#Nietzsche's theory of Art

[anglerflsh]

can you believe he's a history major

[penhive]

Applying Nietzsche’s Will to Power

It is the philosopher Nietzsche who brought out the theory of will to power. Basically it’s the power to use language to satisfy our innermost desires and wishes. Through metaphors language becomes a vehicle for disseminating our wants and desires.

Here I am combining Christian apologetics and Nietzsche’s will to power. I have coined two new words and they are: Writefermation (write and affirmation) and writeualization (write and visualization). Words become metaphoric signs to transcend our thoughts into desired realities.

For General Wishes

By touching the Robes of Jesus ( a woman who had bleeding touched the robes of Jesus and was healed), with a mustard seed of faith (Jesus said if you have faith as small as mustard seed and tell the mountain to move, it will)  with Hagar’s cry of distress (Hagar the maid of Abraham was banished to the desert and she cried out to God for help and God answered her prayers), with Job’s restoration (After a harrowing experience with the Devil, God restored Job), with Habakkuk’s vision to write (Habakkuk wrote down all his visions)

For Financial Wishes

With your blood and grace open up the barren financial womb of Sarah for me (Sarah the wife of Abraham conceived very late), part the blocked financial Red Sea for me (God parted the Red Sea for the Israelites to escape from the Egyptians), serve me the financial wine at the wedding at Cana for me (God turned water into wine at the wedding at Cana), break the blocked financial wall of Jericho for me (The Israelites marched around the wall of Jericho and it fell), help me cast your miracle net with my belief onto the windfall bonanzas side of the sea (the disciples of Jesus were fishing all night but in vain and then Jesus commanded them to cast their nets onto the other side of the sea and they were able to haul a rich catch.)

[my-fancy-hat]

Do you have any favourite books? When did you get into drawing art? And lastly, would you rather eat sushi or gyoza?

hi! aw sadly i'm not very culturized in books as i'd like to admit, i have a readlist but i've always been more into movies, so i just read a bit of everything but nothing concrete. what i read the most are essays and informative books, but i used to like a lot spinoza and schopenhauer's, and jane eyre!

about art, it has always been a close thing to me. my whole family are artists in some kind of way, either painters, musicians, writers, tailors/designers for ex, so it came naturally to me to start drawing at a very young age, encouraged by my mom. i started with graphite and oil painting self-taught, i even won some local awards for it, but i ended up putting it aside for years because i didn't have inspiration to do anything related, it became boring to me. i started drawing again to try digital and i'm vibing with it so far, i've (re)learned a lot lol

and sushi or gyoza... raw fish creeps me out tbh tho i'm willing to try it someday! but i choose gyoza bc it looks like empanadas de queso

[vixen-academia]

Free MIT online courses that sound interesting

Arts & Literature

Introduction to World Music

Reading Fiction

Literary Interpretation: Virginia Woolf's Shakespeare

Introduction to Photography

Foundations of Western Culture II: Renaissance to Modernity

Studies in Poetry - Briths Poetry and the Sciences of the Mind

Studies in Literary History: Modernism: From Nietzsche to Fellini

Screen Women: Body Narratives in Popular American Film

Studies in Poetry: "What's the Use of Beauty"

Queer Cinema and Visual Culture

Monteverdi to Mozart: 1600 - 1800

Writing and Experience: Reading and Writing Autobiography

Advanced Topics in Hispanic Literature and Film: The Films of Luis Buñel

Major Authors: Rewriting Genesis: "Paradise Lost" and Twentieth-Century Fantasy

Arthurian Literature and Celtic Colonization

Contemporary Literature: Britsh Novel Now

Studies in Poetry: 20th Century Irish Poetry: The Shadow of W. B. Yeats

Writing About Literature: Writing About Love

Introduction to European and Latin American Fiction: Great Books On The Page and On The Screen

Popular Culture and Narrative: Use and Abuse of the Fairy Tale

Victorian Literature and Culture

Reading Poetry

English Renaissance Drama: Theatre and Society in the Age of Shakespeare

Introduction to Fiction

International Woman's Voice

Major Authors: Oscar Wilde and the "90's"

Prizewinners: Nobelistas

American Authors: American Women Authors

Shakespeare, Film and Media

Japanese Literature and Cinema

Woman's Novels: A Weekly Book Club

Classics of Chinese Literature

Major English Novels

Topics in South Asia Literature and Culture

Introduction to Literary Theory

History & Social Studies

American Classics

The Middle East in the 20th Century

Africa and the Politics of Knowledge

The Rise of Modern Science

European Imperialism in the 19th and 20th Century

Philosophy of Love

Human Rights: At Home and Abroad

The Nature of Creativity

Introduction to Comparative Politics

Riots, Rebellions, Revolutions

Introduction to the History of Technology

Ancient Philosophy

Youth Political Participation

[dearorpheus]

hello, your blog's vibes are absolutely impeccable! I was wondering if you could recommend me some nonfiction reading on eroticism, religion or fear? I'd love to read about any of these topics, but I never really know where to start looking for good theory books or essays, so I usually end up reading fiction instead. any nonfiction recs would be deeply appreciated (and on other topics too if you have particular favorites). have a nice day!

