On the Practical Necessity of Having Demons (Session 12)

Okay. And hello and welcome to the 12th session of on the practical necessity of having demons by Reza Nicaristani. I will give a bit of an overview of how today's session will be organized. So we will have presentations. Presentations have to be 10 minutes sharp and I'm obliged to keep it very precise so that we have time for everyone to present. After the presentations, there is a five minutes time slot for Reza to respond. And I will let you know when you have three minutes left, one minute left. During Reza's response, we cannot accommodate any other interventions by other students, but I will encourage you to share your thoughts and recommendations on the chat box, which would be very, very great. If you allow me, we will go with presentation in that order in which it was mentioned in the email.

I'll just copy paste it to chat box right now so you can take a look at it. Then, regarding video presentations, the deadline for them is Monday, so 27th of July, and they will be responded within two weeks. And then Reza will be responding to the your video presentations and then responding to the papers themselves on the rolling basis as they go. And now I'm going to pass the mic to Reza and then we will start those presentations. if you want to say about how you're gonna work with the papers and oh yes okay so I think that you know it's best to have like a schedule Skype meetings

like 20 minutes Skype meetings for each paper or video presentation where I give my feedback. This I think you know is better precisely because there might some question arise you see if I simply put the marginalia not that it it does take huge amounts of time but I have noticed that if you are simply make a comment some questions arise and they cannot be answered so because requires a lot of back and forth. So I think that going through a Skype, having a real conversation about the papers and presentations, would be much more food. And so we begin.

Okay, now if I may invite, would you like to start with a presentation? Sure. Thank you, Alexei. Thank you, Rasa. So I'll be brief. I'm going to time this. So So I didn't go that far. Basically, what I have is like a sketch of the paper. I don't have like a full-fledged idea. What I have sketched out is the following. The Flight of Reason is the scenario of the annihilation of human supremacy. I would imply that this scenario can be seen as a horror story, which narrates reason as an opening to the engulfment of an aves that can swallow voraciously any naive misconceptions,

we have temporarily dwelled in the fixity of what it means being human. This means that reason has to pierce what was so preciously kilted together under the rubric of a naturalistic fallacy in order to arrive at productive imagination. Productive imagination, I was thinking of this in the Kantian sense. via the synthetic a priori, as to dissolve any whimsical and unwavering beliefs that now work as new citizens and obstacles to yet unseen opportunities of complexification. There is a feeling of profound horror when the ground below us collapses into shards by force of reason.

We don't want to look at the entity we have just invoked. We don't want to make the pact that permits our dwindling down into the deceiving pitch black we so desperately are clawing out of time and time again. For this scenario, I have five starting points. I think that the main one was incited by a reading of Ray Brasier's account of the cold unmasking of reason in chapter two of Nihil and Bound. And I think this is particularly enlightening regarding the dissolving of the myth as it is built or brought upon the table by Adorno and Horkheimer.

but I enjoy our oldness of reason that he builds in Kant's critique of pure reason via Sellers and this would be focused on the demolishing of the eye as a fixed substance and this would lead to an artifactual eye that can traverse the flight of reason I mean what I would imply is that we would need the building of an artifactual eye in order to, let's say, lead to the path of this that is opened by reason. The third reference I have is Thomas Moynihan's Opposition of Cosmic Fictianism versus Cosmic Sadianism as a critique of the seducing morass of libidinal materialism

that allows a catastrophic fixing of the human. This means that we go back to the human, all to human via drives, flows, fluids, and decay. And I think that the critique that he builds there is also precious in that he chooses a normative building of this artifactual I in the Fichtian sense so that we can actually traverse the Avis that is open by reason. The fourth and final idea that has brought into this mix is J.G. Ballard. I think that I mentioned this in an email I wrote to you like a long time ago. J.G. Ballard, but now I was reading a text by Fisher, by Mark Fisher, where he actually highlights this cult geometry that Ballard builds and that can actually be related to the productive imagination in the Kantian sense.

Although, well, Fisher refers to this in taking it to its extremes. But I would like to focus on this interpretation that Fisher makes of Ballard via the productive imagination, focusing on the cold geometry that is enforced on the human as the space of micro-nightmares that force us of ourselves as substances. so this would be like a let's say in a big sketch like a like a free free form piece I'm actually not looking for let's say let's say like a heavily theoretical essay or paper but I would like to like postulate or bind the the idea of the gothic and terror into reason but let's say not like

you know like this is the tales of um libidinal materialism where horror overtakes the human but rather this positive uh horror that is incarnated in reason that permits us uh the flight to other possibilities of being that are not affixed to any substantiality let's say substantiality like in a naive sense. Yeah, that would be it. I think I rushed through it, but well, it's not something that is, it's not something that is like solidly built yet. It can fall apart right now with Reza's comments. So I think we can permit the butt train to begin.

