to ask them questions can be a contamination risk, since they will label you with the elements of their personalities or experiences they do not like.
4. Ninety percent of the burden I've been carrying has not been my own, but that of others who emotionally blackmailed me with the suggestion, "If you carry this for me, you will belong, and at least everything will be well."
5. I have suffered for too long from post-traumatic migrant guilt. That is over.
6. American culture is responsible of a lot of oversimplifying meaning, through the anti-intellectual milieu of its media.
7. People are happy so long as they can breed. The majority of those who do not have an intellect or hobby enjoy breeding.
8. Capitalism now permeates everything. What can I get from that? If that sentence doesn't benefit me, why did I bother reading it. I am the almighty consumer. Bow down and give me tea.
9. Most people can be very normal at a basic level, quite logical and decent, one-on-one.
10. My African hopes are either fulfilled or dead. Many are fulfilled and others are dead. I can't bring back the past.
Monday 11 February 2013
When squashed down and condensed
Apparently, in the overall scheme of things, I am slightly thick-skinned.
This graph doesn't really tell you very much about me though, because it would make one's boundaries out to be an issue of character, rather than of culture or experience.
My African personality, for instance, would be measured by the chart above as "thin-skinned", even though the tendency to diffuse one's sense of self into others is also a recipe for psychological resilience and a militaristic group definition, within the African social context. If you don't understand what I mean, listen to African harmonizing and understand how this expression of psychological oneness has the capacity to mutate into an effective war chant:
(Sorry about the flag)
My self that resulted from Western cultural conditioning is definitely "thick-skinned" in that I really don't feel what other Western individuals are feeling -- and most often have no desire for that.
Sunday 10 February 2013
Saturday 9 February 2013
Friday 8 February 2013
The soldier in you and me
There's an interesting tension in going to the extremes. Is it the same for you?
Bataille in a nutshell: by Mike Ballard
Of course, plunging into immanence has some complex philosophical ramifications as well.........
Thursday 7 February 2013
The notion of 'PRIVILEGE" Vs. the shamanic view
Somebody asked me whether I sought "privilege" in my determination to learn about male experience.
Lateral enmeshment
Parents and Children: Towards a Healthy Relationship, Part II | Clarissa's Blog
In Africa, it was different. One basically leaves home in grade one, although the test for this is nursery school, at the age of three and four. Grade one is when military discipline descends on you. You learn rules like walking in single file, being quiet during class and always standing up when a teacher enters the room. There are heavy punishments for insubordination, even unintentional acts. The kids tend to form a lateral allegiance under such circumstances, where they identify as "one" against the hierarchy. That's basically how I grew up -- with lateral enmeshment and parental distancing.
In Africa, it was different. One basically leaves home in grade one, although the test for this is nursery school, at the age of three and four. Grade one is when military discipline descends on you. You learn rules like walking in single file, being quiet during class and always standing up when a teacher enters the room. There are heavy punishments for insubordination, even unintentional acts. The kids tend to form a lateral allegiance under such circumstances, where they identify as "one" against the hierarchy. That's basically how I grew up -- with lateral enmeshment and parental distancing.
Wednesday 6 February 2013
Repost: personal Buddhism
My intellectual explorations and my martial arts training are very much interrelated.
I've learned a few things from martial arts, the most significant of which is that you can't expect to get by with an attitude of asserting mind over matter. Rather, you have to train your body to respond reflexively -- almost as if you didn't have a mind, because your body must think and move faster than your mind does.
A very close cousin of this principle is the knowledge that a puffed up ego doesn't help you to defend yourself. Actually, ego takes a lot of energy to generate and to maintain. You could be using this energy to make your practical game more efficient. So don't waste energy pushing it into the maintenance of an ego shield around you. Rather, slow down your heartbeat and your mind and keep a greater distance than you're used to from the centre of emotional confrontation.
The fact that it is even possible to see the world not from the perspective of ego but from the perspective of aptitude and efficiency is very interesting. Ego distorts reality by representing part of the picture as the whole. Is her punch straighter than mine? Well then I'm a failure. Is my kick better than hers? Well I am Queen of the sandpit! That is how ego functions -- slow and ponderously, taking in one bit of the environment at a time and mistaking it for the whole.
Perceiving without ego is more impartial. You see what is good and bad about everything, without becoming fixated on any one thing. You process more of reality and filter out less of it.
