autonomystic

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“'The beginning of the slaves' revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying 'yes' to itself, slave morality says 'no' on principle to everything that is 'outside', other', 'non-self’: and this 'no' is its creative deed. This reversal of the evaluating glance—this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself—is a feature of ressentiment: in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all,—its action is basically a reaction. The opposite is the case with the noble method of valuation: this acts and grows spontaneously, seeking out its opposite only so that it can say 'yes' to itself even more thankfully and exultantly,—its negative concept 'low', ‘common', 'bad' is only a pale contrast created after the event compared to its positive basic concept, saturated with life and passion, ‘we the noble, the good, the beautiful and the happy!' When the noble method of valuation makes a mistake and sins against reality, this happens in relation to the sphere with which it is not sufficiently familiar, a true knowledge of which, indeed, it rigidly resists: in some circumstances, it misjudges the sphere it despises, that of the common man, the rabble; on the other hand, we should bear in mind that the distortion which results from the feeling of contempt, disdain and superciliousness, always assuming that the image of the despised person is distorted, remains far behind the distortion with which the entrenched hatred and revenge of the powerless man attacks his opponent—in effigy of course. Indeed, contempt has too much negligence, nonchalance, complacency and impatience, even too much personal cheerfulness mixed into it, for it to be in a position to transform its object into a real caricature and monster.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, “First Essay: ‘Good and Evil,’ ‘Good and Bad,’” On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)

"We said in our introduction that man was an affirmation. We shall never stop repeating it. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a negation. No to man’s contempt. No to the indignity of man. To the exploitation of man. To the massacre of what is most human in man: freedom. Man’s behavior is not only reactional. And there is always ressentiment in reaction. Nietzsche had already said it in The Will to Power. To induce man to be actional, by maintaining in his circularity the respect of the fundamental values that make the world human, that is the task of utmost urgency for he who, after careful reflection, prepares to act."

—Frantz Fanon, "The Black Man and Recognition," Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

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“Exceptionally gifted as a pedagogue, Kracauer made Kant come alive for me. Under his guidance I experienced the work from the beginning not as mere epistemology, not as an analysis of the conditions of scientifically valid judgments, but as a kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read, with the vague expectation that in doing so one could acquire something of truth itself. If in my later reading of traditional philosophical texts I was not so much impressed by their unity and systematic consistency as I was concerned with the play of forces at work under the surface of every closed doctrine and viewed the codified philosophies as force fields in each case, it was certainly Kracauer who impelled me to do so. As he presented it to me, Kant's critical philosophy was not simply a system of transcendental idealism. Rather, he showed me how the objective-ontological and subjective-idealist moments warred within it, how the more eloquent passages in the work are the wounds this conflict has left in the theory. From a certain point of view, the fissures and flaws in a philosophy are more essential to it than the continuity of its meaning, which most philosophies emphasize of their own accord.”

Theodor Adorno, The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer

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It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

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Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 61. Court of Appeal:

Nietzsche in The Antichrist voiced the strongest argument not merely against theology but against metaphysics, that hope is mistaken for truth; that the impossibility of living happily, or even living at all, without the thought of an absolute, does not vouch for the legitimacy of that thought. He refutes the Christian 'proof by efficacy,' that faith is true because it brings felicity. For "could happiness - or more technically speaking, pleasure - ever be a proof of truth? So far from this, it almost proves the converse, at any rate it gives the strongest grounds for suspecting 'truth' whenever feelings of pleasure have had a say in the matter. The proof of pleasure is proof of: pleasure - nothing more; why in the world should true judgments cause more enjoyment than false ones and, in accordance with a preordained harmony, necessarily bring pleasant feelings in their train?" (Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ). But Nietzsche himself taught amor fati: thou shalt love thy fate. This, he says in the Epilogue to the Twilight of the Idols, was his innermost nature. We might well ask whether we have more reason to love what happens to us, to affirm what is because it is, than to believe true what we hope. Is it not the same false inference that leads from the existence of stubborn facts to their erection as the highest value, as he criticizes in the leap from hope to truth? If he consigns "happiness through an idée fixe" to the lunatic asylum, the origin of amor fati might be sought in a prison. Love of stone walls and barred windows is the last resort of someone who sees and has nothing else to love. Both are cases of the same ignominious adaptation which, in order to endure the world's horror, attributes reality to wishes and meaning to senseless compulsion. No less than in the credo quia absurdum, resignation bows down in the amor fati, the glorification of the absurdest of all things, before the powers that be. In the end hope, wrested from reality by negating it, is the only form in which truth appears. Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable, and it is the cardinal untruth, having recognized existence to be bad, to present it as truth simply because it has been recognized. Here, rather than in the opposite, lies the crime of theology that Nietzsche arraigned without ever reaching the final court. In one of the most powerful passages of his critique he charges Christianity with mythology: "The guilt sacrifice, in its most repulsive and most barbaric form: the sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What appalling paganism!" Nothing other, however, is love of fate, the absolute sanctioning of an infinity of such sacrifice. Myth debars Nietzsche's critique of myth from truth.