I don't know. No, thank you so much. Excellent. Excellent. There are a couple of comments came to mind. Right. That's. Did you say that the political reason somehow equated with a certain kind of nihilism at the end, if I remember correctly, or not really? Not really like. Like jumping into the abyss. it's jumping to into the into an apparent abyss i mean there's an opening of the abyss but we actually have to make a pact uh so that we can see what lies in the abyss not not being engulfed by it like in a let's say like in a banal nihilistic sense but does it have actually a

nihilistic vibe, an nihilistic curve. Well, it's sort of this, yes. Yes, I think it does. But you see, the thing is that nihilism, yeah, I think that that comes, yes, okay. I see there is a certain kind of, obviously, a Brasierian thing going on in your presentation. I think I remember someone asked Ray that, so can we believe in nihilism, right? Well that is not nihilism really. That's just that kind of baneful nihilism that is usually associated with nihilism.

But nihilism of reason is not that of belief. It is really the idea that concepts are media over which no human being has a final hold. Right? And these concepts, furthermore, are being generated by, as you said, you know, what you might call to be impersonal I. as something that is being intersubjectively fabricated. It's a fabrication. So that's all good. Then you mentioned altruism, human altruism. I think that human altruism is

something that should be in fact kept. What you shouldn't actually keep in this formula is human Voluntilism. Because altruism, you can have a rational altruistic stance in terms of practical reasoning, right? Marx has it, Engels has it. This kind of nihilism that you are charting, What it doesn't allow is classical human volantilism, right? Essentially, what it takes out of the classical humanistic vocabulary, first and foremost,

is a fatty notion of the free will. Free will is just like free speech. The more you look into it, the more muddy it becomes. But taking free will doesn't mean that you are taking rational will out of this. And hence altruism can survive, but volantilism cannot. This is one of the, I was talking this a few weeks ago, that you see the term free will, particularly as an English phrase, is quite vague precisely because you do not know that

it is of the will or the will. It is of free choice, arbitrary choices that the human being can make, or something that is of the rational nature, hence unnatural. It doesn't mean it's supernatural, it's unnatural. Finally, with regard to the Ballardian, I mean, this is something that you have to expand on, the connection between power and productive imagination. To be honest with you, I think Ballard is a fundamentally conservative writer, not as a literary writer, right? It's fantastic. But essentially, Ballard turns this idea of jumping into the abyss, the rational way,

into some sort of dystopian series, molecular dystopian scenarios. these molecular dystopian scenarios are ultimately repetitive at the end. And hence, it creates a certain kind of aura around what it means to actually face the abyss. Why do I need to jump in the abyss if I cannot gain further ethical injunctions? further kinds of artificial norms. Recraft myself, recraft my society, so on and so forth. Ballard's dystopian scenario is that whatever you do,

it leads to these kinds of stuff. Three minutes. Sorry? Three minutes left. I'm keeping updated. The three minutes are left. Oh, oh, oh, oh, my apologies. So Ballard, to end this, Ballard's essentially vision of the abyss is something out of which you cannot gain any sort of emancipatory project. It is merely the self-consciousness of certain things that are going on, which might not be true. I would actually say that it's quite anti-rational at the end. So sorry.

All right. Thank you Reza. Absolutely. Federico, if you don't have any more questions, then we probably proceed. Yes. Yeah, for now I have no questions. Thank you. Okay. Then I would like to invite Nikita and Nicaev. Yeah, so I'd be starting. I was interested in the Sabine Spiele Reign discussion we had last time for a couple of reasons. well one of those is the larger framework of the seminar around raising and fighting demons of which

we thought as entities at the border of the self and the outer that can be fought in different ways and the methodology of it can bring different types of realities and communalities into being and i would be interested to try and trace the possibilities of such ethical methodology that could differ between the personal and collective experiences probably switch between them by looking at Spielrein's work and an artistic piece of a Russian artist I'm working with now which is kind of connected to the story and practice of Sabine Spielrein. So the work by this artist, his name is German Lavrovsky, he's a young Russian artist, it's

called Reborn and his project is... Would you be able to post the name on the chat Yeah, I can actually give you a link to the first phase of the project. So yeah, this work builds and documents within a variety of media relationship with a reborn doll. It is a 3D printed post-human baby which looks quite abstract and alien and interacting with this doll the artist explores questions of post-gender reproduction, queer and feminist theories of different kinds and alternative configurations of family and creates speculative

practices of emancipatory coming into being. And together with that the protocols of communicating with this reborn doll are organized in a sort of performative therapy groups with a certain protocol of communication which is based on its turn on the research of a particular experiment in earlier psychoanalysis in Soviet Union and that is the International Solidarity Orphanage Laboratory. It is an educational institution for preschool kids, which was developed by psychoanalyst Vera Schmidt, among others, and it existed in 1921-25. And Sabine Spielrein was a tutor at the orphanage, and the institution surely embraced a lot of her ideas.

and well roughly speaking the reason there was based on total acceptance of personality of the kid with no punishment and the first experiments of sex education for preschool children in the world were held there and of course there was extensive research of sexuality and death drive in early years There were no parents allowed within the kind of the jokingly part of our seminar. I can't help but mention that the son of Joseph Stalin was bred up there. It was Vasily Stalin who later became a military avate and commander of the air forces in Moscow.

