Less Than Nothing

• Walt

  2016-12-26
  So Hegel "cannot think the symptom" insofar as we understand the Cunning of Reason in its traditional teleological sense, as a hidden rational order controlling historical contingency, manipulatively exploiting particular moments in order to realize its hidden universal goal. （重点）However, the moment we take into account the retroactivity of universal necessity--- the fact that each "use" of particular moments for some universal goal, as well as this goal itself, emerge retroactively in order, precisely, to "rationalize" the symptomal excess-we can no longer accept the Hegelian Cunning of Reason in its standard sense. In his early, Maoist-phase Theory of Contradiction, Badiou wrote: "To the nothing new-under-the-sun, the thinking of revolt opposes the ever new insurgent redsun, under th...
• 豆友58906132

  2015-05-29
  It is the difference between the human and the inhuman, or rather the post-human: while the third movement renders the human dimension at its most melancholic, the fourth movement shifts into a dimension beyond, in which a mad post-human playfulness coincides with subjective destitution.In short, the passage here is that from Romanticism to modernism. From the standpoint of the new materialism, we should also rehabilitate musical Romanticism: its basic feature is not the celebration of spiritual longing. but the gradual and painful emergence of a melody out of a struggle with the musical material. In this sense, musical Romanticism is deeply materialist: in Mozart and (most of) Beethoven, a melody is unproblematically there, simply given as the starting point for its variations, while in ...
• Walt

  2023-03-24
  It is life without theory which is gray, a flat stupid reality—it is only theory which makes it “green,” truly alive, bringing out the complex underlying network of mediations and tensions which makes it move.