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1. Godfor Saken

   Buena pinta este libro: "The Infra-World", de François J. Bonnet. https://www.urbanomic.com/book/the-infra-world/

   Hace 6 años 4 meses

2. Godfor Saken

   Sovereign (a poem) suns brigthly burning void swallows all jeweled worlds turning void devours all stars faintly gleaming void quenches all worlds with life teeming void consumes all dead fragments straying void dissolves all planets decaying void cancels all galaxies spinning void destroys all end and beginning void annuls all. From the book “Spiral Consilience”, by Oudeís. https://gnomebooks.wordpress.com/2016/12/01/the-spiral-consilience/

   Hace 6 años 10 meses

3. Godfor Saken

   The nonhuman turn, then, can be understood as a continuation of earlier attempts to depict a world populated not by active subjects and passive objects but by lively and essentially interactive materials, by bodies human and nonhuman. Some of the impetus to reinhabit the tradition also comes from the voluminous mountains of “things” that today surround those of us living in corporate-capitalist, neoliberal, shopping-as- religion cultures. Novelty items, prepackaged edibles, disposable objects, past and future landfill residents, buildings, weeds, books, devices, websites, and so on, and so on—all these materialities make “calls” upon us, demand attention. It’s getting harder not to notice their powers of enabling and refusing us, of enhancing and destroying what we want (to have, to do, to be and become). Theorists of the nonhuman want to see what would happen—to perception and judgment, to sympathies and antipathies, to physical and intellectual postures, to writing styles and research designs, to practices of consumption and production, and to our very notions of self and the human, if what Graham Harman has termed the “allure” of objects were to have more pride of place in our thinking. It no longer seems satisfactory to write off this allure as wholly a function of the pathetic fallacy or the projection of voice onto some inanimate stuff. Perhaps the big project of the nonhuman turn is to find new techniques, in speech and art and mood, to disclose the participation of nonhumans in “our” world. This would require the invention and deployment of a grammar that was less organized around subjects and objects and more capable of avowing the presence of what Bruno Latour called “actants.” It would also require closer attention to the work of those in physical and natural sciences who also recognize the power of materials to shape, induce, even hail other bodies. (…) I find myself living in a world populated by materially diverse, lively bodies. In this materialism, things—what is special about them given their sensuous specificity, their particular material configuration, and their distinctive, idiosyncratic history—matter a lot. But so do the eccentric assemblages that they form. Earthy bodies, of various but always finite durations, affect and are affected by one another. And they form noisy systems or temporary working assemblages that are, as much as any individuated thing, loci of effectivity and allure. These (sometimes stubborn and voracious but never closed or sovereign) systems enact real change. They give rise to new configurations, individuations, patterns of affection. Networks of things display differential degrees of creativity, for good or for ill from the human point of view. There may be creative evolution at the system level, if Bergson and contemporary complexity theorists are on the right track. (…) Texts as Special Bodies I close by turning briefly to things that are literary: the essay and the poem. Like all bodies, these literary objects are affected by other bodies, or, as Timothy Morton puts it in ‘An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry’, “A poem is not simply a representation, but rather a nonhuman agent.” I also proclaim that the effectivity of a text-body, including its ability to gesture toward a something more, is a function of a distributive network of bodies: words on the page, words in the reader’s imagination, sounds of words, sounds and smells in the reading room, and so on, and so on—all these bodies co-acting are what do the job. There are also, it seems, some features of the text-body that are not shared or shared differentially by bodies that rely more heavily on smell and touch, and less heavily on the conveyances that are words. I’m not qualified to say too much about the affectivity of a text as a material body, and I can only gesture in the direction that Walt Whitman takes when he says that poetry, if enmeshed in a fortuitous assemblage of other (especially nontext) bodies, can have material effects as real as any. If you read Leaves of Grass in conjunction with “the open air every season of every year of your life,” and also bound in affection to “the earth and sun and the animals,” while also going “freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families,” then “your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” (…) Perhaps the most important stake for me of the nonhuman turn is how it might help us live more sustainably, with less violence toward a variety of bodies. Poetry can help us feel more of the liveliness hidden in such things and reveal more of the threads of connection binding our fate to theirs. Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: On Vital Materialism and Object-Oriented Philosophy”, in “The Nonhuman Turn”, Richard Grusin, ed.)

