Reading Group for Summer 2025 Update

READING GROUP SUMMER 2025

Cybernetics and Forms of Life: Bios, Zoe, Kybernetos

Readings are going to be short selections from the following books: 

• Michael Naas Plato and the Invention of Life
• Gilles Deleuze: "Immanence: A Life" 
• Ruyer Cybernetics and the Origin of Information
• Excerpts other texts as assigned

Link HERE

Ray Brassier Unbound (2022 podcast interview with Ray Brassier)

 

Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour · Ray Brassier - Brassier Unbound

An excellent quick read

Reading Groups updated for Spring and Summer 2022

I've updated the plan for our weekly get-together Reading Group for spring and summer 2022.  I began running these reading groups my first year of grad school and chose not to stop once I graduated with the Ph.D.  (I took my Ph.D. in 2009.)  Hard to believe but they've proved invaluable in encountering new ideas and discussing ideas with others so as to get real hands-on experience with texts and research that, more often than not, helped me move in profitable directions while avoiding the pitfalls of others.

Link HERE.

forthcoming from Urbanomic, "Abducting the Outside"

 

Abducting the Outside by Reza Negarestani

A comprehensive collection of Reza Negarestani’s writings from 2003–2018, Abducting the Outside begins with texts in which horror, decay, cruelty, and barbarism assail the solidity of thought. It goes on to chart the sustained development of a ‘geophilosophical realism’ in which the Nietzschean / DeleuzoGuattarian inquiry into human thought’s relation to its contingent material origins is pushed beyond the localist obsession with the planet. Allowing the reader to experience this original and unique trajectory in one collection, Abducting the Outside presents an encyclopaedic view of what it means to depart from the human, to descend into the abyss, and to see thinking as an infinite drift outside of our established habitats and perspectives.

Certainly looks interesting. Link HERE.

Ray Brassier - The Human: From Subversion to Compulsion

 Found this from an online workshop featuring Ray Brassier, run a few months ago. I'll link and post below.

The Human: From Subversion to Compulsion 

 In the contemporary ‘critical’ humanities, the privileging of the human has become as suspect as every other sort of privilege. Far from being the uncircumventable horizon for emancipatory politics, humanism is denounced as integral to a logic of domination that proceeds from the subjugation of nature to the enslavement of all those deemed less than human. It is easy to retort that this indictment of humanism follows from conflating the restrictive specification of the human (as white, male, heterosexual, European etc.) with its generic de-specification – the human as what Alain Badiou calls ‘the voided animal’, an exception that includes the unspecified part of everything: neither white nor black, neither male nor female, neither heterosexual nor homosexual, etc. But the suggestion that universalization proceeds not by generalizing specific predicates but by subtracting them tends to fall on deaf ears in a theoretical context where the Nietzschean equation of universalization with domination continues to hold sway. Once the inference from exception to exclusion is made, an all-inclusive post-humanism supplants exclusionary humanism as the politically ‘progressive’ optic consonant with the liberal ideal of inclusiveness that has become the humanities’ critical lodestone. This ideal stipulates a formal equivalence of human and non-human that is the ontological ratification of capitalism’s personification of things and reification of people. But it is not enough to expose the conservative kernel underlying post-humanism’s radical veneer, or to abstractly oppose the generic de-specification of the human to its restrictive specification. What must be grasped rather is how both this specification and de-specification are conjoined in capitalism as a historically specific mode of social production. Doing so reveals that the human is neither a metaphysical subject nor an anthropological attribute. It is the name for a mutability that is sui generis but no longer synonymous with self-consciousness; a displacement compelled by the twin pulses of social reproduction and libidinal repetition. 

 Readings

•  Ray Brassier 'The Human' [unpublished text] 
•  Rosi Braidotti, ‘A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities’ in Theory Culture & Society 2019 36(6): 31-61 
•  Jacques Derrida 'The Ends of Man' in Margins of Philosophy, Translated by Alan Bass (Brighton: The Harvester Press Ltd., 1982), pp. 109-136 
• Link to Google drive folder with the readings: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-G6lNb5hzFaBkrcryTdFGsJnMoQcFwtN&authuser=sepideh%40foreignobjekt.com&usp=drive_fs

Page Link:

HERE

 

 

Quote of the day

"Necessary: An eye for what is twilight. Sundown is sunrise elsewhere. Charaterologically: one is an optimist or pessimist. Change is effected through radiations.... Visible changes are preceded by less visible ones and these by ones that are invisible. Already technology rises up as modus vivendi from great depth. The precedence of spiritual change before technological, technological before political, political before strategic....Profit and loss lie in what is unforeseen. Just for this reason one should not lose faith too soon, not even in questions of power." 

