Limited, Inc.
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Friday, October 11, 2024
Du Bellay meets Hank Williams Sr. in the Coliseum
Wednesday, October 09, 2024
Notes on haunting and being haunted
In the world of epiphenomena, the haunt is king.
Tuesday, October 08, 2024
Stupid apocalyspo time: and the winner is the Italian fascist! Applause applause!
For those who think we are living in normal times, I present, as countering evidence, the Atlantic Council. This money suck (it gets a million from the British government) consists of cast-offs from the great anti-communist crusade. The lounge lizards of the Tory party, and others of that sort. So, it makes sense, as we go through the stupid Apocalypse, that the Atlantic Council would give its Global Citizen award to their fave fascist, Giorgia Meloni, and that she would have Elon Musk as her besty at the ceremony, forking over the trophy. Lina Wertmuller was right in the Seven Beauties: Fascism won't be understood if you don't see it as comedy. A comedy drenched in blood. The blood drenching is, of course, all around us. So, in honor of the Meloni award, this song from the beginning of Seven Beauties. One of the greatest openings of a movie ever. They should def played it before Meloni came on stage. Oh yeah! For those who want to look up the words to Quelli che, here they are.
The ones who say follow me to success/ but kill me if I fail, so to speak/ oh yeah
The ones who say, you know what I mean/oh yeah
Monday, October 07, 2024
one year: October 7, 2024
The commemoration of the Hamas attack on October 7 has been an exhibition of hollow and disgraceful rhetoric, which probes neither the causes and circumstances of the murder of 1,189 Israelis nor the bloody and criminal consequences. The government of Israel is, astonishingly, unchanged. The murder of more than 40,000 Gazans with weapons supplied by the U.S. is unmentioned. The false image of Jewish unity - when it is Jewish groups like Jewish Voices for Peace who have been most prominent in protesting the massacre - is tossed out there as the prevarication of the day. The expansion of the war, via terror tactics, in Lebanon (it is casually mentioned that 2,000 people in Lebanon have already died, but you can bet their will be no anniversary in the news for their deaths) is treated as an understandable gesture, a little irrational, but nothing to withhold bomb shipments over. Discussion here is a hollow mockery. This October 7, 2024, those murdered Israelis are being used in the most unholy way to justify war crimes committed by the very government that utterly failed them. We've seen this before - of course. On 9/11, the US government showed its complete incompetence by failing to stop a much signalled attack staged by a buncha college dropouts and rednecks from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, then seized on its failure to fail on a much larger scale.
An event that taught the powers that be absolutely nothing.
How should the NYT, Le Monde, etc., have commemorated the murdered souls of the victims of October 7? By shutting up. By publishing column inch by column inch a blacked out text. By an act of shame - for the news medias in the West have systematically overlooked the fascist tendencies, the irredentism, the corruption, of a government who has put a statement of clear apartheid in the Israeli constitution.
Hamas murdered those people. Israel's government was the silent accessory. And the murdered tens of thousands of Gazans will weight like a nightmare on the state of Israel for decades to come. But lets all forget that with fake mourning.
It is a heartbreaking one year. And it is getting worse.
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
The ethnostate on the downward path: Israel
The Netanyahu government seems determined to make Israel a major power or destroy it. It is a crazy ambition. And a logical one. Every ethnostate goes irredentist - following an almost Freudian arc - where the Id goes, the ego follows. In this case, the ID is majorly armed, and doesn't hesitate to drop a two thousand pound bomb on the capital of a neighboring state. The ethnostate is best tamed internally, by the development of a theoretically egalitarian, non-ethnic or religious constitution. This has not happened in Israel. Will it? this is where the West's abetting of Israel has damaged not only thousands of murdered Gazans, not only hundred of murdered Lebanese, but, as well, Israel's future chances of survival. Israel had its moment of peace with its neighbors, and could have used that moment to seriously return to the 1967 borders that were internationally recognized - but it has used it, instead, to abet a class of furious nationalists, who think nothing of stealing and killing Palestinians due to a mystical "right". Meanwhile, the Israeli right's alliance with evangelicals is paying off, for the latter. This is the show they've paid for: the Armaggedon of the conversion of the Jews.
