candychuckles

Instagram user 'candychuckles'

[Dedicated Friend @Jacksonionoh]

Reading and understanding 2,000 years worth of philosophy just to know why it’s all false.

[jordan pruett @pruett_jordan]

um, actually, "artificial intelligence" is 4000 years old. it was invented in mesopotamia in the bronze age, it's called "writing," and it has been autonomously manipulating humans for evil purposes ever since

[Richard Siken @richardsiken]

@nyushinee If you can point to it, you don't need a word for it. You only need a word for it when it's no longer there.

[Richard Siken @richardsiken]

@nyushinee Because the vocabulary of joy is grunts and moans and the vocabulary of loss is the dictionary.

[borkedsys @borkedsys]

Capitalism is anti-earth by design and anti-human by consequence. A system built on extraction can’t protect the thing it devours.

[Mach0 @Machzero0]

@moultano maybe my favorite page I read this year:

[Ryan Moulton @moultano]

Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists. You're telling me that there's a black ichor under the earth, made from the ancient dead, whose burning can realize all the dreams of man but only at the price of slowly returning the earth to its primordial state?

[RiverGod 💦 @GiverRod]

@moultano That’s because it’s a temporal weapon made of compressed deep time, it possesses its own agency but is indifferent to man

[Yaro @YarosShelter]

@astridwilde @Duderichy they found a way to wash the black gold away from the bodies of ancient dragons, who were sleeping for aeons way down below, without¹ waking them up

¹almost

[Justino Carneiro @katechon22]

This is a good summary of the early Schmitt, but these concepts cannot be applied today without taking into account later developments.

After Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt argued that the classical interstate order of the jus publicum Europaeum was dissolved de jure after World War I with the creation of international institutions such as the League of Nations (and later the UN). The criminalization of the 'war of aggression' and the resulting incapacity to distinguish between enemy and criminal gave rise to what he called a 'global civil war', eroding the boundary between internal and external politics.

With the decline of the political, Schmitt called for the emergence of a new Nomos of the Earth, no longer grounded in states but in land-based Grossräume – great spaces under the leadership of regional powers. His reference point was the early Monroe Doctrine.

But he saw that the growing subjugation of politics to technological governance neutralized all political concepts and made the state an occupied power at the service of global technocracy. This places all legitimate political actors in the position of extralegal insurgents within the global civil war. This condition gives rise to a metapolitical struggle, where the transcendental, metapolitical enmity is not an empirical enmity between friends and enemies, but the enmity between the political and the unpolitical, between the forces of politicization and the forces of depoliticization. In this metapolitical conflict, beyond diversionary partisan politics, political insurgents act as agents of repoliticization against the real hostile powers of globalism and technocracy.

[Chad Crowley @CCrowley100]

Most of the present online discourse around Carl Schmitt is unserious. One hears his name invoked as a talisman of tribalism, as a crude justification for rewarding allies and punishing opponents, or as a mark of sinister association with regimes of the past.

This is, of course, a distortion of both his intent and his significance. Schmitt was one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century, and his “The Concept of the Political” (1932) remains a text that cannot be ignored. To reduce it to the bizarre moral platitudes of contemporary binaries and the obsessions of the “current thing” is asinine.

The aim of “The Concept of the Political” is not to glorify conflict but to defend the reality of politics against utopian aspirations that seek to abolish it altogether. Schmitt regarded such utopianism as the common feature of liberalism, socialism, anarchism, pacifism, and global capitalism. All of these doctrines promise a universal order in which differences are dissolved and conflict is banished. To Schmitt, this is not the overcoming of politics but its denial, a refusal to see that the human condition itself contains the seeds of division.

Schmitt defines the political in its own terms, irreducible to morality, aesthetics, or economics. Each of those domains has its own logic, but politics is distinguished by a criterion unique to itself: the distinction between friend and enemy. This distinction is not personal but collective. It is not the private rivalry of inimici but the public opposition of hostes. It is the recognition of “us” and “them,” the grouping of men into allies and adversaries at the level of peoples and states.

The friend–enemy distinction is polemical in nature, for it always carries within it the possibility of violence. Politics is not identical with conflict, but conflict remains the ever-present possibility that marks political life off from other human activities. The distinction is existentially serious, because when violence erupts, it involves the possibility of killing and being killed.

It is also irreducible to any other distinction. It is not simply a division between good and evil, for each side regards itself as justified while remaining an enemy to the other. Nor is it confined to a single sphere of life, for any deep difference, whether religious, material, cultural, or philosophical, can harden into the political when men come to see it as worth killing and dying for.

