Spurious

If we went back only 20 or 30 years, we would be astounded by the sheer non-utility that made up good parts of society, which to us today look incomprehensibly wasteful, irrational and non-transparent: jobs maintained to keep people in employment, national sports team still amateur and unregulated, universities free of league tables and regimented performance assessment exercises. Even at the level of everyday culture and aesthetics, our currently condition perspective would view the formalities of the early 1970s as alien, meandering and uneconomical.

The tactics and practises of everyday life recorded by Certeau still implicitly hold onto the rather liberal assumption that a life is indeed possible within the universe of capitalism.

… our attempts to live, that futile optimism that fools even the most enslaved, is stymied at every turn by an existential darkness that denies complete synthesis. Our embodied and inexorable modi operandi are defined by a breathless and depressing, ‘It cannot go on like this’, things must change. But they never do change, and somehow continue as before.

… the most politically abject and ignored in our society must be considered foremost  if the totality is to be understood. The absolute ‘worst off’ that part of the whole life we like to consign to the status of an exception or aberration, is really what gives the totalized system its false positivity. Its part is the part of everything. That is why society despises its untouchables so much, because in them we see the untruthful structure that bears witness to society’s own mendacity.

We now need to give our abandonment depth so it corrupts the smooth plane of one-dimensional rationality that makes the curve of capitalist reality seem unending. This is the ‘lost dimension’ of industrialised modernity. Are you worthy of your abandonment? If you are, then what are you going to do with the absolute impossibility that is now the defining quality of the late-capitalist worker? Where will you go, what will you say and who will you take with you?

Fleming, Mythology of Work

The apocalypse is typically depicted as humanity reduced to mere life, fragile, exposed to all forms of exploitation and the arbitrary exercise of power. But these dystopian future scenarios are nothing worse than the conditions in which most humans live as their day-to-day reality. By ‘end of the world’, we usually mean the end of our world. What we don’t tend to ask is who gets included in the ‘we’, what it cost to attain our world, and whether we were entitled to such a world in the first place.

What contemporary post-apocalyptic culture fears isn’t the end of ‘the world’ so much as the end of ‘a world’ – the rich, white, leisured, affluent one. Western lifestyles are reliant on what the French philosopher Bruno Latour has referred to as a ‘slowly built set of irreversibilities’, requiring the rest of the world to live in conditions that ‘humanity’ regards as unliveable. And nothing could be more precarious than a species that contracts itself to a small portion of the Earth, draws its resources from elsewhere, transfers its waste and violence, and then declares that its mode of existence is humanity as such.

To define humanity as such by this specific form of humanity is to see the end of that humanity as the end of the world. If everything that defines ‘us’ relies upon such a complex, exploitative and appropriative mode of existence, then of course any diminution of this hyper-humanity is deemed to be an apocalyptic event. ‘We’ have lost our world of security, we seem to be telling ourselves, and will soon be living like all those peoples on whom we have relied to bear the true cost of what it means for ‘us’ to be ‘human’.

Claire Colebrook, 'End-Times for Humanity'

The world wasn’t created for our happiness. It’s difficult to say whether we’re happy or not. It doesn’t depend on us. Sure, we can regret being born. But life can give us surprising things. The issue of happiness doesn’t exist for me. Happiness does not exist.

I don’t know what it means to hear myself speak. I wouldn’t recognise my own voice. I’ve never said anything.

Predestination. We’re getting ready for something. – but what? We’re being prepared – for what? I’ve never said a single word.

I’ve never spoken. This isn’t speech. As a child – I was immortal and all was feasible. Possibility? My childhood is beside me.

Art exists because the world isn’t perfect. A man wouldn’t look for harmony, but simply live in it. The search for harmonic relationships between art and life. between time and history.

I’ve ceased being happy now I understand life. As a child, I might have been happy. We don’t believe in nature, in our selves. We don’t have any time to think. We’re not emotional. We don’t contemplate. Children and animals are closer to the truth. We all like children more than adults. I’ve always thought that what I say and do is someone else’s decision. If we allowed ourselves, we could love the others. We could feel love for people. For life itself.

