#Nietzsche's theory of Art

[anglerflsh]

can you believe he's a history major

[penhive]

Expanding Nietzsche’s theory of art into life

Nietzsche in the birth of tragedy said art is the synthesis of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Apollonian features are melody and harmony and the Dionysian features are rhythm and beat. In this article I want to relate Nietzsche’s theory of art into life.

First of all I want to take a close look at Apollonian features. Melody is the beautification of life.  A melodious person will have dreams serene and soul filled with superhuman aspiration. Melodious person lives a life of meaning and s/he authenticates life’s experience. Melody is the soundness of meaning. Melody is the fruition of life’s existence. Melody is the Nietzsche’s Ubermensch (superman) and Zarathustra. A melodious person is passionate about life. The melodious person has an eloquent personality.  Next I want to speak about harmony. Harmony is the pure joy of experience, a jouissance.  The harmonious person celebrates the meaning of life. Life becomes a vessel of enigmatic joy. Harmony is the celebration of masculinity and feminity.  The harmonious person shuns mediocrity avoids following the herd mentality.  Life is the absence of taboos. A harmonious person views life as a celebration of meaning.

Next I would like to unfold the Dionysian content of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The Dionysian content of Nietzsche’s philosophy is beat and rhythm.  Rhythm is the foreplay of life and beat life’s ecstasy.  Some elements of beat and rhythm are: celebrating the body as an erotic text. The body becomes a text of cathartic passion. Here I would like to mention the Greek mystery religion called Orphic. Orphic religions celebrated the Bacchus of intoxication and sexuality. Sex became the celebration of the body. Again rhythm and beat are for achieving altered states of consciousness by experimenting with drugs. Sex is a drama where love is embraced as a core of meaning. Celebrate the mind: celebrate the body: celebrate life. Being is intoxicated with optimism. The carnal is unleashed in poetic ecstasy. Time becomes a dream, surreal, incandescent, devotional, ecstatic, ceremonial, arcane, and mystical.  

[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

[enjakey]

Physics and Arts

Jake x you | fluff, opposites attract, some smut, students au | smart kink, whimper kink | Jake is a science geek, reader is an academia geek | small drabble

Jake didn’t know how he ended up with someone like you.

For the longest time, he thought he’d end up with someone similar to him. Someone who liked math and physics, could solve numerical problems within seconds- just hand him a pen and paper and he’d prove it to you- and liked music the way he did. He was in a band with his college friends, he played the second guitar and was the lead rapper (whenever it was needed)

But you? You were nothing like him.

But it wasn’t to say you weren’t smart- no, you were so learned, so knowledgeable. Just not in the way Jake was. Because Jake was all about numbers, all about the way he could perceive the world through physics and mathematical theories. He could go on and on about Oppenheimer (he even read his book) and Schrödinger’s cat and about Murphy’s law and about how he wanted to become and space engineer one day. He could ramble about the physics of stars and galaxies and how our universe was infinitely stretching.

You, on the other hand, looked at the world through culture, social institutions and contemporary issues of race, class, gender and religion. You looked at the world through philosophies of Socrates and Nietzsche and whenever you talked about the theory of multiple universes, you looked at like a philosophical question rather than a scientific one.

It was an argument, a debate, you and Jake had been tangled in during many occasions- during breakfast coffees or nights where neither of you could fall asleep.

You liked to write essays, read knowledge heavy books and nitpick at research papers like it was your hobby. Jake hated reading research papers, hated reading books with too many words and hated doing his citations for his essays (and out of frustration, you started doing it for him, afraid he’d get called out for plagiarism).

While you liked to study in silence, Jake loved to listen to r&b music while doing assignments- cracking numbers in his brain like a calculator.

Your mind didn’t work like his, that much was certain. You disagreed on so many topics, looked at life and the world through complete different lenses and saw the future as two different destinations- one as death and the other as success.

Jake really didn’t know how he ended up here with you.

When he was set up with a blind date by a mutual friend- Heeseung, his senior, who thought the pair of you would be a great couple- Jake didn’t know how he came to that conclusion. Because during that date, where you sat across from him in a yellow-lit café surrounded by potted plants and flowers, he could only ever see you as a friend.

And for the longest time, the pair of you did agree to be friends. And that friendship consisted of early morning coffee runs at that very cafe, standing in line together to guess the special of the menu for that morning, talking about your classes from the day prior.