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lowkey think a lot of us Asians who are so attached to the cultural Christianity idea as like a definitive rejection of atheism—-as though we don’t have strong traditions of rejection of religion & it’s consequences—-have, for all our outrage, fully bought into the Orientalist idea of us (or agreed with it out of our own traditions) and can’t separate our very existence from our religious identity. what would we have to be proud of if we abandon spirituality? sanatan, the creative being is perennial, right? we’ve always been like this, how dare you. “we have nothing else”, and you’re so wrong it’s sad.

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ok. so. baby's first moral philosophy in war. moral consequentialism apparently demands not fighting any war where you don’t have as many weapons as the other side. but first of all that denies like? actual history especially because we have a history of so called unwinnable wars where under resourced sides beat more powerful ones, specifically in anti colonial contexts vietnam, algeria etc. there is a whole philosophy and history of tactics for the underdog which even dilettantes like me know. like you can do a careful analysis of palestinian firepower and conclude that now was not the right time, but you certainly cannot conclude that the time for palestine is never. if you choose to only fight when you can match in conventional firepower, you also lose the opportunity to economically weaken the powerful state. holding fire till you believe you can win every objective is a very short termist view. war is a long theater.

not all people who recognise the value of anti colonial liberation movements do it bc they're idealists who valorise the power of doing the right thing. conceding the possibility of winning before trying to win is conceding that the powerful only get more powerful and we should just leave them to it. sadly for you nietschzean freaks, history proved you false. why don't you advocate for the rights of kings?

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Windom Earle: Garland, what do you fear most… in the world? Major Briggs: The possibility that love is not enough.

The Shining (1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992, dir. David Lynch)

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"Freedom as freedom from natural necessity" is actually a pretty intuitive conception. On the reading that sees this as implicitly saying that freedom is absolute freedom from natural necessity, this is of course absurd; no conception of political freedom can have any traction that makes the only normatively acceptable state one in which we're all empirically free from the laws of nature. This could only be a tragic theory of life, not politics.

But it's possible to be more or less constrained by natural necessity by being more or less capable of pursuing endorsed plans and acting according to endorsed principles. This is just the Spinozist conception of freedom. And in a sense it's literally cope, because you're still determined to endorse what you endorse, and it's just a matter of being appropriately harmonized with your determining factors. But that's all you can have unless you believe in libertarian free will.

But it doesn't have to just be cope, because we can also become more or less capable of pursuing a greater diversity of plans and following a greater diversity of principles by developing greater power (this is still Spinozist). And the institutions of social reproduction can empower and disempower individuals within them to greater and lesser degrees. The modern condition of "having to earn a living" can be understood as this sort of reduced state of power, and thus a reduced state of freedom, insofar as one is subject to the arbitrary will of something external to oneself. Especially since the problem of "having to earn a living" is not just that one must exert effort in order to survive (shocking!), but the desperate and servile way one has to chase after, and mold oneself to, the shifting array of desires the wage represents.

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The fact is, from the moment that we are place within the framework of Oedipus — from the moment we are measured in terms of Oedipus — the cards are stacked against us, and the only real relationship, that of production, has been done away with. The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon buried under a new brand of idealism: a classical theater was substituted for the unconscious as a factory; representation was substituted for the units of the unconscious; and that was capable of nothing but expressing itself — in myth, tragedy, dreams — was substituted for the productive unconscious.