- Ernst Junger, Maxima-Minima, Additional Notes to The Worker (1964)

It's Time to Go: United States Conservative Secession is Here

Modernity is apocalypse. If you can't see that you soon will. As early as 2014 I predicted the acceleration of this apocalypse, based only however on a prognostication from a much more capable philosopher, that of Nick Land (see my "A Humble Attempt to Introduce the Philosophy of Nick Land, HERE). In many ways Land's accelerationist idea of hyper-fragmentation makes even more sense now than it did then. In short, Nick Land is a prophet and what he has prophesied has turned out to be true.



The United States is fragmenting, and quickly. Yet also, there is a cultural fire that has slowly been consuming more and more, and becoming hotter and hotter. Near its peak, how will things turn out? What will be left after all has been consumed? Is there a place, a zone, where freedom might continue to live?

There are philosophers who have provided us with some clues, some pieces of maps, who have already forecast the condition. It is to those philosophers to whom we must turn. Contemporary, Nick Land. And adding in from the history of philosophy and literature, Ernst Junger (1895-1998). 

That said, I direct you to below where you'll find a few important Landian After Nature posts on Land's work, as well as a book recommendation. These posts - written as far back as 2014 - were written  in the spirit of secession, in full cognizance of the oncoming cultural apocalypse. Not because I am a conservative, but because  afterall, the Jungerian anarch - the spiritual reactionary - wears chameleon like colors until the end, until it's time to go.

In some sense the ship has already sunk, or better, the city already burned to the ground. Liberalism's sacred nihilism revels in its own continual self-destruction.  The endless self-loathing and self-destruction is never enough, yet it fuels the elan vital of those spiritual reactionaries who sit back and watch the world burn. It is the reason why the forest flight was necessary - from warrior, to worker, to anarch, to forest fleer, to ...

Inner emigration is a tricky game. In order to "cross the line" as Junger puts it, one must be able to forecast conditions. Nick Land is extremely good at doing that.

This article, "Secession fever spikes in five states as conservatives seek to escape blue rule" uncovers the already-emerging blue-prints of a US divided into self-governing new states.

The time is now. It's time to go.


Nietzsche, the other great prognosticator tells us that,

"Pity is the practice of nihilism. To repeat: this depressive and contagious instinct crosses those instincts which aim at the preservation of life and at the enhancement of its value. It multiplies misery and conserves all that is miserable, and is thus a prime instrument of the advancement of decadence: pity persuades men to nothingness!”

— Nietzsche, The Antichrist"

“Being nationalistic in the sense in which it is now demanded by public opinion would, it seems to me, be for us who are more spiritual not mere insipidity but dishonesty, a deliberate deadening of our better will and conscience.”

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Note

***

From After Nature:

Nick Land (and Ernst Juenger) on Ultimate Exit

More on "ultimate exit" - thoughts on Accelerationism, Promethianism, and Neoreaction (NRx)

And finally, an interesting book parallel to our reaction against liberalism's sacred nihilism.

quote of the day

HERVIER: If I focus on the two utopias of your great novels Heliopolis and Eumeswil- 1949 and 1977 respectively-it seems that your view of the world has definitely grown more somber.

JÜNGER: Yes, but I would like to say that I do not want this to be interpreted as a prophecy about the future. At the moment, there is a portion that involves everything that Nietzsche says about his last man. For me, the last man is, above all, a phantom: man living amid comfort, as depicted in Nietzsche's Zarathustra, is only the before- last, and another will soon emerge. This is the kind of thought that comes to mind at twilight, and that is then pondered. But Eumeswil does not boil down to that. As for the period of "Passage of the Line," [translated as "Across the Line", AF] which, Heidegger says, should have posted the problems differently, I was playing an optimistic game. This doesn't mean that I'm contradicting myself, I am simply revealing facts that contradict one another. This an entirely different matter

- The Details of Time: Conversations with Ernst Junger

Conversations with Ernst Junger: The Details of Time

Junger continues to be of huge importance for me as I finish up current reading projects and move on to new ones.  I've spent quite a bit of time with Hegel and Schelling this past year, branching out into Hegel's Philosophy of Right - and thus political philosophy has yet again entered into the margins of me developing a perspective that would inform my upcoming writing projects.