hello! thank you for the kind words♡

hm! some reading might be: - Erotism: Death and Sensuality + Visions of Excess, Bataille - Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs, Deleuze - The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography, Angela Carter - Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose, Leigh Cowart - Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson - A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes - Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde - A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953 - Foucault's Histor[ies] of Sexuality - Being and Nothingness, Sartre - The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson - Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism, Romana Byrne - Pleasure Principles: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado - "The Aesthetics of Fear", Joyce Carol Oates - Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing, Isabel Cristina Pinedo - "On Fear", Mary Ruefle - "In Search of Fear", Philippe Petit - Female Masochism in Film: Sexuality, Ethics and Aesthetics, Ruth Mcphee - Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva - Hélène Cixous' Stigmata (i am thinking esp of "Love of the Wolf") - Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis - anything from Caroline Walker Bynum.... Wonderful Blood, Fragmentation and Redemption, Holy Feast and Holy Fast - excerpts of Letter From a Region in my Mind, James Baldwin - Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche (re: Christian morality, death of God) - Waiting for God, Simone Weil - The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus - Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl Jung - "The Genesis of Blame", Anne Enright

do know as well that Lapham's Quarterly has issues dedicated entirely to these subjects you've mentioned: eros, religion, fear ! there's also this wonderful ask from @rotgospels on biblical horror theory

other non-fic i will always rec: - "On Self-Respect", Joan Didion - Illness as Metaphor + Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag - The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Maggie Nelson - "The Laugh of the Medusa", Hélène Cixous - Ways of Seeing, John Berger - The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit - The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry some non-fic things i've read lately: - "Mary Shelley's Obsession with the Cemetery", Bess Lovejoy - "Horror Lives in the Body", Megan Pillow - "The Cruel Myth of the Suffering Artist", Patrick Nathan - "The Rub of Rough Sex", Chelsea G. Summers - "The Lost Art of Memorizing Poetry", Nina Kang - "The problem with English", Mario Saraceni

[ghelgheli]

Stuff I Read In July 2024

bold indicates favourites

Books

Nazi Literature in the Americas, Roberto Bolaño

Antwerp, Roberto Bolaño

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler

In an Abusive State, Kristin Bumiller

Short Fiction

Founding Father, Isaac Asimov

Exile to Hell, Isaac Asimov

Key Item, Isaac Asimov

Queer &c.

Science Fiction Double Feature: Trans Liberation on Twin Earth, B.R. George & R.A. Briggs [link]

King’s Member, Queen’s Body: Transsexual Surgery, Self-Demand Amputation and the Somatechnics of Sovereign Power, Susan Stryker & Nikki Sullivan

Much Ado About Nothing: Unmotivating "Gender Identity", E.M. Hernandez & Rowan Bell [link]

We Are All Nonbinary, Kadji Amin [link]

An Orientalist History of Transmisogyny, Julianna Neuhouser [link]

Where Is My Place in the World? Early Shoujo Manga Portrayals of Lesbianism, Fujimoto Yukari [link]

Alice in Monsterland, Gilles Dauvé [link]

Manchester Medieval Society: Guest Post: ‘Weaponed’ men, impotent men, and ‘not-men’: sex and manhood in Anglo-Saxon England, Chris Monk [link]

Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color, Kimberlé Crenshaw [link]

Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response, Audre Lorde [link]

Palestine

‘I’m bored, so I shoot’: The Israeli army’s approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza, Oren Ziv [link]

We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable. Mark Perlmutter & Feroze Sidhwa [link]

Elements of Anti-Semitism, Jake Romm [link]

Paradoxical Modernity: Pasolini and Israele, Nicola Perugini [link]

Pol/History

Unknowable: Against an Indigenous Anarchist Theory, Ya’iishjááshch’ilí [link]

The Street, the Sponge, and the Ultra, Paul Amar [link]

Camatte: A propos capital, Jacques Camatte [link]

Enslaved Children in Portuguese India, 1550-1760, Patricia Souza de Faria [link]

Kamala Harris’s “American Journey”: Caste, Global Mobility & State Power, Tanvi Kohli [link]

"What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July", Frederick Douglass [link]

Dev Bio

The attention span myth, Maria Panagiotidi [link]

Innateness and Canalization, André Ariew [link]

An evaluation of the concept of innateness, Matteo Mameli & Patrick Bateson [link]

The Vernacular Concept of Innateness, Paul Griffiths & Edouard Machery [link]

Other

Nihei Tsutomu and the Poetics of Space: Notes Toward a Cyberpunk Ecology, Keith Leslie Johnson [link]

Speculative Architectures in Comics, Francesco-Alessio Ursini [link]

In Defence of Critique: Let People Enjoy Not Enjoying Things, Charlie Squire [link]

Nietzsche is Dead, Meredith Hindley [link]

Hegel on the Kant-Laplace Hypothesis and the Moral Postulates, Colin Bodayle [link]

Let's Ride: Art history after Black studies, Huey Copeland, Sampada Aranke, & Faye R. Gleisser [link]

[aloneandforsakenbyfateandbyman]

I hate it when men say “oh women are so boring they have no personality” exsqueeze me u Reddit podcast coomer 4Chan manosphere gymcel bitch?? It’s like they never met an autistic female bc women hate them lol? Meanwhile asperged women can literally deep dive into any conspiracy theory known to man, define incel vocabulary better than incels themselves, analyze the history of political theory from Marx to Friedman, study the complex ideas of everyone from Nietzsche to Evola to Schopenhauer to Guenon, name every 70s B porno ever made, study medieval art and Catholic visual motifs from the renaissance, PLUS we look cute in a miniskirt and winged eyeliner and platform shoes and bonus is we don’t smell like old sweaty socks and have dried coom on our undergarments