   Hace 6 años 11 meses

4. Godfor Saken

   “I have to say that, uh, the quick answer is nobody knows anything at all”. Mikael Jensen, Analyst at Radiation Safety Authority, Sweden, on nuclear waste storage, in the documentary ‘Into Eternity. A Film for the Future”.

   Hace 6 años 11 meses

5. Godfor Saken

   "Entré y cerré la puerta. Me senté sobre la cama. La oscuridad más impenetrable ante mí. Pero yo no estaba sumido en ella, sino en la orilla, y, lo reconozco, es horrorosa. Horrorosa porque contiene algo que el hombre desprecia y que no puede soportar sin perderse. Aunque perderse es necesario; y aquel que resiste sucumbe, y aquel que huye, se convierte en la oscuridad misma, algo frío, muerto y despreciable en cuyo seno mora el infinito. Aquella oscuridad seguía a mi lado, probablemente por el miedo que sentía: no era un miedo corriente, no me paralizaba, no se ocupaba de mí, sino que erraba por la habitación como si fuera algo humano. Hace falta mucha paciencia para que, desde las profundidades más horribles, el pensamiento surja poco a poco, nos reconozca y nos contemple. Aunque también yo temía aquella mirada. Una mirada es algo muy diferente de lo que se piensa, no contiene ni luminosidad ni expresión ni fuerza ni movimiento, es silenciosa, pero, en el colmo de la extravagancia, su silencio surca los mundos y quien lo oye se transforma". Maurice Blanchot, “La sentencia de muerte”

   Hace 6 años 11 meses

6. Godfor Saken

   “I alternate between thinking of the planet as home—dear and familiar stone hearth and garden—and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word “sojourner” occurs often in the English Old Testament. It invokes a nomadic people’s sense of vagrancy, a praying people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” We don’t know where we belong, but in times of sorrow it doesn’t seem to be here, here with these silly pansies and witless mountains, here with sponges and hard-eyed birds. In times of sorrow the innocence of the other creatures—from whom and with whom we evolved— seems a mockery. Their ways are not our ways. We seem set among them as among lifelike props for a tragedy— or a broad lampoon—on a thrust rock stage. It doesn’t seem to be here that we belong, here where space is curved, the earth is round, we’re all going to die, and it seems as wise to stay in bed as budge. It is strange here, not quite warm enough, or too warm, too leafy, or inedible, or windy, or dead. It is not, frankly, the sort of home for people one would have thought of—although I lack the fancy to imagine another. The planet itself is a sojourner in airless space, a wet ball flung across nowhere. (…)These are enervating thoughts, the thoughts of despair. They crowd back, unbidden, when human life as it unrolls goes ill, when we lose control of our lives or the illusion of control, and it seems that we are not moving toward any end but merely blown. Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end. Even nature is hostile and poisonous, as though it were impossible for our vulnerability to survive on these acrid stones.” Annie Dillard, “Sojourner” (in “Teaching a Stone to Talk”).

   Hace 6 años 11 meses

7. Godfor Saken

   "At its worst, speculative philosophy is a lot like speculative finance, leveraging vast amounts of credit (both fiscal and metaphysical) on the basis of shaky, dubious foundations (or no foundations at all). But at its best, speculative philosophy rather resembles speculative fiction, for it cannot do without extrapolation. Speculative philosophy works, as Whitehead puts it, through “the complex process of generalizing from particular topics, of imaginatively schematizing the generalizations, and finally by renewed comparison of the imagined scheme with the direct experience to which it should apply” (Process and Reality, 16). The same might well be said of science fiction, and indeed, the line between science fiction and speculative metaphysics is often quite difficult to draw." Steven Shaviro. ‘The Universe of Things’.