 I've never been much interested in the political until I began to realize how the political (as such) and ontologies of power are one and the same (this realization thanks not only to Hegel, but also to Nietzsche, Foucault, and Junger). 

I have argued in the past that it is incredibly profitable to triangulate reading of Nietzsche-Foucault-Junger when it comes to ontologies of power and ascertainment of political perspective. Many would assume Deleuze instead of Junger perhaps, which does work albeit from a different perspective. I think Junger works abit better over Deleuze simply because he is more "flexible" or "adaptable" in terms of optical assessment and practice.  With Junger apoliteia is quite valuable in terms of one determining what is what, without being locked into a particular political schism or schema.

As my upcoming reading project takes shape I most likely will post a reading list, but what I have so far is more topical than specifically author-based.  This all also fits with my currently developing YouTube channel (I have 110 +/- subscribers!) where I post both short ten to fifteen-minute-ish videos as well as broadcast lengthier live-streams (an hour plus) covering political philosophy, aesthetics, or sometimes less academic-natured things such as music or chatting with viewers.

That all said, here is a link to a nice little over-view of Ernst Junger's thinking. Hopefully you can see why I think he is so valuable and how he is such a brilliant and fascinating mind.

The Details of Time: Conversations with Ernst Junger (.pdf download, 3MB, HERE).

Cyclops Journal

Interesting new journal, new as in only a few years old with one or two issues now out - but they are definitely worth checking out.

It seems I might be appearing in their pages soon as they plan to release their next issue on Bataille, which you can find out more about: HERE or HERE.

If all goes well I am thinking of an assessment of Bataille through Nick Land across from Habermas, who critiqued Bataille in his Modernity book. Does Land's Bataille enable or prohibit creaturely inter-being via transgression of power, excess and defect?

Ray Brassier, "Principled Compassion, Compulsive Freedom" (VIDEO)

Parts TWO | THREE | FOUR | FIVE

Monoskop on accelerationism

Monoskop has a page posted that is an excellent resource on accelerationism. Be sure to spend some time there going through the multitude of great resources found in a variety of media formats. Such a great page, I highly recommend it. Link HERE. (As an aside, check out After Nature with a humble introduction to the philosophy of Nick Land, HERE.)

"Dark Star: A Special Review of Nick Land's ‘A Thirst for Annihilation"

HERE. A pretty interesting read - be warned though, it's fairly subtle writing given the content so take your time.

the aesthetics of accelerationism

Following yesterday's post which covered the music of John Maus and featured an interview with Adam Harper, I'm posting a link to Harper's blog "Rouge's Foam" which seems to still be more or less active, HERE. The theme is "excessive aesthetics" although plenty of other sorts of philosophy makes its way into the posts as well, for example with THIS post on the aesthetics of accelerationism.

new essay by Nick Land on accelerationism

Two new essays by Nick Land in the newly launched Jacobite online magazine, "a magazine of philosophy, cultural analysis, exit, and post-politics."

One can read "The Atomization Trap" HERE or "A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism" HERE.

Prometheanism and the brothers Jünger (excerpt from The Titans)

The brother of Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898-1977), is known for his Prometheanist text The Titans (1943), second only to his master treatise The Failure of Technology (1953) (HERE).

Ernst Jünger's The Worker: Dominion and Form (1932) is similar to both of his brother's most famous books and is due to be published in English translation this coming fall of 2017 through Northwestern University Press (HERE), however an alternate translation was once proposed but never made it through.  You can see that alternate translation in its entirety HERE. The alternate translation is very, very rare and I had the privilege of finding it after having been seeking it out for years.  I finally made contact with Dirk Leach, the original translator, and asked for the page proofs that were eventually rejected by Northwestern UP in favor of another translation.  So the original is quite rare and a gem to have.

Below is an excerpt from The Titans, perhaps interesting for those interested in proto-accelerationist texts or NrX texts of "right-accelerationism" so-called (whatever that might mean).

Friedrich Georg Jünger

Die Titanen (1943)

* * *

THE TITANS: CUSTODIANS OF LAW AND ORDER

….The Titans are not the Gods even though they generate the Gods and relish divine reverence in the kingdom of Zeus. The world in which the Titans rule is a world without the Gods. Whoever desires to imagine a kosmos atheos, i.e. a godless cosmos, that is, a cosmos not as such as depicted by natural sciences, will find it there. The Titans and the Gods differ, and, given that their differences are visible in their behavior toward man and in view of the fact that man himself experiences on his own as to how they rule, man, by virtue of his own experience, is able to make a distinction between them.