Your conversations consisted of you quoting various theorists across academia and philosophy- because that was pretty much your whole personality- while Jake hid most of himself away and only showed the fun parts, the goofy parts you seemed to enjoy being around so much.

But then, one day, you fixed his grammar while he was speaking and Jake was taken aback. Jake might have been a science geek but the knowing the English language was important to him. You knew that, and corrected his grammar- something about using the past participle in the wrong context. He didn’t know what else he was expecting- you, who spent most of your time writing essays and buried in academic literature, obviously knew the rules and regulations of English better than he did.

But it was finally when Jake actually started to let his interest show- his spanning knowledge on physics theory- did he realise how smart you actually were. Because when he talked about the string theory, you finished a lot of his sentences. And he was stunned that you’d known about it, that you’d once spent a phase in university studying about the physics of the universe, to see if the world could be explained and understood by scientific theory rather than sociological critique.

And you understood both worlds, unlike Jake. You understood the science of living as well as the art of living. And Jake almost envied that about you, that your brain had somehow unlocked crevices that could comprehend things Jake couldn’t fathom.

Because to him, the contemporary world belonged to all the social media scandals and TikTok videos explaining comedic politics and a dying economy.

But to you, it was more than that. It would always mean more than that.

It wasn’t until a night you found yourself laying on his bed that Jake started seeing you differently. Like, physically, actually differently after spending days coming to terms with the fact that he didn’t just find your mind sexy, but you as a whole person too. How did you end up on his bed? You were simply too lazy to leave in the first place, after having stuffed your face with too many bowls of Jake’s perfectly cooked ramen and after arguing over something about the science of manifestations.

Your brain was throbbing from all the times you’d raised your voice to prove a point and he raised his voice to do the same- not that any of it was out of malice. Such conversations were common to you, by that point. It was integral to your friendship with Jake.

Somehow, Jake found himself scooting closer to you, wrinkling the navy blue duvet under him. He hovered over you for only a moment, eyes locking, breath ragged as if he were afraid to you a question- a question of which you knew he’d ask you.

“You’re so pretty,” he whispered under his breath and the words hit your cheek with a warm welcome.

And when you didn’t show any signs of discomfort, when you moved your face closer to his and fluttered your eyes closed, Jake kissed you. It was a kiss long over due and if Heeseung found out, he would brag about introducing you to each other- because, perhaps, he was right. He was right about you being a good couple and he was right about you getting along.

And, fuck, did kissing you feel right, too.

Jake didn’t know how to pull away from you. He just let his hands wander, holding and clutching anything he could get get a grip on- your jaw, your neck, your hair, your waist and finally, your hips.

He was heaving for air- but he kissed you like you were the oxygen he didn’t know was missing. He felt so euphoric, he was sure he’d wake up the next morning more blind than he already was.

In between all your pants, all the moments you refused to part your lips from his, your clothes had somehow (somehow? You knew where this was going) ended up in the floor. And as you ran your hands down his chest, his taut muscles under the tips of your fingers, writhing and desperate, you looked at him through your lashes.

“Why didn’t we do this sooner?”

Jake let out a loud whine as he held your hips harder, feeling his cock twitch at your voice- usually so loud and confident, now teasing and sultry. He loved this change in you, this version of you that only he got to experience.

“Oh, Y/N,” he moaned as he let the tip of his cock slide through your wet folds, hips bucking in desperation. “Fuck.”

That night, he didn’t exactly rail you. He made love to you (the railing would happen later and a lot more throughout your relationship). He whispered all the sweet things that went through his head when you talked about your favourite things, kissed down your neck and chest, sucking on your nipples and the tip of his cock touched your cervix.

As his cock slid in and out of you, careful and calculated in motion to make sure you felt every inch of him, you moaned for him. Well, Jake wasn’t even sure if he could call it a moan- it was high pitched, perhaps a whine, that came in short intervals and sharp breaths.

A whimper, perhaps?

He didn’t know what it was but he loved it- and he planned on hearing it more. It took everything in him to not go feral at the sight of you, at the sounds you made- you looked so breakable under him, so responsive, so weak as you clawed at him, searching for your own high.

As Jake spent more time with you, he realised that those high pitched whines you made didn’t just come from sex. No, you made them in your sleep, when you were tired, when you were yawing or when you were tutting at something you were annoyed at.