[calledbyflowers]

i see how u could like fink that kirby is a pokemon like i can notice hte objective similarities btwn their designs and like how u could oribky assemble kirby out of pokemon parts eyes from sudowoodo and body from jilggpypuff or smthn but like its interesring cuz i can def see how u would think that kirby is a pokemon looking at them side by side but also like it feels wrong to me now as i fink abt it further. liike idk kirby seems too alive to be a pokemon. he has a soul. he stares back at you. he challenges ur gaze in a way a pokemon just doesnt. pokemon r so clearly passive things made to be owned. kirby has an interiority. he is playful curious brave angry hungry sleepy dumb glad to be alive. he wants things. hungry! and ik that objectively pokemon do all these things too but they dont do it in the same spirit. kirby is hungry. the pokemone can only perform hunger for you. a pokemon is just essentially a slave and nothing that it is or does is for itself as an autonomous subjectivity but rather for you. a pokemon is a whimpering disgusting persistent thing that is nothing without you which begs w you pleads w u performs 4 u so fucking obedient theyll die for u without a seocnd through since withotu you there is no them ot begin w. the pokemon stop existing when oyu turn off the game when you deletre the save file. kirby is slepeing and eating and flying and cooking and having misadventures no matter what. kirby is more alive than a pokemon. to make a pokemon like kirby would be to unmake pokemon. what is a pokemon but a "pcoket monster" a monster that is defined entirely in relation to how you can store them and breed them and make them fight each other for your amusement. im not saying pokemon trainers cant b nice im not saying theyre evil for doing this to the pokemon (ik pokemon dont rlly die). aa trianer can be v kiund and considerate and lovely to their pokemon and give them lots of treats and so on. and yet in all this it wil lremain true that as hermann cohen said abt the poor and impoverished of the world in trying to solve the problem of evil without becoming a based gnostic like me the pokemon whines and complains and needs attention and lvove from you so that you may play the role of the savior. a pokemon suffers so that you may save it. everything that a pokem,on is it is for you. kirby meanwhile exists purely and entirely in and with hhimself a self-contained unity of being gradually sucking the outside in as a kind of light-hearted play without malice or forethought. the beings that eat worlds r generally dumb and stupid and happy. the devourers of worlds r bimbos and himbos and thembos one and all and may God strike me down if we will not be saved by them as we once scourged by them in a great revaluation of values what one might call a third way revaluation btwn the one proposed by nietzsche and what he supposed to be the initial revaluations of nietzsche and by third way i mean everybody fink abt urself try tio look hot and pretty and dumb capitalism is the only possible economic system baka no thoguths. head empty. just vibes. nudge theory. tax rebates. cultural pluralism. computers r the future. id cards. id cards. id cards. id cards. id cards. id cards. modern art is a concept btwn space and time

[nicklloydnow]

The Speech of Comrade Jiangqing on the Culture and Arts (c1970s)

“Jiang’s philosophy of heroism seems unusual for the wife of China’s most famous communist. Marxist analysis doesn’t obviously lend itself to individual valorization. But Marx was not Madame Mao’s teacher in these matters. That role fell to Friedrich Nietzsche.

Jiang was hardly the only Nietzschean in the red camp. Mao Zedong himself had been exposed to Nietzsche before Marx. Late Qing reformers had picked up Nietzsche’s ideas as they visited Japan and Germany; the young Mao devoured their work. The archives preserve Mao’s first writing on Nietzsche, scribbled in the margins of Cai Yuanpei’s translation of Friedrich Paulsen’s A System of Ethics. Mao admired the neo-Kantian Paulsen but had an instinctual sympathy with Nietzsche’s view that traditional morality needed to be upended. Only by harnessing powerful, buried forces did Mao see a path toward a new world.

The artists and thinkers of the early Republican period were likewise enthralled by Nietzsche, the rebel philosopher who believed in the power of culture. For those focused on sweeping away the dust of feudal China, his nihilistic attack on tradition and call to overcome slave morality translated well into the post-imperial context. It is no wonder that Nietzsche was idolized by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, who would go on to found the Communist Party.

Even once figures like Chen, Li, and Mao turned left, they continued to absorb Nietzschean ideas. His thinking permeated many of the Bolsheviks, as well as radical Russian intellectuals and artists. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Aleksandr Bogdanov, and Nikolai Bukharin all refer to Nietzsche explicitly or implicitly. Bukharin and Bogdanov, in particular, drew on him enough to be dubbed “Nietzschean Marxists” by scholars. In the words of historian Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Nietzsche was “a vital element of Bolshevism,” animating an “activist, heroic, voluntaristic, mercilessly cruel, and future-oriented interpretation of Marxism.” This line of Soviet cultural revolution intensified under the leadership of Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s: monumental art glorified the proletarian hero. There was even room for the Dionysian excess of the Russian avant-garde, though Stalin eventually turned against it.

Jiang, moving in radical circles in the 1930s, absorbed these ideas. Her study of Nietzsche came through the scholar Lu Xun. Before becoming the patron saint of socialist literature in the People’s Republic of China, Lu was its foremost interpreter, translator, and popularizer of Nietzsche. Jiang idolized him, later declaring that while Mao was her political north star, Lu Xun provided her cultural guidance. While his books had been bowdlerized to remove more provocative texts, Jiang kept an unexpurgated 1938 edition of his collected work on her bookshelf deep into the Cultural Revolution, handbound in twenty volumes.

Lu Xun was a Nietzschean through and through. His reading of ​​Thus Spake Zarathustra in Japan in 1902 changed his worldview completely. In “On Cultural Extremism,” an essay published in 1908, he pointed to the ideals of Nietzsche as the solution to China’s ills—only the will to power of supreme individuals was capable of leading the benighted masses. Jiang would certainly have read “On Satanic Poetry,” which Lu wrote under the stated influences of Nietzsche and Lord Byron. In it, he called for spiritual fighters and savage rebels to destroy the ultrastable system of Chinese ethics. Like Maxim Gorky in Russia, Lu’s political allies downplayed his Nietzschean sympathies after he moved to the left, but they continued to energize his writing, theory, and criticism until his death in 1936.

When the communists took control of China in 1949, Nietzsche was in the bloodstream of the party. His thinking would inform the psychopolitical project of creating the New Socialist Man in the ashes of the old society. When Jiang led her Dionysian artistic assault on the Apollonian state, Nietzsche was with her.

Later, when Jiang sat in Qincheng Prison, her enemies used this lineage against her. In 1977, Cao Boyan and Ji Weilong sought to protect the party’s ideological continuity by condemning the Gang of Four as Nietzscheans who contradicted Maoism. Through 1978 and 1979, articles like Zhang Wen’s “The New Disciples of Nietzschean Philosophy” and Zhang Zhuomin’s “The Will to Power and Social Fascism” attacked the Cultural Revolution as an expression of the will to power. An essay by Dai Wenlin charged Jiang with trying to create a new social fascist model of the Übermensch.