Martial arts has also taught me that there is no gain without pain, and that the learning process is never-ending. It is not helpful to have a know-it-all attitude, unless it is your way of suggesting that you have learned all that you need to know, and that your training stops here. Criticism -- when constructively given -- is your friend.
More stuff:
* Pain is not necessarily a sign that something isn't going according to plan, or that the experience is not in accordance with the best possible outcome.
* Describing pain in the aftermath of the experience isn't "whining".
Another infernal personality test
Mike's results:
Female oppression?
Actually, one can truly say that women are really only oppressed if what they do and think and say independently is reduced to some feature of their gender in a negative way.
So, if communication is read as "whining" and participation is read as ineptitude and women's existence is viewed as having an overall negative character, subject to criticism and censure and disbelief, we can say that women are truly oppressed.
But if this never happens, or hardly happens because we live in a free world, then surely there is no oppression.
Getting to know the ape within!
This is a reflection on how shamans prefer to nourish and defend "the ape within".
Tuesday 5 February 2013
Reflecting on the unconscious mind and different goals
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyd-tEekCJk
I've always had problems trying to understand what exactly was the relationship between what I like to call 'intellectual shamanism' (AKA Georges Bataille and Friedrich Nietzsche and those like them) and psychoanalysis. They share some aspects in common, but psychoanalysis seems to cater to people within a narrower range of the psyche, perhaps we could say people "within civilisation", whereas the tradition I am exploring seems to draw a larger circle of inclusion for experiences, people and situations outside of the norm -- specifically outside of civilization and in the wild state of humanity. As a consequence of close similarities but also differences, the language of shamanism sounds like the language of psychoanalysis at times, but also relates to something entirely different. In fact, I think their purposes are different. Psychoanalysis has the purpose of getting you to understand enough about yourself to fit in with society, I presume, whereas shamanism wants you to understand enough about yourself NOT TO FIT IN -- that is, to become out of step.
I think that is why misunderstandings could take place -- because the language is often similar, but the goals are almost in the opposite directions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yHMwIgieUY
I've always had problems trying to understand what exactly was the relationship between what I like to call 'intellectual shamanism' (AKA Georges Bataille and Friedrich Nietzsche and those like them) and psychoanalysis. They share some aspects in common, but psychoanalysis seems to cater to people within a narrower range of the psyche, perhaps we could say people "within civilisation", whereas the tradition I am exploring seems to draw a larger circle of inclusion for experiences, people and situations outside of the norm -- specifically outside of civilization and in the wild state of humanity. As a consequence of close similarities but also differences, the language of shamanism sounds like the language of psychoanalysis at times, but also relates to something entirely different. In fact, I think their purposes are different. Psychoanalysis has the purpose of getting you to understand enough about yourself to fit in with society, I presume, whereas shamanism wants you to understand enough about yourself NOT TO FIT IN -- that is, to become out of step.
I think that is why misunderstandings could take place -- because the language is often similar, but the goals are almost in the opposite directions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yHMwIgieUY
My recent shamanic wilderness experience
Sometimes deep thought and pressure to change can have a catalytic effect on the mind, so that one understands everything more deeply.
The shamanic type and sacrificial madness
Monday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion | Clarissa's Blog
Not all unfortunate situations are the result of the machinations of the unconscious mind. Some are due to lack of experience and some we remain in because we don't have the emotional force we need to see through the smoke and make a clear cut between the past and the present. When the ties are direct and involve one's family, that is even more difficult. One is dealing directly with a family member who is mad, for instance, and it is unclear whether one has the strength for this (this was my situation). I think some people thought that I enjoyed this difficulty, but I didn't. My unconscious and my conscious mind were not divided on that matter.
I suspect that in a case where the unconscious mind is not the operational force one feels a generalized anxiety, but in a case where the opposite is true, the anxiety one feels would probably be much more localized and acute.
Bataille said, "Humanity invented a hell for itself and thereupon it was in heaven."
Bataille was a crazy person who liked being mad, because he felt that being in touch with the unconscious minds of others and himself was a form of power. It was like having his fingers on electric power lines all the time. It made him feel extremely alive. He certainly invented a hell for himself, but he gained pleasure from it, including a certain freedom from subservience to established social mores.
I think the person who is mad, but wants to be mad, because there is much to be gained by accessing this forbidden knowledge -- the secret recesses of human minds -- is a shaman.
Most people would not choose to have so much direct awareness of what is going on in the depths of their minds, but shamans revel in this inner experience, even though it is extremely painful. They feel the benefits they gain from knowledge of their inner worlds outweigh the painful aspects of their vocation.