So the experiment, this orphanage laboratory was closed after four years with financial difficulties and lack of expertise in working with older children. But, well, it is worth to mention that the possibility of existence of such institution at that time was, of course, conditioned by ideological necessity of breeding up a new revolutionized man. But together with that, the organization actually offered some kind of concrete methodology of creating and raising communality, avoiding trauma, and actually deconstructing all the demons of a personality in acceptance and collectiveness just from the very birth.

So I would be interested in tracing like what can be done with this kind of methodology and can it be reworked in the sense of common intelligence based on DTN's account of that. So I'd be also reading several texts and papers on the history of this particular educational institution, namely, for instance, Alexander Atkin, to the Uris of the Impossible, the history of psychoanalysis in Russia, as well as destruction as the cause of coming into being by Sbina Shpilrein. And, well, I think that is mostly the core of the work I'll be going through.

I was also thinking of probably trying to look at quite different work by John Boyd, who is a US fighter, pilot and military strategist, which is called Destruction and Creation, and which revolves around surprisingly similar ideas to ones Spielrein had, but together with that that led to or objected to absolutely different talus like forceful domination in a military way as opposed to total acceptance that Spielerin offered. So yeah, this is mostly the outline of that.

Excellent, excellent. I mean, poor you. You had to deliver paper and now again in this session. Excellent. Both excellent ones. So I don't have that much philosophical comments, but I have certain kind of trajectories that you might actually find interesting. So you see, I'm aware of these kinds of educational programs in Russia, right? I mean, Tolstoy began with I mean the essays of Tolstoy on education are magnificent. I really highly recommend them to any person who is interested in those things.

But then there is a problem that's the problem of exploitation, right? That frenzy actually brings up. So Sabina Espiral has this kind of acceptance of the demon and being destroyed by it and being recreated by it. But frenzy has a far more cynical idea, which is more on the side of what you might call to be the exploitation. That's for an early conceptual agent such as a child,

the acceptance of demon is probably not the best thing, right? The example he sites are essentially those parents, older relatives who try to play with you mommy and daddy. Under the sign of something quite innocent, they abuse the child. And through that, they exert a certain kind of psychic power inside the child's psyche, which he calls the alien will. a power so immense that it almost looks like a Cartesian evil demon, almost omnipotent,

that this demon goes into the psyche, precisely because you have accepted it, other adults are accepted in Gids, it goes and it starts to morph your psyche from inside out. By the time that you grow up, there is nothing of you anymore to have any sort of decision in how to recreate yourself. All it is is pure assurance of a destroyed ego. And he actually compares this with a volcano or a firework that once you lit it up, all

it remains next morning are dead ashes of the previous subject. So it would be great if you can actually look into these kinds of problems with regard to such educational problems because these problems do exist actually and the stories of systematic child abuse is of course one of the preneal concerns of psychoanalysis the way that how the psyche is being molded

by mere acceptance or affirmation of the demon not just by the side of the child but also on the side of adults who are dealing with the child. What was your last point? My apologies I forgot. What was your last point that you were mentioning about something with regard to Atkins. Something. Sorry, we forgot to what? Who was the last person that you mentioned? Probably John Boyd. Oh, yes, yes. What was it? You made a point with regard to that. Would you be

able to... Well, his work Destruction and Creation is kind of mirroring in a way, I know, almost metaphorical, but still the moves that... Oh yes, yes, okay, I got it. My apologies. That was a suggestion that I wanted to say. You brought the military stuff and the stuff about conning intelligence, Matisse, Detienne and Bernot. One thing that you might actually find very interesting if you don't know about it is the Three Ties on the Psychological Warfare, that Paul Leinbarger basically called Wainer Smith. That is a magnificent book

with regard to these kinds of ideas of psyops, creating a demon, which doesn't fundamentally dominate a person, but just like alien will, creates a new person, a person that can never be reconstructed. It's called Psychological Warfare. The writer of it is famous sci-fi novelist, Kurt Weiner-Smith. Again, thank you very much. Yeah, thank you so much.