The commentary against Jiang revealed for a moment what most historiography of socialist China has worked to conceal: Nietzsche haunts all of the revolutions that China experienced in the twentieth century.

Jiang’s entry into the practice of cultural struggle began in the early 1960s when Mao found himself sidelined by his own party. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were rising in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward and the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, with pragmatic policies that Jiang saw as unacceptably revisionist. She turned to culture to defend the cause. This was not merely a means to propagate political messages or attack enemies; following Nietzsche, Jiang believed that the world’s existence was justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Following Lu Xun, she also believed that culture could overcome the hegemony of conventional ethics.

(…)

This focus on heroic cadres laboring in the provinces was politically useful, since highlighting prominent leaders could backfire in the event of a later purge. But it was also part of the Maoist endeavor to create a new revolutionary culture among Chinese peasants and workers. In his “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao had previously promoted the use of folk forms and the magnification of heroic traits. Jiang’s application went even further and demanded their complete transformation:

Out of the worker, peasant, and soldier, we must enthusiastically and by any means create heroic images. As Chairman Mao told us, the world represented in art can and should surpass reality. It should be stronger, purer, more perfect, and more idealized. Don’t be limited by real people and events. Stop writing about dead heroes when we are surrounded by living heroes.

Echoing Nietzsche’s division of art from truth, Jiang called for a break from the rules of realism, revolutionary or otherwise. Other Chinese thinkers had critiqued realist ideas with the concept of revolutionary romanticism as the Sino-Soviet split took effect. Jiang outstripped them, calling for heroes that defied reality itself.

(…)

While Jiang personally directed the productions created in this process of aesthetic reorganization, her fellow Gang of Four member Yao Wenyuan later systematized these ideas. He outlined the “Three Prominences” which Jiang and Yao believed all cultural productions should highlight: the prominence of positive characters in a work, the prominence of heroes among the positive characters, and the prominence of the major heroic protagonist among the supporting heroes. Nothing was left to interpretive chance: the protagonist would always be “Red, Bright, and Clear”—accompanied by a literal red glow, projecting an aura of willful positivity, and with an unobscured role and set of virtues. A third principle, “Tall, Mighty, Complete,” set forth that the main hero must physically dominate and appear to tower over surrounding characters with an overpowering presence, free of negative characteristics.

Anti-heroes and navel-gazing introspection about the cause had no place in the revolutionary operas. While these tropes later gained popularity in China and had already become more prominent in Western literature, the apparent “moral complexity” they allowed for only served to diminish the heroic consciousness. They cultivated a suspicion toward the heroic impulse, which became seen as a mask for morally compromised souls as lowly and unworthy as everyone else.

By contrast, Jiang’s insistence on the aesthetic and physical valorization of the hero made them more real than the world they struggled against. They did not fall into the trap of slave morality by letting their enemies define them. Vividly more worthy than those they fought against, they overcame them by sheer force of will. Their noble character also served to accuse those supposed allies with compromised commitments—they were without excuse for failing to live up to the heroic ideal. Again and again in the revolutionary operas, those who join the hero’s battle end up reflecting their beauty and vitality.

(…)

Jiang did not lack collaborators. The left-wing artists that had driven Chinese culture in the 1930s were given a long leash by a party leadership made up mostly of urban intellectuals. Dance, in particular, had become a refuge for artists and composers. Jiang was uninterested in the numerous modern dance dramas, which included topical productions about the Vietnam War and Patrice Lumumba, and in experiments in adapting folk dance. It was the revolutionary modern ballets that held the most appeal for Jiang. They exemplified high-art elitism. She loved her hardened, beautiful ballerinas and the heroic themes present in ballets like Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl.

As the Cultural Revolution progressed, her guidance saw revolutionary ballets become extensively modified. New pieces were composed or sections removed to push them toward pure heroism and compliance with the “Three Prominences,” “Red, Bright, Clear,” and “Tall, Mighty, Complete.” In her selection of artistic forms, Jiang maintained the standard that what was beautiful should not be debased at the hands of popular instincts. The ballet, opera, and cinema that defined the Cultural Revolution were not vulgar kitsch, unlike much of the literature of the time. Jiang was interested in high art and her speeches and writing gave no consideration as to whether or not these forms would be appropriate for the masses. Yet, they proved popular enough that they are still performed today.

The filmed version of Ode to Yimeng, released in 1975, is the pinnacle of Jiang’s vision for ballet. While it retains a scene from older renditions of the protagonist feeding a wounded partisan from her breast, in the hands of Jiang it is less a fable of feminine sacrifice than of individual ungendered heroism. With Cheng Bojia dancing as the lead, the tall, powerful beauty seems just as prepared to toss the wounded soldier over her shoulder as she is to suckle him. Her knife fight against local goons, charged in earlier versions with fear of the woman being overpowered, becomes slightly surreal as she seems to tower over her opponents while cast in a red glow and moving effortlessly en pointe. The reels were quickly transported around the country. Urban audiences sat in theaters and villagers gathered around projectors under the stars to watch Cheng Bojia as the national embodiment of Jiang’s Nietzschean heroine.

Meeting the technical, artistic, and ideological perfection that Jiang demanded was no easy task. The heroic art Jiang envisioned required her to mobilize the best and brightest. Yu Huiyong, a composer and theorist, became Jiang’s constant companion as she oversaw this program of cultural engineering. He had originally won the right to work on revolutionary opera in a contest held by Jiang in Shanghai in 1965. The contest reflected Jiang’s demand for raw aesthetic ability: twenty composers were charged with creating an original aria inspired by a lyric from Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.