Not all unfortunate situations are the result of the machinations of the unconscious mind. Some are due to lack of experience and some we remain in because we don't have the emotional force we need to see through the smoke and make a clear cut between the past and the present. When the ties are direct and involve one's family, that is even more difficult. One is dealing directly with a family member who is mad, for instance, and it is unclear whether one has the strength for this (this was my situation). I think some people thought that I enjoyed this difficulty, but I didn't. My unconscious and my conscious mind were not divided on that matter.
I suspect that in a case where the unconscious mind is not the operational force one feels a generalized anxiety, but in a case where the opposite is true, the anxiety one feels would probably be much more localized and acute.
Bataille said, "Humanity invented a hell for itself and thereupon it was in heaven."
Bataille was a crazy person who liked being mad, because he felt that being in touch with the unconscious minds of others and himself was a form of power. It was like having his fingers on electric power lines all the time. It made him feel extremely alive. He certainly invented a hell for himself, but he gained pleasure from it, including a certain freedom from subservience to established social mores.
I think the person who is mad, but wants to be mad, because there is much to be gained by accessing this forbidden knowledge -- the secret recesses of human minds -- is a shaman.
Most people would not choose to have so much direct awareness of what is going on in the depths of their minds, but shamans revel in this inner experience, even though it is extremely painful. They feel the benefits they gain from knowledge of their inner worlds outweigh the painful aspects of their vocation.
Monday 4 February 2013
Upon returning from another initiation by the forest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yHMwIgieUY
Sometimes we do something that we think might have been an example of our bad judgment, because the outcome was mixed or even bad -- but looking at it from the point of view of the Bataille/Nietzsche nexus, that was a pure act of your individuality. All the more so if you feel badly about it, that is a sign that your action took you off the beaten path and made you question it from the point of view of regular thinking, which is herd morality.
Bataille faces what he would like to repress. In doing so, he drives himself mad. But he also feels better for it.
Already, my recent reading of the book "On Nietzsche", by Bataille, has been instructive. There is an intro by an academic, who basically takes the line that Nietzsche's philosophy has an overall consistency that can be understood. He implies that Bataille's philosophy went against a particular grain, in Nietzsche. Bataille, however, argues in the same book that Nietzsche is not, overall, consistent with himself. Rather, he says, the overman type is someone who is "mentally confused, but with an undeniably vigorous constitution". Bataille sees Nietzsche and himself in that way. They are confused because they don't accept the dominant mores. Reality is not as clear to them as to those like the academic who introduces the text -- who sees everything clearly, but also sees clarity where there isn't any. That is, he sees logical consistency in Nietzsche when there isn't any, because when one's mind explodes and one looks at the pieces, one has to be honest and say that the pieces of anyone's mind do not automatically cohere, not least of a mind that has exploded.
Sometimes we do something that we think might have been an example of our bad judgment, because the outcome was mixed or even bad -- but looking at it from the point of view of the Bataille/Nietzsche nexus, that was a pure act of your individuality. All the more so if you feel badly about it, that is a sign that your action took you off the beaten path and made you question it from the point of view of regular thinking, which is herd morality.
Bataille faces what he would like to repress. In doing so, he drives himself mad. But he also feels better for it.
Already, my recent reading of the book "On Nietzsche", by Bataille, has been instructive. There is an intro by an academic, who basically takes the line that Nietzsche's philosophy has an overall consistency that can be understood. He implies that Bataille's philosophy went against a particular grain, in Nietzsche. Bataille, however, argues in the same book that Nietzsche is not, overall, consistent with himself. Rather, he says, the overman type is someone who is "mentally confused, but with an undeniably vigorous constitution". Bataille sees Nietzsche and himself in that way. They are confused because they don't accept the dominant mores. Reality is not as clear to them as to those like the academic who introduces the text -- who sees everything clearly, but also sees clarity where there isn't any. That is, he sees logical consistency in Nietzsche when there isn't any, because when one's mind explodes and one looks at the pieces, one has to be honest and say that the pieces of anyone's mind do not automatically cohere, not least of a mind that has exploded.
Sunday 3 February 2013
Saturday 2 February 2013
Friday 1 February 2013
Bataille, identity politics and the psychology of "evil"
"Evil" is a paradox. Those who try to transcend human reality can themselves become evil-doers in subtle, but devastating ways -- without realizing it.
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