Schmitt’s insistence on this reality is not a defense of conflict as good in itself. On the contrary, it is a call for realism about the conditions of human existence. Conflict cannot be abolished, and efforts to eliminate it altogether only expand and intensify its reach. Wars to end all wars are the most universal and fanatical wars of all, precisely because they elevate the abolition of politics into an absolute mission. In Schmitt’s view, to acknowledge enmity is the best way to contain it. To deny it is to unleash it in limitless forms.

The foundation of politics lies in what the ancients called thumos, the spirited part of the soul. Neither pure reason nor physical appetite, thumos is the source of passionate attachment, the willingness to identify with groups and to hold values that transcend individual life. Men fight not only for survival but for honor, for culture, for religion, for ways of life they regard as higher than themselves. The apolitical man is therefore the apathetic man, who has no attachment to anything greater than his own existence. To imagine a world without politics is to imagine a world without spirit, what Nietzsche foresaw as the reign of the “last man,” satisfied with comfort but devoid of greatness.

From this foundation Schmitt arrives at his concept of sovereignty. If politics is defined by the friend–enemy distinction, then sovereignty is defined by the power to decide the enemy. The sovereign is he who makes that determination, for upon it depends the possibility of war, revolution, and the survival of the community itself. To refuse the sovereign’s choice is to take a step toward civil war or rebellion, for to choose one’s enemies independently is to claim sovereignty for oneself. This is why Schmitt’s analysis bears out the saying that war is when the government tells you who the enemy is, and revolution is when you decide for yourself.

The wider implication of Schmitt’s analysis is that politics cannot be abolished so long as man retains his capacity for spirited attachment. Liberalism, with its dream of a universal order based on bargaining and procedure, is itself caught in the paradox that it cannot abolish what it opposes without becoming political in the act of doing so. The abolition of politics would require either the abolition of all differences or the abolition of all seriousness. The first is achieved through violence and assimilation, the second through apathy, relativism, and consumerism. Yet differences endure, crises recur, and men are not satisfied with comfort alone. For this reason politics reasserts itself, whether through ordinary disputes between states or through conflicts over the highest values.

Schmitt’s thought has often been accused of nihilism, of reducing politics to mere struggle devoid of higher ends. But his point was not to elevate conflict as a good in itself. It was to strip away illusions about what politics is, to force men to see the seriousness of collective life, and to recognize the decisive role of sovereignty. If his analysis disturbs, it is because he refused to soften its edges with moral platitudes. Politics, as he saw it, is ultimately about who we are, who belongs with us, and who stands against us. That is not a counsel of despair but a sober reminder that any order, however just, rests on distinctions that cannot be wished away.

It is precisely this sobriety that is missing from much of today’s debate. Schmitt is too often invoked as a caricature, either as a sinister prophet of totalitarianism or as a crude manual for political partisanship. Both readings betray the depth of his analysis. To read him seriously is to confront the permanent reality of conflict and the impossibility of a politics without enemies. The rest is noise.

[Lacanian Foothold @BTholfsen]

In the beginning of his Gospel, Saint John says: 'In the beginning was the word'. I completely agree.

But where was it before the beginning?

That is the truly impenetrable mystery.

Jacques Lacan,
Rome, 1974

[tay @hairball1952]

franz kafka’s drawings

[candychuckles @UdoyHasan2004]

Money matters are treated by civilized people in the same way as sexual matters—with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy.

S. Freud, On Beginning The Treatment, 1913.

[Lacanian Foothold @BTholfsen]

Money matters are treated by civilized people in the same way as sexual matters—

with the same
inconsistency,
prudishness
and hypocrisy.

Sigmund Freud

[Lacanian Foothold @BTholfsen]

truth can only be half said.

One speaks the truth as best one can,

that is,

in part.

Jacques Lacan,

Lecture on the Symptom

[Lacanian Foothold @BTholfsen]

Never shall we be able to do without a notion of object lack being central.

This is not a negative,

but the very spring of the subject’s relation to the world.

JLacan

[Magnus Carlsen @MagnusCarlsen]

Finally World Champion! Thanks to all for your support!

[Lacanian Foothold @BTholfsen]

"It is insofar as a correct interpretation extinguishes a symptom,

that the truth is specified to be poetic."

Jacques Lacan,
Les non-dupes errent