After Yu fell afoul of Jiang’s own atmosphere of persecution—he was attacked both for slavish devotion to Western forms and for failing to support Jiang’s call to add Western instruments to Chinese orchestras—she rehabilitated him. Jiang wasn’t going to be politically pedantic. Working with the right kind of visionaries came first. Those with ability could be forgiven for political transgressions that condemned the less-than-worthy. Drafted into service alongside many of the best artists and musicians, he worked with Jiang to fine-tune her favorite works in a production process similar to the Hollywood studio system.

The revolutionary opera On the Docks became a shared masterpiece between Yu and Jiang. Yu had worked earlier on experiments in combining Chinese and Western instruments and tuning, as in the incorporation of “The Internationale” as a leitmotif in The Red Lantern, and On the Docks would be the perfection of these attempts. This arrangement of Chinese and Western orchestras would eventually become common, but Yu was the first to pull it off. Yu’s compositions, like the choreography for the revolutionary modern ballet, forged something new from the deconstruction of indigenous folk forms and Western high art. The result is considered a triumph of Cultural Revolution art.

Perfection was the rule. When a film version of On the Docks was shot in 1972, it only circulated for a brief time before Jiang’s careful review found deficiencies: the color grading was too pale, robbing her heroes of their red glow, and the cinematography failed to live up to the demands of “Red, Bright, Clear.” A reshoot appeared the following year, using the same performers and crew.

(…)

When her political luck ran out, she refused submission. As one biographer wrote: “She held fast to her moral sovereignty as an individual.” Charged under Article 103 of the Chinese criminal code for committing counter-revolutionary acts that caused grave harm to the state and the people, death was a likely outcome. On the stand, she gave her final performance as the hero in chains, persecuted by the rabble. “I fear nobody,” she thundered. “I am above the law of men and of Heaven!”

In the end, Jiang lived long enough to see what Deng Xiaoping’s cultural bureaucracy did to the program she had created. Reform and Opening Up became an age of individualist ressentiment, rather than cultural affirmation. Envy, persecution, and petty hatreds became the obsessions of new waves of art and film. Writers turned to “scar literature,” detailing their suffering under the Cultural Revolution.

Popular films showed the persecution of intellectuals by the Gang of Four. The victims, unlike the peasant girl in Red Detachment of Women, did not rescue themselves. Instead, they were made pure by their suffering. Artists were encouraged to turn inwards, to find their deepest pain. In Nietzschean terms, it was a full re-embrace of the slave morality that finds moral worth in the negation of health, power, and vitality—traits now associated with the art of the Cultural Revolution. Mobilization for economic development was acceptable to the leadership, but grand visions now risked political conflict. Politically, it was more expedient for artists to brood on the troubles and resentments of daily life.

The theories of Jiang’s reformation, including both the Nietzschean impulse and the orthodox Maoist call for artistic engagement with the masses, were reversed with market-driven mass media. Cinema in this period degenerated into violent pornography; many films made in this period, like the 1988 productions Silver Snake Murders and Obsession, could not be released to overseas markets without extensive cuts by local censorship boards and cannot be screened in China today. Experiments in stream-of-consciousness work, abstract impressionism, and performance art became popular.

Compared with Jiang’s mobilization of the best artists and musicians into large-scale productions with heroic ideological goals, the new era was a managed descent into cultural chaos. The ideal artist was now an entrepreneur that could keep themselves afloat on the seas of the market economy. Locked into private competition, shock and vulgarity were the best ways to inch ahead of one’s rivals. It was not conducive to heroic impulses or high-minded political action.

The “Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution Debates” and “Campaign Against Bourgeois Liberalization” were launched in 1983 and 1986 as attempts to rein in the excesses by restoring guard rails on expression, but reformers allied with Deng ultimately cut these campaigns short. The intellectuals and artists that the party gave space to repudiate the Cultural Revolution kept going right up until the summer of 1989 when China was rocked by nationwide protests.

The years since 1989 have seen an attempt to contain what was unleashed by this cultural free-for-all. This has sometimes involved marketization, banking on the fact that existentialism is not profitable, but also an abortive revival of the Jiang Qing line. The Central Ballet staged Red Detachment of Women for the first time since the Cultural Revolution in 1992. China Central Television still broadcasts new productions of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and the films made under Jiang Qing’s leadership in the 1970s were never actively suppressed.

But it is hard to find the heroic aesthetic of the Cultural Revolution in the official art promoted since 1989. Jiang Qing commanded high art for the masses, without any competition from the market. The newer works merely ape some of the principles.

The worthwhile lesson of Jiang Qing is in her refusal to impose powerlessness and victimhood on her subjects. She refused to sanction what Pierre Bourdieu, invoking Nietzsche, once called a “sociologically mutilated being” as a model of human excellence. Instead, she invited the masses at gunpoint to contemplate beauty and strength. The power of her project can be seen in the transformative chaos of its age. As she learned from Lu Xun, also invoking Nietzsche, the artist must be capable of driving men mad.

The popular audience for Jiang’s elite high art was large and enduring enough that these works were performed long after the appreciation mandated by the Cultural Revolution had ended. Folk culture was not, in practice, displaced; instead, it existed alongside a popular audience for the revolutionary ballets. The goal of Jiang’s art was not to push aside all that came before; it was to absorb and transform it. In her vision, the dominant must not impose ressentiment on the dominated—to do so would be aesthetically disgusting. Jiang’s heroes were personalities to aspire to, not moral battering rams. This vision was accomplished by nurturing individual and collective creativity, pursuing technical perfection, and tolerating the transgression of traditional ethics.

These were Jiang’s lessons for China and artists. The tyranny of irony can be cast off by heroic sincerity. Mythology can become a true ethos. By giving up on victimhood, one gives up on misery. Without the narcissistic compulsion for representation of one’s petty flaws, it is possible to imagine true heroes.

