Whence Then MAGA?

Today, thanks to late-stage capitalism, alienation and atomization has exacerbated everything, threatening the apocalypse by pushing the survival of the human species to the brink. A bullying, bureaucratized anonymity on our phones hectors us from the minute we wake until we finally close our eyes at nighttime, and it seems nothing really matters, and nobody ever really gets their comeuppance.

Mr. Robot
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Nothing Old Fashioned

Gardenna by Paul Cézanne

Like many artists who were inspired by his work, Paul Cézanne was contaminated with the malady of the modern condition – indeterminacy, which can be seen in his art. He agonized over his paintings, and revised many of his canvasses over a number of years, while others remained incomplete with blank spots. Even with scrupulous observation, Cézanne realized that he could never be certain about the details of what he was seeing and so he was unable to complete a decisive, definitive representation.

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The Post-Human in Pantheon

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Die Harder, by David Mach

One of the main reasons of conceiving my graphic novel epic Pantheon is to explore the post-human aspect of science fiction, and I felt this was the most interesting direction to take the stories of mythology towards. For me, science fiction works best when it expresses the future according to our hopes and fears, but mythology works in a different fashion – it comes from some type of a collective unconscious of the human experience. That said, a combination of both elements should be quite rich and dynamic. Continue reading The Post-Human in Pantheon

Ethics of Piracy

piracy

The other day I got into a debate on twitter about the morality of sharing ebooks. Someone was posting free copies of Roger Zelazny’s books on kindle, and I replied that I was entitled to ebooks of the printed books I own. This writer challenged that assertion and asked for an argument. I refused to engage in his Empire-inflected moralizing, that the writer owned the medium his story is printed on, and used the Ship of Theseus example to deconstruct the notion of ownership.shipoftheseusargument

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…Insomnia

Insomnia by Brian DeYoung

I’m quite interested in the possible avenues of philosophizing out of the mood of insomnia — how it shreds the so-called default state of the self — and whether insomnia can show us a more acute state of consciousness that is no longer slave to the conventional understanding of the world. Speaking from experience, insomnia helps me understand the darker aspects of existence (anxiety, angst, dread, despair, etc) and relate to writers like Beckett, Cioran. Continue reading …Insomnia

Nothing.

 

Every ‘why’ question is a subset of the ultimate question: Why is there Something and not Nothing instead? If you can think yourself and the world away, if you can say no, then you are acting in the dimension of the nothing. There is such a thing – the Nothing. We are, Heidegger says, “a placeholder of the nothing.” (What is Metaphysics, p. 38) The transcendence of human beings is therefore Nothing. Continue reading Nothing.

Existentialism in Pantheon

I had an epiphany a few days ago: the graphic novel I am working on, Pantheon, is a vampire novel. I mean, it doesn’t obviously share with many traditional elements (blood sucking, undead creatures), but they both feature immortal beings that reflect on our humanity in many ways, and most importantly in an existential fashion. Continue reading Existentialism in Pantheon

Being and Time: Part 1, Division 2

Apologies on the late addition. Hopefully it’s not too garbled, and please feel free to discuss anything that strikes your fancy!

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Dasein & Authenticity
At first Heidegger says Dasein exists. Sure, sounds great. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Heidegger claims that there’s a basic difference between being and existing. Dasein doesn’t JUST exist. It’s that ONLY Dasein exists. Other things, objects like furniture, cars, books, etc., are, but they do not exist in the strict sense of the word. Existence only comes into play with the realization of being. When a being becomes conscious of its own being, it begins to exist.  Continue reading Being and Time: Part 1, Division 2