Neither are the Titans unrestrained power hungry beings, nor do they scorn the law; rather, they are the rulers over a legal system whose necessity must never be put in doubt. In an awe-inspiring fashion, it is the flux of primordial elements over which they rule, holding bridle and reins in their hands, as seen in Helios. They are the guardians, custodians, supervisors and the guides of the order. They are the founders unfolding beyond chaos, as pointed out by Homer in his remarks about Atlas who shoulders the long columns holding the heavens and the Earth. Their rule rules out any confusion, any disorderly power performance. Rather, they constitute a powerful deterrent against chaos.

The Titans and the Gods match with each other. Just as Zeus stands in for Kronos, so does Poseidon stand in opposition to Oceanus, or for that matter Hyperion and his son Helios in opposition to Apollo, or Coeus and Phoebe in opposition to Apollo and Artemis, or Selene in opposition to Artemis.

THE TITANS AGAINST THE GODS

What distinguishes the kingdom of Kronos from the kingdom of Zeus? One thing is for certain; the kingdom of Kronos is not a kingdom of the son. The sons are hidden in Kronos, who devoured those he himself had generated, the sons being now hidden in his dominion, whereas Zeus is kept away from Kronos by Rhea, who hides and raises Zeus in the caverns. And given that Kronos comports himself in such a manner his kingdom will never be a kingdom of the father. Kronos does not want to be a father because fatherhood is equivalent with a constant menace to his rule. To him fatherhood signifies an endeavor and prearrangement aimed at his downfall.

What does Kronos want, anyway? He wants to preserve the cycle of the status quo over which he presides; he wants to keep it unchanged. He wants to toss and turn it within himself from one eon to another eon. Preservation and perseverance were already the hallmark of his father. Although his father Uranus did not strive toward the Titanic becoming, he did, however, desire to continue his reign in the realm of spaciousness. Uranus was old, unimaginably old, as old as metal and stones. He was of iron-like strength that ran counter to the process of becoming. But Kronos is also old. Why is he so old? Can this fluctuation of the Titanic forces take on at the same time traits of the immovable and unchangeable? Yes, of course it can, if one observes it from the perspective of the return, or from the point of view of the return of the same. If one attempts it, one can uncover the mechanical side in this ceaseless flux of the movement. The movement unveils itself as a rigid and inviolable law.

THE INFINITE SADNESS OF THE TITANS

How can we describe the sufferings of the Titans? How much do they suffer anyway, and what do they suffer from? The sound of grief uttered by the chained Prometheus induces Hermes to derisive remarks about the same behavior which is unknown to Zeus. In so far as the Titans are in the process of moving, we must therefore also conceive of them as the objects of removal. Their struggle is onerous; it is filled with anxiety of becoming. And their anxiety means suffering. Grandiose things are being accomplished by the Titans, but grandiose things are being imposed on them too. And because the Titans are closer to chaos than Gods are, chaotic elements reveal themselves amidst them more saliently. No necessity appears as yet in chaos because chaos has not yet been measured off by any legal system. The necessity springs up only when it can be gauged by virtue of some lawfulness. This is shown in the case of Uranus and Kronos. The necessary keeps increasing insofar as lawfulness increases; it gets stronger when the lawful movements occur, that is, when the movements start reoccurring over and over again.

Among the Titanesses the sadness is most visible in the grief of Rhea whose motherhood was harmed. Also in the mourning of Mnemosyne who ceaselessly conjures up the past. The suffering of this Titaness carries something of sublime magnificence. In her inaccessible solitude, no solace can be found. Alone, she must muse about herself — a dark image of the sorrow of life. The suffering of the Titans, after their downfall, reveals itself in all its might. The vanquished Titan represents one of the greatest images of suffering. Toppled, thrown down under into the ravines beneath the earth, sentenced to passivity, the Titan knows only how to carry, how to heave and how to struggle with the burden — similar to the burden carried by the Caryatids.

THE SELF-SUFFICIENT GODS

The Olympian Gods, however, do not suffer like the Titans. They are happy with themselves; they are self-sufficient. They do not ignore the pain and sufferings of man. They in fact conjure up these sufferings, but they also heal them. In Epicurean thought, in the Epicurean world of happiness, we observe the Gods dwelling in-between-the-worlds, divorced from the life of the earth and separated from the life of men, to a degree that nothing can ever reach out to them and nothing can ever come from them. They enjoy themselves in an eternal halcyon bliss that cannot be conveyed by words.