The pinnacles of such art require the same kind of mass mobilization as any other achievement of modern society. As far back as the 1920s, directors like Fritz Lang commanded masses of people and machines with a firm hand to create masterworks of cultural production. But this apparent stiffness shelters the artist’s disruptive impulse. Jiang tolerated the transgressions of once-in-a-lifetime geniuses like Xue Jinghua or Yu Huiyong for a reason. The real crime she did not allow was the aestheticization of petty transgressions into ideals.

Jiang was under no illusions that the average viewer would be directly transformed into a great hero by their aesthetic experience. Her own “Three Prominences” assume that such heroes are few. But by refusing to valorize the sociologically mutilated individual, Jiang swept away the conditioning of powerlessness and victimhood. Her struggle was to inculcate a new heroic consciousness. In her works, the enemy became an adversary against which the heroes test their courage, nobility, and commitment to the cause. Jiang does not allow her villains to produce envy and deforming hatred in her protagonists or her audience. Instead, the fate of the enemy is that they will be forgotten entirely in the glorious finale, swept aside by the unstoppable, superior personalities of the protagonists.

Jiang’s core message, and her alternative to the celebration of victimhood by contemporary cultural orthodoxy, was the power of heroic ideals to make even overwhelming opposition irrelevant. Armed with her culture of self-justifying strength and beauty, her noble-souled heroes cast off any thought of victimhood to pursue their own glorious visions for their own sake.” - Dylan Levi King, “Madame Mao's Nietzschean Revolution”, (Palladium Magazine; 17 March 2023)

[grandhotelabyss]

Opinions on Martyr Made?

I only ever listened to one episode a few years back, the five-hour one on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. I thought it was somewhat entertaining but tendentious and ultimately wrong-headed. I agree in the abstract with his conclusion that Dostoevsky is greater than Nietzsche—and that all the strange affinities and synchronicities between them make them uniquely worthy of a comparative study—but he moralized it essentially via Girard into an argument that Dostoevsky was a better person on Christian grounds, hanging Nietzsche's analysis of ressentiment around his own outcast neck, the un-returned prodigal. That is debatable—much about Dostoevsky surely wasn't so nice, even in the end, and Nietzsche for his part had his own charms and graces—but it is for my purposes irrelevant. No one's life is perfect; judge not, lest ye be judged. I simply think Dostoevsky practiced the higher art form. Dostoevsky did not show more humanity than Nietzsche; rather, the novel includes more humanity than philosophical discourse.

MM's breathy, earnest, thoughtful, and deep-voiced delivery of the Christian moral, however, in keeping with my theory of the podcast as affective environment, suggests an "alternative modernity": what NPR sounds like under fascism. ("Fascist" is the man's semi-self-description.) I'm not a history buff, so I haven't listened to his other material. As for the recent controversy, I didn't pay attention and try to stay away from strenuous arguments about historical events that are really charged allegories for present-day ideological conflicts (this describes all arguments about historical events).

[penhive]

Assorted

Quotes

When men condemn God transforms you into his privilege.

Disappointment is a disease.

While being contended with little celebrate for abundance.

Passion is the colors of feeling.

I am mastering thought by surrendering to it.

Financial famine is a difficult experience in life.

Trusting God is to live by faith.

To achieve you need to fail.

I am not crying over lost opportunities.

A master plan of the heart is a finesse to execute.

I wish that life would be a rainbow.

The search for aesthetic experiences is a longing of the heart.

Satan is a deceptive beast who intrudes into our weakness and makes it liable to sin.

If my plan matches God’s it will be the most beautiful reality.

Philosophy asks questions and art answers them.

Violence and the Word

The word violence in postmodern literature is present and writing begins with the invocation of the pen in violence. However I am taking a Christian apologetic point of view and stating that the word’s meaning in a Christian Philosophical point of view is grace, compassion, mercy, kindness, tolerance, and forgiveness and the word from the Christian apologetic point of view is harmless and nonviolent.

Nietzsche’s Will to Power

Nietzsche’s will to power is self-progress and propagation of the self towards the victorious attainment of meaning. He uses language motifs and metaphors for the philosophy of Will to power. I am re-quoting his philosophy from a Christian apologetic point of view and I make his philosophy into Will to grace and it means not by my means or power but only by the grace of God. The Will to Power is transformed into Will to Grace.

[nickslays05]

The End of Evangelion

Hello again everyone! I have now watched the end of The End of Evangelion and I can definitely say it was an intense and complex anime film that delves deeply into psychological and philosophical themes. It addresses both Japanese societal issues as well as universal ones. The movie serves as an alternate ending to the series Neon Genesis Evangelion, offering a more explicit exploration of the character's internal struggles and the broader implications of their actions. Here is my deeper analysis of this film: One of the prominent issues that was addressed in The End of Evangelion is the sense of isolation and identity crisis, which resonates strongly in Japanese society, particularly among the younger generation. Japan has faced a significant rise in cases of social withdrawal, known as hikikomori, where individuals shut themselves off from society. The protagonist, Shinji Ikari, embodies this sense of isolation and the struggle to find self-worth and connection. His journey through the film mirrors the psychological battles many young people face, both in Japan and globally, as they navigate the pressures of societal expectations and personal identity. On a global scale, the film's exploration of existential dread and the search for meaning in a seemingly indifferent universe speaks to a universal human experience. The apocalyptic imagery and themes of destruction and rebirth reflect broader concerns about environmental degradation, nuclear threats, and the fragility of human civilization. The film challenges viewers to confront their fears and anxieties about the future and the human condition. About assigned readings, the themes of The End of Evangelion align with existentialist philosophy, particularly the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche. The film's portrayal of characters grappling with freedom, choice, and the construction of their meaning echoes existentialist ideas about the human condition. Additionally, the psychological depth of the characters aligns with the concepts explored in Carl Jung's theories of individuation and the collective unconscious.  In conclusion, The End of Evangelion is a powerful film that addresses both specific societal issues in Japan and broader, universal concerns. Its exploration of isolation, identity, and existential dread offers a profound commentary on the human condition, resonating with viewers on a deeply personal level. The film's themes and imagery challenge us to reflect on our own lives and the world around us, making it a timeless and impactful piece of art.

