Lose everything, be free to do anything
I'm having one of those mornings where I'm utterly terrified of actually writing anything thesis-related before it's 9am. Therefore I am going to subject my lj to a heuristic mantra, courtesy of Chuck Palahniuk and the Dust Brothers, and the vain need to post song lyrics in one's online journal.
And you open the door and you step inside
Were inside our hearts
Now imagine your pain is a white ball of healing light
That's right your pain, the pain of self is a white ball of healing light
I don't think so
This is your life
Good to the last drop
Doesn't get any better then this
This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time.
This isn't a seminar and this isn't a weekend retreat
Where you are now you can't even imagine what the bottom will be like
Only after disaster can we be resurrected
It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything
Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart
This is your life...
It doesn't get any better then this
This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake
You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else
We are all the a part of the same compost heap
we are the all singing all dancing crap of the world
You are not your bank account
You are not the clothes you wear
You are not the contents of your wallet
You are not your bowel cancer
You are not your grande late
You are not the car your drive
You are not your fucking khakis
You have to give up
You have to give up
You have to realize that someday you will die
Until you you know that you are useless
I say let me never be complete
I say may I never be content
I say deliver me from Swedish furniture
I say deliver me from clever art
I say deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth
I say have to give up
I say evolve and let the chips fall where they may
This is your life
This is your life
It doesn't get any better then this
This is your life
This is your life
And it's ending one minute at a time
You have to give up
You have to give up
I want you to hit me as hard as you can
I want you to hit me as hard as you can
Welcome to fight club
If this is your first night
You have to fight
They played This Is Your Life on the radio this morning while my housemates and I were on the way to work. The line "Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart" got me thinking about the way that it is only in abstraction that stability exists. Every material composition is made up of parts or terms which are themselves crumbling and gradually disappearing from view. Even in the heart of my own selfhood, what makes me 'me,' nothingness pervades as a necessary feature of all facets of who/what I am.
This foreground is my basic disagreement with Badiou, which unsurpisingly echoes Zizek's complaint in Think Again and the preface to the second edition of For They Know Not What They Do. Why is there a need for multiplicity to be re-presented in the state? If the state of my selfhood, my self-constitution, is a constitution as such, then it can make some claim to being. But how does this presentation of being appear to itself? It is well and good that we can index/bind language to being-qua-being, but why does them multiplicity of being's presentation need to be reinscribed in the state when language sustains itself by means of self-referentiality, i.e. a dictionary only makes words meaningful by means of other words and not some metalanguage?
For Badiou there is no virtual. Which makes sense when you observe his re-articulation of the idealist topos through materialism, how I can mysteriously transubstantiate myself from being a self-interested creature of appetites to a subject vouching for a Cause. It is not a matter of what I am, but rather a matter that I am not what I am. That is to say, the claim to being-qua-being is because being is not; or to rephrase in the frame of the idealist topos, it is precisely non-being that allows the self-positing of the subject to be presupposed in the shift from being to subject.
Okay, that started getting thesis-like. Better get to it.
~Niveau
And you open the door and you step inside
Were inside our hearts
Now imagine your pain is a white ball of healing light
That's right your pain, the pain of self is a white ball of healing light
I don't think so
This is your life
Good to the last drop
Doesn't get any better then this
This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time.
This isn't a seminar and this isn't a weekend retreat
Where you are now you can't even imagine what the bottom will be like
Only after disaster can we be resurrected
It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything
Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart
This is your life...
It doesn't get any better then this
This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake
You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else
We are all the a part of the same compost heap
we are the all singing all dancing crap of the world
You are not your bank account
You are not the clothes you wear
You are not the contents of your wallet
You are not your bowel cancer
You are not your grande late
You are not the car your drive
You are not your fucking khakis
You have to give up
You have to give up
You have to realize that someday you will die
Until you you know that you are useless
I say let me never be complete
I say may I never be content
I say deliver me from Swedish furniture
I say deliver me from clever art
I say deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth
I say have to give up
I say evolve and let the chips fall where they may
This is your life
This is your life
It doesn't get any better then this
This is your life
This is your life
And it's ending one minute at a time
You have to give up
You have to give up
I want you to hit me as hard as you can
I want you to hit me as hard as you can
Welcome to fight club
If this is your first night
You have to fight
They played This Is Your Life on the radio this morning while my housemates and I were on the way to work. The line "Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart" got me thinking about the way that it is only in abstraction that stability exists. Every material composition is made up of parts or terms which are themselves crumbling and gradually disappearing from view. Even in the heart of my own selfhood, what makes me 'me,' nothingness pervades as a necessary feature of all facets of who/what I am.
This foreground is my basic disagreement with Badiou, which unsurpisingly echoes Zizek's complaint in Think Again and the preface to the second edition of For They Know Not What They Do. Why is there a need for multiplicity to be re-presented in the state? If the state of my selfhood, my self-constitution, is a constitution as such, then it can make some claim to being. But how does this presentation of being appear to itself? It is well and good that we can index/bind language to being-qua-being, but why does them multiplicity of being's presentation need to be reinscribed in the state when language sustains itself by means of self-referentiality, i.e. a dictionary only makes words meaningful by means of other words and not some metalanguage?
For Badiou there is no virtual. Which makes sense when you observe his re-articulation of the idealist topos through materialism, how I can mysteriously transubstantiate myself from being a self-interested creature of appetites to a subject vouching for a Cause. It is not a matter of what I am, but rather a matter that I am not what I am. That is to say, the claim to being-qua-being is because being is not; or to rephrase in the frame of the idealist topos, it is precisely non-being that allows the self-positing of the subject to be presupposed in the shift from being to subject.
Okay, that started getting thesis-like. Better get to it.
~Niveau