The idea of the Gods being devoid of destiny is brought out here insofar as it goes well beyond all power and all powerlessness; it is as if the Gods had been placed in a deepest sleep, as if they were not there for us. Man, therefore, has no need to think of them. He must only leave them alone in their blissful slumber. But this is a philosophical thought, alien to the myth.

Under Kronos, man is part of the Titanic order. He does not stand yet in the opposition to the order — an opposition founded in the reign of Zeus. He experiences now the forces of the Titans; he lives alongside them. The fisherman and boatman venturing out on the sea are in their Titanic element. The same happens with the shepherd, the farmer, the hunter in their realm. Hyperion, Helios and Eos determine their days, Selene regulates their nights. They observe the running Iris, they see the Horae dancing and spinning around throughout the year. They observe the walk of the nymphs Pleiades and Hyades in the skies. They recognize the rule of the great Titanic mothers, Gaia, Rhea, Mnemosyne and that of Gaia-Themis. Above all of them rules and reigns the old Kronos, who keeps a record of what happens in the skies, on the earth, and in the waters.

TITANIC NECESSITY VS. DIVINE DESTINY

The course of human life is inextricably linked to the Titanic order. Life makes one whole with it; the course of life cannot be divorced from this order. It is the flow of time, the year’s course, the day’s course. The tides and the stars are on the move. The process resembles a ceaseless flow of the river. Kronos reigns over it and makes sure it keeps returning. Everything returns and everything repeats itself — everything is the same. This is the law of the Titans; this is their necessity. In their motion a strict cyclical order manifests itself. In this order there is a regular cyclical return that no man can escape. Man’s life is a reflection of this cyclic order; it turns around in a Titanic cycle of Kronos.

Man has no destiny here, in contrast to the demigods and the heroes who all have it. The kingdom of Zeus is teeming with life and deeds of heroes, offering an inexhaustible material to the songs, to the epics and to the tragedies. In the kingdom of Kronos, however, there are no heroes; there is no Heroic Age. For man, Kronos, and the Titans have no destiny; they are themselves devoid of destiny. Does Helios, does Selene, does Eos have a destiny? Wherever the Titanic necessity rules, there cannot be a destiny. But the Gods are also deprived of destiny wherever divine necessity prevails, wherever man grasps the Gods in a fashion that is not in opposition to them. But a man whom the Gods confront has a destiny. A man whom the Titans confront perishes; he succumbs to a catastrophe.

We can say, however, that whatever happens to man under the rule of the Titans is a lot easier than under the rule of the Gods. The burden imposed on man is much lighter.

* * *

What happens when the Gods turn away from man and when they leave him on his own? Wherever they make themselves unrecognizable to man, wherever their care for man fades away, wherever man’s fate begins and ends without them, there always happens the same thing. The Titanic forces return and they validate their claims to power. Where no Gods are, there are the Titans. This is a relationship of a legal order which no man can escape wherever he may turn to. The Titans are immortal. They are always there. They always strive to reestablish their old dominion of their foregone might. This is the dream of the Titanic race of the lapetos, and all the Iapetides who dream about it. The earth is penetrated and filled up with the Titanic forces. The Titans sit in ambush, on the lookout, ready to break out and break up their chains and restore the empire of Kronos.

TITANIC MAN

What is Titanic about man? The Titanic trait occurs everywhere and it can be described in many ways. Titanic is a man who completely relies only upon himself and has boundless confidence in his own powers. This confidence absolves him, but at the same time it isolates him in a Promethean mode. It gives him a feeling of independence, albeit not devoid of arrogance, violence, and defiance. Titanic is a quest for unfettered freedom and independence. However, wherever this quest is to be seen there appears a regulatory factor, a mechanically operating necessity that emerges as a correction to such a quest. This is the end of all the Promethean striving, which is well known to Zeus only. The new world created by Prometheus is not.

What happens when the twin worlds of biotechnology and artificial intelligence merge, allowing us to re-design our species to meet our whims and desires?

NBC tech news article "Godlike 'Homo Deus' Could Replace Humans as Tech Evolves," HERE.

One may also wish to check out THIS article, perhaps being enticed as I was due to this:

"Machines are predicted to be better than us at translating languages by 2024, writing high-school essays by 2026, driving a truck by 2027, working in retail by 2031, writing a bestselling book by 2049 and surgery by 2053. In fact, all human jobs will be automated within the next 120 years, say respondents."