[hospitalterrorizer]

diary278

6/21-22/24

friday - saturday

another day up too late playing video games.

i am not like this mostly, these days at least, it's fun though, it makes me kind of happy i can go here, again, like being younger i guess or something. today fsr there's a free weekend thing going on w/ sony so i have access to the online for a little bit, it's really pleasant seeing all the messages and bloodstains around honestly, it reminds me of when i played dark souls for the first time and got to see all that. idk. really magical stuff, this is really getting at that nostalgia a bit, now that i reflect on it, though it's very different, and definitely not out to recapture anything dark souls had, cuz w/ dark souls it's this journey through levels, this is floatier because of the open world and stuff, the look is also way different, i do miss dark souls' sharpness w/ textures and how metal looked, i still think that and demon's souls could be their best looking engine? idk. bloodborne and elden ring both have really perfect art direction generally so it's not like i dislike how they look, it's just idk, those engines had something weird and special in them, these new games are also weird and special though.

beyond that, the more time i spend w/ the game and the dlc, the more i feel, though i am not totally convinced/able to make it declarative, that the game has some kind of literary theory lodged in it, or all the souls games have philosophy lodged in them, i can't tell how deliberate it ever is, the general nietzschean qualities across all of them, and then the ways they move from that, what else they employ/look at, absorb (digest?) and make use/waste of, make waste the better turn of phrase here (this only means i love what they do more), in terms of history/culture, past(s (plural because multiple + alternate reads on that past within the same context/moment/history staring back on itself)), anyhow with this sense that there's a heavier kind of thought lodged in the games, and the sense of a movement of thought in all of them, from demon's souls being an almost desperately pessimistic thing, to dark souls being more ambivalent and curious about why these things have come to or what enabled them, the manufacturing of morality, the development of the incorrect, what the human "is" in a cluster of ways, humanity against itself, from there most of what comes after is in debt, and squarely this feels like or recalls to me everything i hear/make of the french leftist reads of nietzsche. this isn't to say secretly the games are communist, they are though rather intensely pointed at using thought + strange notions against empire and morality, making explicit in the world colonial/exploitative facts of existence and then making you go through the overturning/transvaluation of things, contending with eternal recurrence in the klossowski sense w/ the gameplay, you go through malady to mania, that kind of thing. anyway that's the way it feels/comes off to me, in a strange way elden ring is the one so far that seems to come closest to pointing at literature, this is hard to think of all examples of, i suppose there are 'none', but what i mean is, the way ritual is employed, the shaky nature of religiosity in the game, what's become of death and whatever, the impossibility of death, this feels it sets one into a bataillean frame almost, where there's excess energies that cannot be wasted, life is eternal + useful, or that is the ideal, that is the disaster you are contending with through much of the game. beyond that however, generally in the game, it seems aware of the need to develop a subhuman for the human, to create the human, and it illustrates that drive in the general cruelty of the broad powers of the land. blah blah blah, anyway in the dlc, it gets really explicit, i feel like, you go to a whole castle level and a huge part of it is this specimen archive zone, where the misshapen/graceless things are hung and displayed, the example is kept and studied! messmer is so oddly and explicitly fascistic a villain, for the series, it's genuinely going out of its way it feels, to make that faction feel intensely evil.

however, i would like to say, i guess for the sake of honesty, that out of all the lanky pale evil villain characters people think are hot, messmer is one of the ones to do it for me. maybe it's the snakes, they make him like, cuter, idk. the cutscene where you see him is really something though, it just made me go, wow, i really really like him. the other characters to do this for me were from dark souls 3, the incest yaoi brothers, where there's weak one hanging on his brother's back and the stronger brother with broken legs drags him around on his back and fights you, and if you kill the stronger brother, the weak one heals him. frustrating fight totally saved by the fact that you know they were made to make you think about them fucking. ds3 is freakishly sexual, i think, maybe. or maybe not. idk. maybe i am telling on myself, elden ring is only slightly less bizarre, on that scale, i think.

any wayyyyyyyyyy, uhmmmm,

thinking about devi mccallion uploading a video about homestuck today and saying her favorite character is andrew hussy because she is also "an ugly blogger who fumbled the bag also." which is a powerful statement. i don't think either of them are ugly, though. hussy just looks like his lips got stung by a bee but it works out for him. some people get away with that look.

here's a song i'm listening to right now:

anyway i really have to sleep, so

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[dreams-of-mutiny]

MORTIMER ADLER’S READING LIST (PART 2)

Reading list from “How To Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler (1972 edition).

Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man

Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws

Voltaire: Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary

Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones

Samuel Johnson: The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

David Hume: Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile, The Social Contract

Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy

Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography

James Boswell: Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: Federalist Papers

Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth

Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History

William Wordsworth: Poems

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma

Carl von Clausewitz: On War

Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love

Lord Byron: Don Juan

Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism

Michael Faraday: Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity

Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology

Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy

Honore de Balzac: Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men; Essays; Journal

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography

Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography

Charles Dickens: Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times

Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience; Walden

Karl Marx: Capital; Communist Manifesto

George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories

Henrik Ibsen: Plays

Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger

William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism

Henry James: The American; ‘The Ambassadors

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power

Jules Henri Poincare: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method

Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces

Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography

Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry

Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas

George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places

Lenin: The State and Revolution

Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past

Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits

Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers

Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics

James Joyce: ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses

Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism

Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle

Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial

Jean Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; The Cancer Ward

Source: mortimer-adlers-reading-list

[realityhop]

The Magic Circle (1886) by J. W. Waterhouse

"Why not woo woo?  The rational stuff hasn't taken us very far.  We are in an incredible time of suffering.  So I think it's time to get a little more woo woo. [...] And I think astrology also is radical in that it turns the power back to the people.  It's not mediated through the priest.  In every single ancient church in Europe, there are zodiac symbols everywhere.  It wasn't until men said, 'You must go through me, not direct knowing of the cosmos' that astrology was banned and made for witches and insane people."