There were times when you’d simply collapse on his bed, hugging his pillow and saying something about being too tired to sleep- and you’d let out that sound again, that whine that made his brain snap into two and his body beg for you.

It was hard to keep his hands off you.

Your relationship, now, consisted of a lot of nights just… doing things together. The pair of you liked to solve puzzles- puzzles of all kind, the kind that had Jake scratching his head over numerical patterns and the kind that made you have a hard time visualise a painting. You liked playing games together- like one of those name all fifty states type of games. They were fun and they made you laugh and by the end of it, if Jake couldn’t resist the allure of your mind, he’d rail you against his bed, into his navy blue sheets.

And he introduced you to a lot of music, not the type you heard in mainstream media, the ones that blew up on TikTok. No, the songs he listened to were personal, old and carried history. Your music taste was… really terrible compared to his.

And while he shared music, you shared your love for film. And not the movies type of film, you loved watching film that was critiqued, that transcended generations, the type that one wouldn’t have heart about if they weren’t keeping up with film history like you were. And though, at first, Jake resisted- absolutely hated the idea of spending three hours watching films he’d potentially hate- he succumbed to you. Because even though he hated the films you made him watch, he loved the wonder your expression held while characters unravelled their stories.

Study sessions meant that Jake would be sitting on his bed with a pen and notebook finishing questions from his textbook with earphones feeding soothing music into his ears while you would sit on his bed, laptop perched on your legs, typing away on essays.

The pair of you could have easily just studied in your respective spaces- you back at your own apartment. But you simply didn’t want to- it was more comforting to be right there, a few steps away from each other so you could reach out whenever work became overwhelming.

There were numerous occasions where Jake would simply give up on his work and would slide onto the bed. He’d close your laptop and slot himself between your legs, head buried in your chest while you killed him to sleep, hands buried in his hair. And there were numerous occasions where you would sigh over an essay and pad over to Jake, pulling his chair just enough to give yourself room to straddle him, to wrap your arms around his neck and cling onto him like a koala.

“What would I do without you?” You’d ask sometimes, accepting the fact that Jake was your anchor now- that there was no escaping it, no denying it. He was your rock, your pull and escape from reality.

“Don’t think about you,” Jake would say. “You never have to know,” because he didn’t plan on letting you go- not anytime soon, not ever.

Because he loves your mind too much- he loves you too much. And you were his counterpart, just as he was yours.

Time and time, again and again, the pair of you would prove that physics and arts went hand in hand, just as you and Jake went hand in hand.

[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

[milkfordragons]

So. I made this for a "HANNIBAL UNIVERSITY" but is that even something anyone would be remotely interested?

SYLLABUS: “The Aesthetics of the Abyss”

Foundations in the Architecture of the Self

(Exploring the structures of identity, desire, and consciousness)

1. PSY 101: Masks and Mirrors: The Multiplicity of the Self

- Jung’s Persona, Shadow, and Individuation

- Lacan’s Mirror Stage

- Performance theory (Goffman, Butler)

2. PHI 117: The Abyss Stares Back: Nietzsche, Power, and the Eternal Return

- Apollonian vs. Dionysian

- Master/Slave morality

- Becoming vs. Being

3. ART 203: The Beautiful Grotesque

- Anatomy as aesthetic object

- Baroque excess and sublimation

- Symbolism and the erotic body in art

4. SOC 140: Cults, Cannibalism, and the Rites of Civilization

- Taboos and sacred violence (Girard)

- Civilized savagery

- Fine dining as domination

Descent into Otherness

(Exploring madness, love, transformation, and the divine predator)

5. PSY 207: Erotics of Death and Surrender

- Thanatos and Eros

- Devotion as annihilation

- Erotic obsession and mutual possession

6. REL 221: The God Who Eats: Myth and Sacrifice

- Dionysus, Shiva, and flesh as offering

- Mystical cannibalism in religious traditions

- Transubstantiation as transformation ritual

7. FILM 301: Dreamlogic and the Unreliable Gaze

- Surrealism, horror, and dream sequences

- The use of framing, slowness, and silence

- Symbolic disorientation (Bergman, Żuławski, Tarkovsky)