Okay. Then I would like to invite Avrim, Thank you. My presentation is on Reza's article titled, Differential Cruelty, A Critic of Ontological Reason in Light of the Philosophy of Cruelty, which is published in Angelaki in 2009. Let me first briefly tell you why I'm interested with this work. I'm recently working on a paper on the concept of a positive and affirmative mode of domination in Deleuze. However, this idea is mainly found in Deleuze's early reading of Nietzsche in his book Nietzschean

Philosophy, while his later works either abruptly abandon this theme or transform it so radically that it becomes hard to discern. So Reza's article is a good opportunity to develop this theme again. What is interesting in Deleuze's early reading of Nietzsche is that domination becomes the very locus of the core Deleuzean themes such as affirmation, difference, and creation. Whether we look from the point of view of established morality or from a politically correct or left-wing perspective, domination is a negative and a bad thing or something like an evil or demonic act that should be avoided.

We know domination to be the very exercise of state apparatus and that it is exerted upon working classes, women, children, minorities, etc. However, Deleuze's strategy is to take domination from the hands of state apparatus and determine it as the exercise of active or life-affirming forces or reactive or nihilistic forces. If we were to look deep into the origin of existence or into being qua being, we would encounter an intricate mixture of forces dominating or being dominated. It is thus impossible to have an affirmative, differentiating, and creative vision of existence without learning how to dominate the reactive forces that are by nature submissive.

In this respect, what gives rise to the victory of nihilism is not domination itself, but the absence of domination, so that reactive forces separate from active forces and begin to have an autonomous life. Perhaps the most controversial and provocative move that Deleuze makes in Nietzschean philosophies to connect this affirmative mode of domination to the very phenomenon of torture. Deleuze portrays immense tortures, fulfilling the history as ways of training and dominating reactive forces, with the objective to create the free, active, and powerful man. Even the worst of all human actions contains some sort of blind inclination towards affirming

life and eliminating reactive forces. This is precisely the point where Reza's reading of Deleuze becomes relevant for my work. In Differential Cruelty, Reza aims to reconstruct Deleuze's project of attaining difference in itself, or determination as such, from the point of view of the philosophy of cruelty. Moreover, he argues that the deeper tendency of Deleuze's work is not towards saving difference from being subordinated to the same or to a regime of representation, as generally believed in Deleuze's scholarship, but the discovery of a new mode of cruelty. Reza is thus pushing Deleuze towards the direction of a radicalized cruelty for his own purpose

of constructing what he calls a speculative ethics of justice. It is also important to note that Reza doesn't directly refer to Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche, as I want to do in my own projects, but constructs his theory of cruelty by restricting himself to a large extent to Deleuze's difference on repetition. However, the concepts Reza deals with are ones that Deleuze develops directly as a continuation of his previous reading of Nietzsche. For example, the distinction between affirmation and negation are obviously taken from Nietzsche again, but also the concepts of intensity and extensity that Reza refers to can be said to be the transformed versions of the active-reactive distinction.

In short, we can read Reza's account of Deleuze as a contribution to Deleuze's early project of developing an affirmative vision of domination. So Reza's whole strategy depends on reconstructing Deleuze's discussion of determination and difference on the model of torture. It can be regarded as an exploration of Deleuze's early reference to torture. The example he gives is a torture made by the king of Etruscans. What Etruscans did was that they firmly tied the living soldiers of the neighboring territories to dead bodies. And they are tied in such perfect symmetry that the living soldier and the dead body

are brought face to face, mouth to mouth, hand to hand, and leg to leg. As time passes, the dead body decomposes and the living soldier dies by the effect of its rotting and putrefaction. According to Reza, this is where we can find determination or difference in itself in its most naked form. It is impossible for a determination to take place without at the same time exerting the kind of cruelty find in the Etruscan model of torture. One of the senses of cruelty is that it triggers an irreversible and irreplaceable process. Besides, it doesn't have an end, it cannot be terminated.

This is what makes the process truly cruel. One of the conceptual distinction Reza refers to in difference on repetition is between intensity and extensity. According to Reza's interpretation, the soul takes place in between the dead body, this purely material and horrible object, and the nose, which, as you know, refers to intellect or understanding in Greek. On the one hand, soul relates with its inner parts or its nose, which constitutes the intensive and necessary activity. On the other hand, and as a consequence of this more original moment, soul proceeds towards the outside, which is its extensive activity and which is exemplified in its being tied to the dead body.