Monday, September 30, 2024
Is laughter allowed in utopia?
So I thought: time to read Archaeologies of the Future. The book that is generally considered a turning point in … in the general consideration, the career, of Fredric Jameson as writer and critic. The turn to science fiction.
Jameson’s approach is through the utopian. My approach to science fiction is through the more marginal science fiction texts, like Calvino’s Cosmicomics and Benjamin Labatut’s When we cease to Understand the World and The Maniac. In Calvino’s case, the Utopian is derived, I think from Nietzsche – specifically, the Nietzsche of The Gay Science, the first book of which opens with the harshest summary of the “truth” of the science of man – that the individual is nothing, the species all – which is a reprise of a certain nineteenth century interpretation of Darwin – and then runs with that dictum like it was a Marx brothers routine. Nietzsche deals with a dialectic that every person must, once in their lives, stumble upon: the amazing difference between one’s non-importance, one’s absolute nullity in the universe, and one’s importance to one thing in that universe: oneself. Dialectic, or comedy routine? This is Nietzsche standup in that first mini-essay, which asks whether there is a future for laughter, a utopian future for laughter, even, against the utopian impulse. Laughter, here, is not an argument – it is a tabooed event, that which, in the absolute, as it is conceived by the moralist, cannot be allowed to have a future, or even a present:
“That drive, which rules in the most superior and most common people alike, the drive of preserving the species, breaks out from time to time as reason and the passion of the mind; it then goes about in a glorious entourage of reasons will, with every violence, make us forget that it is fundamentally drive, instinct, foolishness, groundlessness. Life must be loved, then! Man must care for his neightbor, then. And we will call them musts and thens, even in the future! Thereby that which is necessary and forever and happens by itself, from now on will appear as directed towards a goal, and will illuminate men as reason and the last commandment – for this is what the ethical teachers represent, as the teachers of the goal of existence. And thus they invent a second and other existence and elevate by means of their new mechanics this old common existence, unhinge it from its common hinges. Yes – and the teacher will absolutely not permit us to laugh about existence, or even, and also, about ourselves – nor about him; for him, One is always One, something first and last and enormous, for him there is no type, no sum, no nothings.”
Benjamin Labutet’s When we cease to understand the world was published a decade after Jameson’s book. Some might hesitate to call it science fiction – rather, it is fiction about real scientists. But I think it is in the vein that goes back to Swift’s Island of Laputa, and really to Aristophanes cloud cuckoo land, and is part of the Jameson’s plat, his vision of science fiction. While Calvino’s plunges into the science as a sort of Dada project, with Nietzschian references. For instance, this, from the story, The Meteorites:
“According to the most recent theories, the Earth was originally a tiny, cold body which later increased in size through the incorporation of meteorites and meteor dust.
At first we were under the illusion that we could keep it clean – old Qfwfq said – since it was really small and you could sweep it and dust it every day. Of course a lot of stuff did come down: in fact you would have thought that the Earth had no other purpose in its orbiting but to gather up all the dust and rubbish hovering in space. Now it’s different, there’s the atmosphere; you look at the sky and say: ‘Oh, how clear it is, how pure!’ But you should have seen what landed on us when the planet bumped into one of those meteor storms in the course of its orbit and could not get out. It was a powder white as mothballs, which deposited itself in tiny granules, and sometimes in bigger, crystalline splinters, as though a glass lampshade had crashed down from the sky, and in the middle of it you could also find biggish pebbles, scattered bits from other planetary systems, pear cores, taps, Ionic capitals, back numbers of the Herald Tribune and Paese sera: everyone knows that universes come and go, but it’s always the same stuff that goes round.”
Sunday, September 29, 2024
flood
The destruction of the old world, said the preachers after the New World was discovered, was accomplished and marked by the Flood – the universal flood. Jonathan Edwards even hazarded the interpretation that man, before the flood, subsisted only on herbs of the field. Only after the flood did God allow a further ferocity:
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