   Hace 6 años 11 meses

8. Godfor Saken

   From the book “The Spectacle of the Void”, by David Peak: «Since Lovecraft, horror has increasingly been concerned with the cosmic paralysis of humanity. This paralysis is caused by the realization that the underlying problem with communication is the dilemma of understanding our place, as humans, in the universe—that incalculably large void which envelopes us all. How can we begin to understand what this means in terms of instilling horror? In his landmark text, Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson frequently references the human mind, able to comprehend its place in the universe, as being privileged with consciousness. Alternately, the more recent philosophical tendency of speculative realism attempts to overcome philosophies of access, or philosophies such as Bergson's, that privilege human consciousness over other entities. The result of this contradiction, this overlap in two very different beliefs, is what we will refer to as strangeness. How can we possibly think past our own privilege as human beings, a privilege I am exercising with the very act of this writing? That you, in turn, are exercising by reading what I've written? The argument here is for a post-communication plane of thought—for thinking without language. This would be the existence of total horror existence "understood" through the seemingly contradictory filters of an inarticulate lucidity and an articulate confusion. As Nicola Masciandaro and Gary J. Shipley write in Open Peer Commentary to Eugene Thaker’s “Cosmic Pessimism”, "That is what the world is (the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world)." There is the world and there are our statements about the world—our rhetoric—all of which are different. Correlation of consciousness and language is inherently flawed and results only in failed communication and a reinforced sense of isolation. Our attempts at letting others know the strangeness of how we feel is not so much different from the message of the drowning man in a vast ocean, his attempts at communicating his mortal peril perhaps witnessed only by the shadowy shapes beneath the waves circling their prey, interpreting the man's flailing arms and thrashing legs as something wholly different from their intended meaning. What if those great predators of the deep believe the man is waving them over, offering his body as sustenance?»

   Hace 6 años 11 meses

9. Godfor Saken

   From the book “The Spectacle of the Void”, by David Peak: « The fundamental problem of human existence is rooted in an inherent inability to communicate. That's not to say that people are unable to talk to one another. In fact, people say a great deal to one another throughout any given day, much of it meaningless and instantly forgotten. It's only when the meaning of our words—the desperation of being understood by another—is made the locus of our communication, that the problems inherent to communication become impossible to ignore: wars are waged between governing bodies over conflicting intentions (we know what's best for everyone, trust us); murders occur over simple misunderstandings, wounded pride, and bruised egos (you don't know me, how dare you); a once-safe, nurturing relationship is torn apart by the need of lovers to be both heard and understood (this is who I am, this is how I feel). This is the dilemma of being human: believing that something needs to be communicated—a feeling, a thought, an urgent message—and not being able to communicate or, having made an attempt at communication and ultimately failing, causing irreparable harm. In his book Persuasion and Rhetoric, Carlo Michelstaedter argues that language is merely determined by the senses, that any entity not "entirely at one with itself and the world," and therefore lacking what Michelstaedter refers to as "persuasion," is only able to use language as a means of maintaining a fear of death hidden yet constant. "Having nothing and able to give nothing," he writes, "[men] let themselves sink into words that feign communication, because none of them can make his world be the world of the others; they feign words containing the absolute world, and with words they nourish their boredom, making for themselves a poultice for the pain; with words they show what they do not know and what they need in order to soothe the pain or make themselves numb to it." This "poultice for the pain" is what Michelstaedter refers to as "rhetoric," or the "endless series of deceptions by which we try to convince ourselves and each other that we are persuaded." »

   Hace 6 años 11 meses

10. Godfor Saken

    «Y tanto en palabras como en la mente, la Medusa fascina en mucha mayor medida que lo que horroriza, y nos atormenta tan sólo a este lado de la petrificación. En el otro lado está lo impensable, lo jamás oído, aquello-que-nunca-debió-ser: es decir, lo Real. Esto es lo que ahoga nuestras almas con cientos de dedos, en algún lugar, quizás en aquella habitación en penumbra que nos hacía olvidarnos de nosotros mismos, ese lugar donde nos abandonábamos entre sombras y extraños sonidos, mientras nuestras mentes y palabras jugueteaban, como mascotas traviesas y estúpidas, distrayéndose de un inconmensurable desastre. La tragedia es que debemos acercarnos mucho para poder evitar este peligro. Sólo seríamos capaces de ocultarnos del horror en el mismo corazón del horror». Thomas Ligotti, “Noctuario” (editorial Valdemar).

    Hace 6 años 11 meses

11. Godfor Saken

    No se pierdan el maravilloso librito "How to Stay in Hell: Inspiring Instructions for Daily Living". La editorial lo ofrece gratis en formato pdf: https://gnomebooks.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/how-to-stay-in-hell/

    Hace 6 años 11 meses