8. LIT 212: The Romantic Monster

- Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Dracula

- Ambiguity, seduction, and ethical disintegration

- Beauty and horror as lovers

Becoming the Other

(Initiation, merging, and transcendence through the act of surrender)

9. PHI 302: Devouring the Beloved: Love as Transformation

- Bhakti traditions and divine union

- Bataille’s inner experience and erotic limit

- Sufism and the disappearance of self in the Beloved

10. ANTH 351: Rituals of the Hunt

- Predator/prey symbolism

- The gaze as weapon and intimacy

- Shamanic metamorphosis and animal identity

11. ART 377: The Tableau Mort: Staging Death as Art

- Performance art and the aesthetics of stillness

- Francesca Woodman, Joel-Peter Witkin

- Forensics and beauty

[lesb0]

I am enjoying Liquid but I don't see how this is extremely intellectual literature that warrants a "highbrow" warning sticker on that website, it's litfic, it's half memoir, it's honest and sad, it's in LA. Unless people have never read Butler or Said or Nietzsche or Rumi are getting their hands on this, I don't see anyone complaining about it for being too smart as I feared like they will stick to Ali Hazelwood. maybe the word sfumato and Faustian really ARE 'pretentious' and 'super smart' to someone who reads 'books' but not literature. I think this book bridges the gap by being light and silly while casually referring to the theory canon in a very unserious way.

It's enjoyable and fun... the author doesn't wallow in self pity about poorness or navalgaze about her feelings, she just observes things that happen to her and comments internally on the events. like her best friends' rich white girlfriend does an art show about classism, her dead skin collection that she saved and packed to sell as artworks editions, post manipedi. the show implicates the rich girlfriend privileged white woman who leverages her money for Asian/Latina labor, but the artist trained her curator to disclaim "the artist is Asian American" when questioned about it, pretending not to notice that she is clearly 99% European. The same insufferable character claims to be "queer" but of course she doesn't eat pussy. the protagonist described it as claiming otherness without any surface to it which is SUCH a great way to put it.

So she has this deliciously sharp judgey critical tone, but doesn't ever turn it on herself. her self hate and casual hiding of her culture, her being just as fake "queer" as that woman she hates, and there's this stark denial that her resignation and passiveness in the post doc job search is clearly leading her into an inferior lifetime of prostitution, not "dating for a husband", but trading sex for financial security instead of even considering min wage jobs.

In one cruel scene she looks down at a waitress for working to pay her bachelor's degree and going back to college as an adult, which is a hugely impressive accomplishment, and it's crazy that she doesn't realize the waitress works hard for herself and isn't pathetically resorting to fucking rich men and waiting for a proposal. she goes out with a super sweet PA for ice cream and realizes his old sneakers were worn out because he was working class and ghosts him. It's just such a fun read by an author who I would hope to neverrrr cross paths with lol

[breadandlottery]

I love your blog in the best way possible. Informative, deep, and enjoyment filled.

What type of art is Inho into?

Would you say Ilnam is into art as well?

I love your blog. Sorry, if these questions are stupid.

ilysm omg never apologize for asking anything at all ❤️❤️❤️

This question. THIS QUESTION. Phew, ok. *Opens up google doc with all my notes about Inho and the intersection of art and philosophy*

Sorry, this may get a little long.

So we know a bit about Inho’s taste in art from the books in his apartment. He has books on Monet (Impressionism), Van Gogh (Post-Impressionism), Picasso (Cubism), and Magritte (Surrealism). The only actual art he has, though, is the Magritte print, that he has not one but TWO of. I think he has an appreciation for all of these artists/styles, but something about Surrealism speaks to him. Why? Why Magritte? Why The Empire of Light specifically?

I’ve seen varying interpretations of the work, but based on some of Inho’s comments (“think of it as a dream”) and the nods to the Matrix, I’m inclined to believe his interpretation is that it depicts the juxtaposition of dream/illusion and reality. I think Inho is someone who is really grappling with reconciling the world he thought he lived in and the world he experiences after his win and the death of his wife (and reconciling the two versions of himself, the one from before and the one from after). I think he saw Magritte’s Empire of Light and it struck him as a visual representation of what he’d been struggling with. The sky, beautiful and sunny, perfect blue with white fluffy clouds, perhaps that was the illusion, the dream he’d been living? The house, dark and lonely, maybe his idea of the “real” world? 