As is well known, one of Deleuze's lifelong projects is to explain how negation can be subordinated to affirmation, or to speak with the words of his early reading of Nietzsche, how reactive forces can be dominated by active forces. The model of at-risk contorture can thus be seen as a certain answer to how this domination takes place. The affirmative and intense inward movement is precisely the instance which is able to rule negation. However, this original affirmative movement demands for a second binding, which is not the dead body, which is not to the dead body, but to the very abyss or the pure void of existence. According to Reza, this shows that what is even deeper than the distinction

between intensity and extensity is the one between two systems of cruelty, which constitutes two different modes of bondage. By way of contraction or a pendular movement, a vibration or an oscillation happens between these two realms of cruelty. This forms a necessary bondage to the two realms of death, namely the dead body and the void to which nothing can belong and which belongs to nothing. And this is such a radical necessity that it is even superior to the correlation between being and necessity. This at the same time brings us to the ancient question

of being qua being, which Reza argues that it has not been solved or even paused in a way that reminds us of Heidegger. These two modes of bondage give answer to the question of what determines being and life or to the problem of understanding the vitality or being of the soul. In order to grasp how they are determined or in order to pose the question of being qua being, we should first perform an act which is necessarily cruel. One should exerted violence over the soul in order to grasp what determines it is the living entity. And since determination is different as such, we might say that no affirmation, differentiation,

and creation is possible without first a certain domination is exerted over the soul. Yeah, this is the end of my presentation. This was definitely one of the most intense and an unorthodox piece of writing I read on Deleuze, and I'm aware that I have oversimplified it maybe in this very short time minutes, but I hope I could give a sense of what I'm trying to do. And finally, I have a question that I asked myself and I'm not sure how relevant it is, but it is about the concept of the eternal return. Since this concept is eternal return is very central in difference and repetition,

and in particular with regards to the distinction between intensity and extensity, but also with regards to the emergence of something new and the future itself. I wonder how the ethical mode of cruelty that you are trying to develop might be related to the eternal return. This is just something in my mind. Yeah. Sure, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think the best point was that, you know, when you were talking about forces of domination, the absence of domination is Nealism, right, right, precisely because, you know, you can think about it by way of so many philosophers. That's

the task of determination is at the same time a proactive force of the domination and also a force that determines hidden forms of domination which are merely passed on as passive forces, right? Or the absence of such forces. So there is a kind of a double bind here. It's not just Nietzsche. I mean, you can see it in Freud, you can see it in Marx, you can see it in Descartes, so on and so forth. Plato, in fact, Plato,

that any source of act of determination, I wouldn't call it the act of understanding, right? Because I would actually call it, as Federico was talking about, productive imagination. In fact, the etros contorture can be a metaphor for productive imagination. imagination have something of the body and something of the understanding. But nevertheless, every sort of act of determination, such as for example detecting forces of exploitation,

is itself an act of cruelty. It might not be exploitation, but it's an act of cruelty. an act of cruelty that many philosophers think that it is the fundament of ethics and justice. It's simple as that, that no, Plato is thinking, become a little bit confused with regard to the terms thinking and determination and so on and so forth. So they actually go on to the end with this. They say that every thought, every form of thinking is an act of cruelty, which is necessary.

Right? So that thinking or that determination is proactive. And it is the only warmth that can bring to light to the foreground of intellects passive acts of cruelty or exploitation. One minute. Yes. Okay. That was, I think one thing that's, with regard to the heteroscom torture, you see that obviously there is this kind of mirror image of me and me in the future, the body

and the soul. Both are chained together and having a bondage between them. The thing is that this renders quite something interesting that with the problem of demonology, is it mind that being infected by a defiled body or is it that body is being possessed by an outside mind? Which renders a question that's a premium question of philosophy that we don't know which one is which. One second, one last thing.

This is a good one. This is a good one. So Descartes actually never says what is a body or what is a mind and which of them are actually being possessed by a demon. Precisely because he starts to question, what is this thing that I think of? It doesn't talk about mind or body, the thing. So it becomes, it starts from a hypothesis. Okay, my apologies. Sorry. I'm going to turn off my camera. I'm going to get some juice, but I will listen. So start. I would like to invite Georgia. Hi.

I am going to share my screen. So perhaps Reza should be able to see the screen in order to follow. follow up. Do you want me to wait to come back or? No, no, no, no, no, no. You start, you start. I just stopped my video. I will look at the screen share. Maybe do another presentation that doesn't have screen share now and then. Can you see? Yes. So, it is pretty vague at this moment, but I'm going to pinpoint the basic axis.