If I’m disgusted with myself, I’m disgusted with everyone. I’m disgusted with life. I’m too intolerant. I feel no sympathy. People annoy me. I’m not cheerful. The world is full of insoluble problems. This is no time for laughing. When I laugh, I feel guilty. I can’t approach people. Everyone annoys me. There’s stupidity everywhere.

When I read I feel ashamed. I can’t read. Even as I read, I can’t read. I’m too stupid. I keep on dreaming the same thing. When I am a child again. And everything lies before me. And everything’s possible. Life seems forced upon us. We made mistakes in the past. We should have lived differently.

Tarkovsky, interviewed somewhere

At the end of the day Myshkin is not the Russian Christ, as some readers have wished to see him - he succeeds in 'resurrecting' no one - and he is scarcely a traditional saint. Although he embodies to an unusual degree those features which Dostoevskii associates with the Christian personality (compassion, insight, humility, sensitivity to beauty, tenderness of heart, forgiveness) and shares Dostoevskii's own glimpse of paradise through the aura of an epileptic fit, this glimpse is followed by a sense of utter desolation.

Epilepsy. Quotes from Revelations: ‘time will be no more’. Ecstatic vision of a state beyond time and so beyond choice and action. Some sense in which this ecstatic vision of harmony is bound up with death. For all the compelling beauty of what is experience and the overpowering feeling of having really grasped the nature of things, the outcome is destructive.

Notes on Rowan Williams's book on Dostoevsky

 

Myshkin: … our people don’t simply become atheists, but they must believe in atheism, as in a new faith, without ever noticing that they’re believing in a zero.

… suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, all his life’s forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. The sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with an extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as if placated at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquility, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause.

At that moment I was somehow able to understand the extraordinary phrase that time shall be no more.

… dullness, darkness of soul, idiocy stood before him as the clear consequence of these ‘highest’ moments.

Yes, for this moment one could give one’s whole life!

My gestures are inappropriate, I have no sense of measure; my words are wrong, they don’t correspond to my thoughts, and that is humiliating for the thoughts.

It’s all philosophy. You’re a philosopher and have come to teach us.

Such beauty has power. You can overturn the world with such beauty.

The point is in life, in life alone – in discovering it, constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself!

Why did I actually begin to live, knowing that it was no longer possible for me to begin; why did I try, knowing that it was no longer anything for me to try.

My dreams will change and perhaps become lighter.

stray lines from Dostoevsky's The Idiot

… we always view our own age as being the end of civilization, ‘its prophets false’ and so forth. Which is probably true. What was interesting about punk was that it actually celebrated and drew energy from this otherwise rather depressing generational habit.

Punk – this idea that you suddenly felt in your head as though we were living in the ruins of modernity. Jarman: It’s like the bomb has gone off in our heads already.

Michael Bracewell, The Space Between

Nietzsche saw that ultimately the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate reconciliation or redemption, ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Nietzsche’s solution – his attempted overcoming of nihilism – consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such – all becoming, without reservation or discrimination. The affirmation of eternal recurrence is amor fati: the love of fate. It’s an old quandary: either learn to love fate or learn to transform it. To affirm fate is to let time do whatever it will with us, but in such a way that our will might coincide with time’s. The principal contention of my book, and the point at which it diverges most fundamentally from Nietzsche, is that nihilism is not the negation of truth, but rather the truth of negation, and the truth of negation is transformative.

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound

The system doesn’t believe. It doesn’t need to believe. The system’s unhinging itself.

The system is nihilistic and affects itself nihilistically.

Notes on Baudrillard

Our cultivated, high society set only gorge themselves on Beckett, Cioran, Artaud and all today’s hallowed forms of cynicism and nihilism the better to evade any analysis of the current forms of despair. They denounce with the greatest moral and political energy ever present instance of nihilism, of the nihility of our values, while ‘culturally’ savouring the heroic but anachronistic forms of nihilism and the inhuman. They glorify the accursed share, but keep the holy water handy.

Baudrillard, Cool Memories II

The illuminating mind is like lightning, it flashes rapidly over the greatest distances. It leaves everything aside and shoots for one thing, which it does not know before illuminating it. Its effectivity begins when it strikes. Without some minimum of destruction, without terror, it never takes shape for human beings. Illumination per se is too boundless and too shapeless. The fate of the new knowledge depends on the place of the striking.

Canetti, The Human Province