In combining day and night, the painting kinda asserts that the two can coexist, the dream and the reality. Or, maybe the conscious and subconscious. which brings me to the intersection of art and philosophy…

Because if we look at the four styles of art represented in his collection of books, we can make at least a loose association with different philosophical viewpoints for each. I haven't identified all of the books (yet), but he definitely has some on a few of these represented. 

1. Impressionism →  Empiricism 

Impressionism explores how objects are affected by objective variables: light, angles, movement, and physical perspective. Empiricism as a philosophy requires evidence. It says Reality is objective. 

2. Post-Impressionism → Existentialism (Camus, Nietzsche)

Post-Impressionist art is more subjective. The subjects of these paintings are shaped by external “reality” but also by internal perspective, emotion, and personal interpretations. Similarly, Existentialism focuses on individuality: personal expression, perspective, and creating meaning. “Reality” exists, but is based on how we experience it. Reality is subjective.

3. Cubism → Relativism

Cubism presents a fractured reality, where multiple perspectives shown at once. Relativism rejects the notion of an objective truth or morality. There is no “true” reality. Reality is multiple.

4. Surrealism → Psychoanalysis (Lacan)

Surrealism deals with the coexistence of illusion and reality, many surrealist works have a very dream-like quality. Psychoanalysis is a philosophy that is heavily based in the subconscious and unconscious mind. There is no “true” reality, AND how we experience it relies on our perspective (as with post-impressionism) but also on our unconscious thoughts and desires.  Reality is a dream. ("Think of it as a dream.")

The two books lying flat on Inho’s desk (so presumably the ones he’d most recently been reading) are the Magritte art book and Lacan’s Theory of Desire, which to me telegraphs that he’s in his Surrealism/Psychoanalysis era.

So all this yappity yap to say... I don’t know that the Inho we know, 2021-2025 Inho, really likes art, so much as uses it as a tool to help him try to understand the world. Like I get the impression he’d be very analytical about it, more than he’d be “Oh I fucking love this painting” about it. I also kinda think this approach to art is just a result of his significant trauma, though, and in his prior life, he may have had an actual aesthetic appreciation for art in general, but has lost that, along with so many other aspects of his former self.

(In my non-analytical, completely made-up, headcanon, fic-writing vibe, though, Inho specifically likes the Empire of Light, but in general, prefers Impressionist art, because it's soft and pretty and pastel, like his boyfriend Gihun.) As for Ilnam, I've never really thought about it, but I think, while he may have done the rich people art collecting thing, he never *liked* art. I feel like the kind of person who truly likes/appreciates art isn't the kind of person who'd say "life is no fun because I have everything." If you have everything or if you have very little... there's still new art to discover. New songs to hear. New foods to taste. I don't believe he could have had any real appreciation for something like art outside of its monetary value, or he wouldn't have been so bored he'd have to come up with all this to keep himself entertained.

[maaarine]

in Squid Game 1x02, Jun-ho visits In-ho's (the front man's) room and finds the invite to the game

it's interesting to go back to that scene and see 1) that In-ho seemed to be living like a monk/student, 2) which books the creators of the show decided to put on that man's desk to characterize him

first things first he's a certified fan of surrealist Belgian babe René Magritte

there's a book about him on the desk, which has the painting The Empire of Light on its cover

and there are two replicas of that same painting in the room, one is taped to the wooden panel of the right side of the desk, and the other hangs on the wall behind the desk

guggenheim.org: "With no fantastic element other than the single paradoxical combination of day and night, René Magritte upsets a fundamental organizing premise of life. Sunlight, ordinarily the source of clarity, here causes the confusion and unease traditionally associated with darkness."

other art books in the room: Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, and two about Pablo Picasso (one is on the desk, the other next to the invite box)

so far so good, we love an artsy girlie

now onto the red flags

I immediately spotted Nietzsche's comical moustache on the spine of the yellow book, and yes I'm afraid it's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the übermensch has entered the chat

the orange one is Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, lovely read on an angsty afternoon

between Nietzsche and Salinger we've got Jacques Lacan's Seminar (book 11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis), and there's another one by Lacan next Magritte's, The Theory of Desire — I mean it could be worse, it could be Freud

I couldn't decipher the thin book on the far left but apparently it is Albert Camus's The Stranger, and I feel like I should have guessed that one just based on the vibe we were going for so far — of course there's some Camus in there!