So, I will begin with handling the term logos, which in Greek has a dual interpretation. So, on the one hand, it has to do with speech and words, and it functions as a contrast between what is being said and what is actually real. It can be understood as an equivalent of statement, reference, mention, promise, answer, spread word, or traditional command or event. That is the first aspect of the word. But in Greek, the same word has a different aspect, which actually equals to the cause or reason behind things. So the same term assists us to navigate through the course of causality and it is equivalent

to justification and accountability. So my question is that for the first interpretation of the word, there is the theory of infinite and limited simiosis that guarantees us the impossibility behind establishing like a perfect extraction of meaning. But my question is if this also equals for the second aspect of this world, about the impossibility of rational thinking, of reasoning. And I'm thinking of it in terms as equal to a mass hysteria condition. And lately I have been working for my diploma and I have stepped onto a text that I have

written a long time ago. I'm going to read it to you. It goes as follows. They danced together ceaselessly for hours or days and in wild delirium. The dancers collapsed and fell to the ground, exhausted, groaning and sighing as if in the agonist of death. In sociology and psychology, mass hysteria is a phenomenon that transmits collective illusions of threats, whether real or imaginary, through a population in society as a result of rumors and fear, obsessive dancing manias, unstoppable painstaking laughter, outbreaks of screaming, collective panic, reactions of a commonly searched subconscious that every now and then synchronizes its constituents into individualities as if to reboot them. Supposedly clear borders protect each polarized individuality of the admitted suggestion between

the mind and the body. There are rational illustrations of madness and mild illustrations of rationality. There is supposed to be a clear distinction between a healthy isolated core and a pathological divided one. There are supposed to be 16 types of personality, broad enough to fit us, and 10 inputs that judge us. attempts to simulate the weirdest organ of them all, the one that is both physical and what, what else, imaginary, mental, non-physical. Delusional paintings by asylum inmates or agonizing abstraction of the soul by experts of the field are inverted narratives of the one and common question, what is real, what is unreal, and how do we protect ourselves from their

in-betweenness. So at this point it becomes pretty clear that my concern is about this in between us. And from the one side of this in between us, we have mad representations of personality, like geometrical representations of the human soul from all the texts, like statistical distributions that try to fit each personality on a single scheme, abstract diagrams from the experts of the field, the inputs, and even taxonomies between words that try to justify our categorization inside this real regional thinking.

And on the other hand of the in-betweeners, we have rational representations of madness, like engineering blueprints from inmates that describe to the every time they did their delusions or frank writing, writing they say or even relentless diaries from Robert Seals that created this diary which described what happened in his life every five moments or even masterpieces of literature that invent words with like 100 letters in order to pass the meaning from the writing. So, the next notion is catastrophe, catastrophe, which also happens

to have a dual meaning. The first meaning is the disaster, the mayhem, to dissolve something in such a way that it no longer is, it equals to damage, alteration, annihilation, disorganization or disillusion. But catastrophe, according to the etymological breakdown of the word in Greek also means to turn something around, to align something according to the desired direction. It consists of kata and strefo, which translates to turn something towards something else. So catastrophe can also become creation. And this is a point that I would like to focus my research on. I don't know if this is going to be like a traditional paper. I'm thinking of turning into a diagrammatical representation of language, because I think it is also aligned with what

we have already discussed in this course about the engineering nature of this whole field of demons, ethics, self, etc. So yes, I will try to resort to this diagrammatical function of language or metaphor or in general representation in order to try to discover the demons that lie at the end behind communication and exchange and meaning creation and of course self-formation. So that's all for me. Superb. Magnificent diagram first and foremost. Excellent talk.

Thank you. I actually would love all of you to actually, if you can, write a paper of these things and send it to me. Because there is things that ought to be unpacked and that can only happen through feedback and stuff going back and forth. So you see, as I was mentioning with Descartes' demon, that Descartes' demon is someone that is immensely powerful, right?

It's not omnipotent, though, precisely because it cannot, according to Descartes, for example, infect mathematics or mathematical thoughts. It can target anything that is about sensation and understanding, which the middle ground is the productive imagination, Kant's general name for understanding. And coming back to the body and soul, the contamination between the two, mind and body, and are demons of both categories, Descartes thinks that we should think about this whole

scenario of being possessed by a demon in this kind of philosophical set-up between sensation and understanding as a hypothesis with little bit premises, the smallest amount of premises. And that's why it was mentioned just now that his first question is that he refers to I as a thing, not mind or body, but the thing, because that's the least amount of presence that you need. This also happens in Plato's divided line, which you were talking about the in-between

Plato thinks that all maladies and all that is good, good in a very trivial sense, good for a person, is actually come from that which is good. That's a kind of paradoxical situation. maladies and everything that is good for the life, good living of a good living or a good mind comes from that which is the good. So what is the good in Plato? The good in Plato is essentially the systematic way that body and mind, sensation and logical

forms or reason are not just understanding. Sensation and reason hang together, and there are different phases of intermediation between the two. Understanding is not reason. Understanding is not rationality actually. But Plato's understanding, just like Descartes and Aristotle, can be infected either positively or negatively because it's an intermediary phase between the power of reason and sensations. Now Descartes actually goes further with this with regard to so