Land on Kant and Hegel, Husserl, phenomenology, and Schelling (quote of the day)

While reading Land's The Thirst for Annihilation the below stood out as particularly interesting. I decided to type out some excerpts for After Nature readers to enjoy as well. As I begin thinking about lines of research for this summer some of these ideas and directions certainly will come into play, so re-typing it has its research purpose as well. (Note: see also After Nature post "A humble attempt to introduce the philosophy of Nick Land...", HERE.)

“The importance of Hegel is not immediate [but] stems from the character of Hegelian thinking as redemption of Kantianism; its attempt to save transcendental philosophy from the lethal spasms welling up from within….Hegel's philosophy is the life-support machine of Kantianism, the medical apparatus responding to a crisis.” 

[…] 

“Hegel's reading of Kant is complex and multifaceted; but also of an unprecedented coherence. Its intelligibility is, in the end, coterminus with the possibility of a system of reason, or actual infinity. Hegel realizes that the Kantian conception of infinity, which abstractly opposes itself to finitude rather than subsuming it, indefinitely perpetuated a dangerous tension, insofar as it suspends the moment of resolution. This bad infinity – the endless task of perpetual growth (capital) – is incapable of ever diminishing the prospect of utter collapse. Kantian infinity is deprived of any possibility of intervening….Kantian infinity is given, whereas Hegel sets it to work.” 

[…] 

“To repeat, Kantianism is to perpetuate the exacerbative displacement of critique, to exceed it is to cross the line which divides representations from the real, and thus to depart both from philosophy and the world that has expelled it into its isolation. Critique is a matter of boundaries, or the delimitation of domains of application for concepts. The Kantian name for the items within the legitimate field of theoretical cognition is phenomena, whilst the extra-territorial items are called noumena. Because the noumena escapes the categories of the understanding Kant says “we can neither say that it is possible nor that it is impossible.” Noumena are what escapes the competence of theory...noumena are only understood as being such only in a negative sense.” 

[…] 

“The most coherent attempt to establish a connection between conception and outside is Hegel's, in particular his phenomenological solution to the delineation of experience. Hegel argues that the boundary of experience is produced by the inherently self-transcending character of reason, so that the discursive excess which is exhibited...is not confined by the difference which restricts or determines phenomenality, since it is itself auto-differentiation….This is not merely the collapse of Kant's thing-in-itself back into the phenomenal world, because Hegel does not think of spirit as a timeless (transcendentally pre-given) system of cognitive faculties in Kantian fashion, but as a historical auto-production in which the self is really – and not merely reflectively – determined by the logically orchestrated activity of thinking as and through time. Hegelian history is not formal but speculative, which means that the subject is developed and not merely expressed through the series of predicates by which 'it' is thought.” 

[…] 

“Since Hegel the word phenomenology has fallen even further into disrepute. Compared to the majestic system of Hegelian philosophy, the philosophy of Edmund Husserl – with which the word 'phenomenology' is now inextricably tangled – is a mere neo-Kantian eccentricity.” 

[…] 

“An altogether richer vein of thought [richer than Husserl – After Nature, ed.] is that initiated by Schelling, provoked by Hegel's famous remark concerning a 'night in which all cows are black.' Like Hegel, Schelling saw the weak spot of Kantianism to lie in the impossibility of a rigorous determination of the transcendental ground of knowing, since what is transcendental has to remain immanent to ts own disjunction. What differentiates these two philosophical modes is that where Hegel's Auhebung or assimilatory negation passes through the other, appropriating it as a mediating pause of absolute reason, Schelling's Indifferenz undercuts the articulated terms, exacerbating the critical gesture, since one of the transcendentally subverted terms is in each case the simulacrum of the transcendental. Hegelian thought is guided by the exigency of comprehension (which when pushed to its limit grounds itself), Schelling's by that of transcendental grounding (which at the limit comprehends all difference).”

quote of the day

“The individual is no longer rooted in society as a tree in a forest, rather he is comparable to the passenger in a rapidly moving vehicle whose name may be Titanic, but also Leviathan. As long as the weather holds and the outlook is pleasant, he will scarcely notice the curtailment of his freedom. He may even be filled with optimism and with the consciousness of power produced by the sense of speed. But all this changes when the fiery volcanic islands and icebergs emerge on the horizon. Then not only will technology claim a right to dominate fields other than the procurement of comfort, but at the same time the lack of freedom will become apparent–be it in the victory of elemental forces or in the fact that individuals who have remained strong acquire the means to exercise absolute power.”

— Ernst Jünger, Der Waldgang