— Jennifer Freed in What’s Your Sign? Astrology's Modern Renaissance (2023)

"Above all, science cannot dispel religion by showing it to be an illusion.  The rationalist philosophy according to which religion is an intellectual error is fundamentally at odds with scientific inquiry into religion as a natural human activity.  Religion may involve the creation of illusions.  But there is nothing in science that says illusion may not be useful, even indispensable, in life."

— John N. Gray, Seven Types of Atheism (2018)

"Twice as many women as men follow astrology, and it seems, to me at least, that there's a large percentage of men who just look down their noses at it."

— Dylan Winton, The Astrology Book for Men: A Guide to Understanding Zodiac Signs, Birth Charts, Horoscopes, and Everything Else Women are Talking About (2022)

"In The Confessions, modelled on Augustine’s, Rousseau says a childhood incident formed his adult sexual tastes.  He is eight, beaten and inadvertently aroused by a woman of thirty.  Since then, his desires have been masochistic: “To fall on my knees before a masterful mistress, to obey her commands, to have to beg for her forgiveness, have been to me the most delicate of pleasures.”  In love, he is passive; women must make the first move.  Rousseau ends the sexual scheme of the great chain of being, where male was sovereign over female. [...] Rousseau’s nature-theory is grounded in sex.  Worshipping nature means worshipping woman.  She is a mysterious superior force."

— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

"When Nietzsche said “supposing truth is a woman, what then?” he may have intuited the mother from whom males cannot really separate, the woman whose loss hurls one into a narcissistic wound that derives from the loss of fusion and omnipotence. [...] The emergence of weakness as a permitted masculine attribute depends upon a man’s integrated awareness that he stands as one among a world of interdependent individuals.  His shame is not to be feared, for it simply includes him in humanity’s lot, which even God had to join if he were to reconcile himself to his failings towards humankind.  Woman can be seen in a new light: rather than seeing the evil succubus, a woman becomes the mother who bears the mystery and misery of life through his seed, as well as providing for his pleasure."

— Mary Ayers, Masculine Shame: From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine (2011)

[fabiansteinhauer]

Was ist eine Krise?

Krise ist, was kreist oder kreischt.

1.

Husserl, ein Zeitgenosse Warburgs, trägt ab 1935 zu Krisen vor und macht daraus eine Altersschrift, eine Art De senectute, nur anders. Die beiden Staatstafeln sind Warburgs Summen und auch Altersschriften, zumindest was seine über dreißigjährige Beschäftigung mit dem Recht betrifft.

Warburg ist immer noch damit beschäftigt, Krisen zu bewältigen, sowohl diejenigen, die ihm eigen als auch diejenigen, die ihm fremd sind. Und so sind beide Tafeln auch als Krisengraphiken lesbar. Krisen zu zeichnen heißt dort zuerst, das Schreiben kreisen oder kreischen zu lassen, im Schreiben zum Beispiel nicht alles auf Schrift oder Sprache oder Bild zu verpflichten, sondern als Choreographie auch ins Begehren, Verkehren und Verzehren, in Krach oder Noise oder ins Rauschen zu lassen - und Warburg verliert darin seine Präzision nicht, wie auch Husserl seine Mitteilungen von Krisen nicht zur Abbruch der Mitteilbarkeit werden lässt.

2.

Krise ist Pathologie, die bringt Warburg in Form und lässt durch die Form Bewegung gehen, u.a. mit seinen Pathosformeln, mit Tabellen und anderen Polobjekten. Warburg zieht zwar nicht auf Tafel 78 Kreise, nicht im geometrischen Sinne, aber auf Tafel 79 (und nutzt schon die ins Bild geratene Architektur der Stanzen im Vatikan, um Bilder elliptisch kreisen zu lassen, also sprung- und schubhaft sowie gehemmt zu bewegen). Damit kreischen die Bilder so, wie die Säuglinge kreischen, also zwar vague und fagierend (zum Verzehren) und doch bestimmt und präzise. Das macht die Graphik wie die Choreographie anfänglich, macht sie kindisch, macht sie in jenem Sinne nietzscheanisch halbgeschrieben, sogar halbgraphisch, der nicht auf das Fragmentarische und nicht auf die Totale zielt, sondern auf Wechselbarkeit. Das Halbgeschriebene und Halbgraphische ist in sein Anderes oder das Übrige übergehbar. Warburg ist nicht Nietzsche, ich will nur auf Affinitäten und Übersetzungen hinweisen.

3.

Wie komm ich gerade darauf? Gabriel de Brito, einer unsere Gäste, hat ein Projekt zu Krisen in den Zwanziger Jahren, in dem Fall zu den Leuten, die am Anfang der kritischen Theorie sich dem Recht widmeten. Weil ich an der Kritischen Theorie Frankfurter Schule Abteilung Benjamin hänge, nicht an der Abteilung Nichtbenjamin, und weil mit die Vermittler der Kritischen Theorie nicht die Frankfurter Institutionen, sondern weil das Alexander Kluge, Bazon Brock und Cornelia Vismann waren, will ich Gabriel de Brito ein bisschen Warburg oder überhaupt ästhetische Praxis unterjubeln.

Darum prepariere ich gerade, was ich unter Krise verstehe. Kurz gesagt: Säuglinge zum Beispiel, die saugen wollen. Oder aber: Warburgs Staatstafeln, zumindest zeigen sie Krise krisenhaft und doch gar nicht so katastrophal oder apokalyptisch, eher alltäglich und als etwas, was nicht nur mitten im Alltag, sondern mitten in der Welt ist und zu ihr gehört, seitdem sie aus den Fugen und auch flüchtig und fügend ist.