So even reason might be infected according to the icon. The only reason that reason is not getting infected, contaminated, defiled by a demon, is precisely because reason is always being accompanied by will. Three minutes left. By will. So that's one point. Second point, with regard to rational representations of madness, I mean, yes, of course, rational representations of madness, but that's, I would say that it's just a rational in a very trivial

sense precisely because it belongs the history, the historical moments of rationality rather than rationality as an engine. Rationality can create its own creative madness without actually considering it as if it is something defiled, as if something possessed or demonic. I mean, Foucault critique, I think is completely right, precisely because what he does, he doesn't actually attack rationality, he's a social rationalist, right? What he does actually attack

are these historical representations of rationality, which hold over the distinction between being mad and being healthy, being this and being that, according to the social or legal norms, which are actually produced by precisely these kinds of historical norms. He doesn't actually criticize rationality as such, because otherwise, if you do criticize rationality as a core engine, what you have is a complete, as Descartes would have said, is a complete conflation or aligning distinction between being yourself and being a demon.

One minute. being mad and being in a most common sensical way and being not mad. Rationality for these people, Plato, Descartes, is a form of, as I mentioned, both detecting certain forms of madness that reason itself has given rise to historically but also creating experiments with itself for the sake of its own maturation madness is one of them Thank you Reza, the time is up

We have enough in our class today Sorry, I have to do it No, don't worry I would like to invite Martina. Hey, hi. Quite abrupt. Sorry, Georgia, for that. I'm going to offer a very small presentation of Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch, which I thought was something interesting to... My apologies, because I caught you. You were caught one woman. What was the name of person? Silvia Federici. okay okay yeah so i'm going to be talking a little bit about caliban and the witch contrary to the view propagated by the enlightenment the witch hunt was not the

last spark of a dying feudal word the dark ages were not bearers of hatred against magic the very concept of witchcraft did not appear until the second half of the middle ages and never were there must trials and execution despite the fact that practice of animism and sorcery were a daily affair. In the 7th and 8th centuries, the crime of maleficium, literally the doing of evil, was codified as law, as it had been during the Roman Empire. But at this time, only magical practices were punished that inflicted damage to persons and things. The situation rapidly evolved, as by the second half of the 15th century, during a time of chaos, plagues, and the incipient feudal crisis, witch trials were introduced as a

habitual component of life into the collective consciousness. There and then, the doctrine of witchcraft was declared a form of heresy and the highest crimes against God, nature, and the state. Peculiarly, the writing of these treaties of witchcraft culminated on the eve of Colaba's voyage with a publication in 1486 of the infamous Malius Maleficarum. It was during the mid-16th century, in the very decades in which European colonizers were capturing and annihilating the American populations, that the hunt for witches became a common enactment of violence and the initiative for their massacre was, almost by a tacit agreement, performed by countries often at war against each other. In this unprecedented bifurcation of the exercise of force,

the otherwise was shattered all at once in one big sweep. What transpires from the accurate protocol that surrounded female persecution is also a confirmation that the impulse towards punishment was not a rural bottom-up endeavor. Rather, it proceeded up the ladder of indoctrination and demonic fear-mongering from secular and religious authorities alike. Magistrates, jurists and demonologists, whose roles were often collapsed into the same figure, contributed to the persecution in the maximum degree. Throughout the century that birthed the modern science and saw the figure of the genius take hold over the public domain, thinking for example the Copernica revolution, witchcraft became a common topic of discussion

amongst European intellectual. It can then be said that the enterprise of the witch hunt was in itself the first gestural signpost of a unified Europe. The essential kernel of witchcraft which separates it from heresy is that it deployed the feminization of evil as its war machine. The list of arguments to justify disposition against women include claims of insatiable lust, moral and mental weakness, sexual perversion and infanticide. A bit largely reflexive of the time, these hypotheses do not fully account for the institutional and economic context, characterised by a preoccupation with a decline in population due to plague and malnutrition and in search for an ultimate culprit to perform its relief.

Having taken notice of the rise of the female personality of the rebel that had developed across the struggle against feudal power, the ruling class proceeded to its obliteration The female assembly, which had foregrounded a lot of heretical thought, had to be expunged Purpose of the language of the witch hunt was to produce the woman as the otherwise, a category of the outside, further epitomized by the disturbing identification between female sexuality and bestiality Against the backdrop of the formation of a new renaissance canon that had started worshipping reason and dissociating the human from the corporeal, animals too were subjected to a brutal devaluation, so that this correlation to bestiality could be deployed as a ferocious dehumanizing technique.