— The Desiring Machines: A Materialist Psychiatry, in, Anti-Oedipus, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

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"A Thousand Plateaus" (1980), Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

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“The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself. What more is this culture waiting for? And even if countless people still have time to wait, is it conceivable that what happened in Europe will have no consequences, that the quantity of victims will not be transformed into a new quality of society at large, barbarism? As long as blow is followed by counter-blow, catastrophe is perpetuated. One need only think of revenge for the murdered. If as many of the others are killed, horror will be institutionalized and the pre-capitalist pattern of vendettas, confined from time immemorial to remote mountainous regions, will be re-introduced in extended form, with whole nations as the sub-jectless subjects. If, however, the dead are not avenged and mercy is exercised, Fascism will despite everything get away with its victory scot-free, and, having once been shown so easy, will be continued elsewhere. The logic of history is as destructive as the people that it brings to prominence: wherever its momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity. Normality is death.”

Adorno, ‘Out of the firing-line’ (1944) from Minima Moralia

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Apparently both "feudalism" and "capitalism" are etymologically related to cattle.

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“After men persuaded themselves, that everything which is created is created for their sake, they were bound to consider as the chief quality in everything that which is most useful to themselves, and to account those things the best of all which have the most beneficial effect on mankind. Further, they were bound to form abstract notions for the explanation of the nature of things, such as goodness, badness, order, confusion, warmth, cold, beauty, deformity, and so on; and from the belief that they are free agents arose the further notions praise and blame, sin and merit.”

— Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, Part I: “Concerning God,“ Appendix, translated by R.H.M. Elwes (1883)

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Ulrike Meinhof, b. October 7, 1934

“That is where we come from: from the isolation of the suburban home, the desolate concreted public housing, the cellprisons, asylums and special prison sections. We come to the guerrilla organization brain-washed through the media, consumerism, physical punishment and the ideology of non-violence; from depression, sickness, declassification, insult and humiliation of the individual, of all exploited people under imperialism. Eventually we perceive the misery of each of us as constituting the necessity of liberation from imperialism, the necessity of anti-imperialist struggle. We understand there is nothing to lose by destroying this system through armed struggle, but everything to win: our collective liberation, life, humanity, identity.”

~ Excerpted in Semiotext(e), Hatred of Capitalism (2001)

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Gilles Deleuze

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"Man is the only animal that kills its kind obstinately and furiously[...] But man is also the only one troubled to the point of absolute laceration by the death of his kind."

—Georges Bataille, "Notes for a Film" (1952-1953), The Cradle of Humanity

"HORKHEIMER: I do not believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive importance. ADORNO: That is connected with rationality. Human beings do things in a far more terrible way than animals, but the idea that things might be otherwise is one that has occurred only to humans."

—Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Idea of Humanity" (13 March 1956), Towards a New Manifesto

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Metaphysicians are frequently only more far-sighted or less timid positivists. Is Spengler really the metaphysician he and his enemies consider him? If one remains on a formalistic level and considers the predominance of conceptualization over empirical content, the difficulty or impossibility of verification, and the crudely irrational supporting concepts of his epistemology, he is. If, however, one examines the substance of these concepts, one is always led to the desiderata of positivism, in particular, to the cult of the ‘fact’. Spengler never misses an opportunity to defame the truth, whatever it may be, and to glorify that which simply is what it is and nothing else, that which needs only to be registered and accepted. "...But in historical reality there are no ideals; there are only facts. There is no causation, no justice, no equity, no goal; there are only facts. Anyone who does not understand this may write books about politics, but he should not meddle in politics itself."

Spengler turns an essentially critical insight – that truth has been impotent in all previous history, that the merely existent has tyrannized all attempts by consciousness to break out of its sphere of power – unobtrusively into a justification of the merely existent. The idea that something which exists, which has power, and which perpetuates itself could nevertheless be wrong never occurs to him; or, rather, he convulsively forbids himself and others to think such thoughts. He is overcome with rage when he hears the voice of impotence, and yet all he can say against it is that it is powerless now and forever. Hegel’s theory that what is real is rational degenerates to a caricature.

[...]

Spengler identifies with power, but the soothsaying aspect of his theory reveals the impotence of identification. He is as sure of his case as is the hangman after the verdict has been pronounced. His historical-philosophical world-formula immortalizes his own impotence no less than that of the others.

Perhaps this characterization of Spengler’s mode of thought allows some more fundamental critical considerations.

His metaphysics is positivist in its resignation to what is so and not otherwise, in its elimination of the category of potentiality, and in its hatred of all thought that takes the possible seriously in its opposition to the actual.

Adorno, Spengler After the Decline