I think on the right of the orange Salinger book there are two notebooks (it's written "campus life" on the spine), because our man likes to write down his own existential musings when he's not busy watching people get slaughtered

and finally there's a set of two books between the notebooks and the massive Van Gogh bible, but alas I can't figure those out

I did google translate the Korean words on the spine: "rose of anger"

the only book in Korean that I could find with that title is by Judith Gould

but when I wiki this Judith Gould, I read that it's apparently a pseudonym for two American gay guys who write romance novels together??

as much as I love and endorse the idea of In-ho reading smut, I feel like I might be missing something here

at first I thought that "rose of anger" would turn out to be Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath but it doesn't seem to be it

anyway I think we can conclude that what those books tell us about the character is that he's a sad and edgy and pretentious motherfucker

and by god I cannot judge him because I've also read Nietzsche and Salinger and Lacan and Camus

as well a book on the semiology of Magritte, one of Van Gogh's letters, and the book Life with Picasso — not to mention that I have a Monet on my wall.......

.....wait

I should send my resume to the squid game, I fit the profile perfectly!

[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]

[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.)

[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

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Axiology

Axiology is the branch of philosophy that studies values, including those of ethics and aesthetics. It focuses on understanding what constitutes "value" and seeks to explore the nature, origins, and criteria of what is considered valuable or worth pursuing in human life. Axiology is often divided into two major fields:

Ethics (Moral Values): Examines questions related to what is morally right or wrong, just or unjust, and the principles by which we make ethical judgments. Ethical axiologists explore theories of what it means to live a good life and the foundational basis of moral duties, obligations, and virtues.

Aesthetics (Aesthetic Values): Concerns itself with the nature of beauty, art, and taste. Aesthetic axiology explores the nature of artistic value, the criteria by which art and beauty are judged, and whether beauty is subjective (dependent on individual experience) or objective (having an inherent quality).

Key Questions in Axiology

Nature of Value: What does it mean for something to have value? Does value exist independently of human perception, or is it a construct of human experience?

Objective vs. Subjective Value: Are values universal and objective, or do they depend on individual or cultural perspectives?

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value: Is something valuable in itself (intrinsic) or only valuable as a means to an end (extrinsic)?

Value Theories in Ethics and Aesthetics: How do we determine what is ethically good, beautiful, or desirable? What is the basis for moral and aesthetic judgments?

Role of Values in Life and Society: How do values shape individual lives, cultures, and societies? How do moral and aesthetic values influence human behavior and social institutions?

Philosophical Perspectives on Axiology

Objectivism in Value Theory: Argues that values exist independently of human beliefs or feelings. For instance, objectivists may hold that there are universal moral truths that apply to all people at all times, or that beauty has inherent qualities regardless of perception.

Subjectivism and Relativism: Maintains that values depend on personal or cultural perspectives. Ethical relativists, for example, believe that moral principles are not absolute but are shaped by cultural or individual differences. Similarly, in aesthetics, beauty might be seen as subjective and varying according to personal or cultural preferences.

Utilitarianism and Consequentialism: Emphasize value in terms of outcomes, such as happiness, utility, or pleasure. For example, in ethics, an act’s value is judged by its capacity to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

Deontological and Virtue Ethics: In ethics, these theories look at the inherent moral value of actions or character traits, rather than their consequences. Deontology values actions based on adherence to duty or moral law, while virtue ethics values character traits like honesty, compassion, and courage.

Aesthetic Theories of Beauty and Art: Some philosophers, like Immanuel Kant, argue that aesthetic judgments have a basis in universal feelings of harmony, while others, like Friedrich Nietzsche, believe that beauty and art derive value from their power to express individuality and challenge norms.

Influence of Axiology

Axiology plays a significant role in shaping our understanding of both personal and societal ideals. For instance, in ethics, it informs discussions on human rights, justice, and morality. In aesthetics, it influences how we interpret and appreciate art, nature, and cultural artifacts. Axiology also intersects with fields like psychology, sociology, and economics, impacting everything from individual well-being to policies around art funding and human welfare.

By clarifying what we value and why, axiology provides insight into human motivation, guiding the ethical frameworks and aesthetic standards by which we live. It helps us question and refine what is worthwhile in life, leading to a deeper understanding of human purpose, fulfillment, and social harmony.

[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).

[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.