the implication of the woman with the beast puts her in a position of mathematical lack where man is one and woman is less than one and is a sign of a numerology that seems to be inextricably linked to the exercise of gendering a quota not to be exceeded the same quota of being participates in and is constitutive of the equation of value as denise de ferrera de silva puts her in their essay on matter beyond the equation of value. And is the foundational cipher, the later instantiated Kant's scientific program and its attendant impasse, a problem not of variables, but of a universal unit of measurements and classification, which is to say, whiteness and manhood. Across the text, a similar calculation

punctuates the binary structure of the folk healer versus the doctor, raising the question of what role might the development of modern science have played in the years of the persecution. This new science, in fact, adds not a liberating effect from the domain of the archaic fabulation. Rather, the regulation and reduction of nature as a law-abiding sequence of occurrences disenchanted the world in order to dominate it. Like other many capitalist events, the witch hunt is an instance in which going back and stepping forward coincide and collapse. In it, the call for science and a nostalgia for the return to the archaic conditions, move side by side to annihilate the effigies of the present. This context makes the woman, in the world of Isabel Senghor's, a milieu that does not answer

a scientific demand. As the humanist project and its ancillary anthropocentric proposition failures and their movement along the gradients of gender, race and class are exposed, witch hunt is revealed as a necropolitical tool of a war waged against attraction that women are gained by virtue of their sexuality, their authority of reproduction, and their ability to heal. That's it. Martino, many, many thanks. Fantastic. So now I have some comments.

Yeah. This is something, yes, I know that a lot of material, wealth of material, have been written by both Marxists and philosophers of science, mostly of the continental tradition, about witchcraft, there was a certain kind of demonization, or casting to the outside of female gender. But there are actually quite good historical evidence

but that wasn't just the cause of it. In fact, the church, you see, you had in fact magic and experimental sciences going hand in hand in higher scholasticism. But the thing is that, what is interesting is that what for them was not really an issue, was not really that much witchcraft, magic, experimentation and stuff. You could do this, but however, if those kinds of magic or experimentations were impinging

upon the Aristotelian natural sciences, which was actually sanctioned by the Church, such as a problem of induction, then you would have been in a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble. So I think that there is a... So this is the context that certain kinds of, of, you know, as a result of this historical, you know, using strictly the kind of natural sciences or even logical sciences of the time, magic started to propagate in all sorts of

way. But then, so why isn't then basically female genders were basically targeted? Obviously, historians think that it was a good example of a scapegoating. Because even because majority of, for example, bishops in Paris's school were absolutely exercising the same kinds of practices. Why is it they didn't burn

at a stake, they were basically rising through the ranks back then. So that's one, something that you can consider to also address. Then I say that the project of Enlightenment, classical enlightenment, yes, was a disenchantment project. But I wouldn't go so far jumping the gun as saying that disenchantment project is a dominating project. If carefully observed, I would say that it is an emancipatory project.

You see, the Darwin project, I'm not talking about neo-Darwinism, these kinds of social Darwinism, the Darwin disenchantment project led to anything in its own context, a specific context, other than enlightenment, which had massive amounts of emancipatory potentials within Marx, within communism, within culture, so on and so forth. I think disenchantment becomes a problem when it is understood as the opposition to enchantment,

to enchantments, right? In the sense that, for example, the very idea of human is a cypher, is a cypher. And people think that if you disenchant it simply, you are contributing to it. No, there should be a certain kind of a double movement with that to construct decipher. You cannot simply disenchant that which is given to you, you have to construct something. But that construction should not be so easily equated to enchantments either. So I think that double movements of construction and disenchantment was actually missing in

the original enlightenment, precisely because, as I mentioned, the original enlightenment was primarily a response to the theological background of natural sciences back then. But then it became issue of politics, economy, social stuff. Two minutes. Two minutes, okay, two minutes. Then, now you see, so you said women and reproduction. This is something that is a very sensitive topic, of course, but you know, we are philosophers. We are supposed to talk about sensitive topics.

So if reproduction is actually a designation for a woman, then what happens to our trans friends? you know that there is a certain kind of artificiality about gender artificiality that ought to be enhanced in fact rather than uh turned turned back into nature yes i can understand the reproduction uh the stuff but then that would be a kind of you know what I'm afraid of this kind of stuff. The comment about reproduction, reproduction kind of entails like a role of care.

Yes, okay. Norturing. In a position in regards to the formation of the family and the education of the children. Top notch. Okay, it doesn't necessarily only require the birthing of the child. Yes, I think that I would say that maybe you should actually do explain this a little bit because then you will run into the problem of being JK Rowling, right? I mean, these kinds of stuff you see these subtleties ought to be explained not just because they are important

but because they are actually leading ideas for a new generation okay i think we have to end here i would like to invite regis Okay, thanks Alexei. I'm without the camera because my connection is not that good. So if you want this, you want to listen to me, please. Would you be able to increase your microphone level just a little bit? microphone. Yeah, maybe I can try to use the microphone from the computer. That's much better.

Like not like this. Are you hearing me well? Yes, thank you so much. Much appreciated. Okay. So, um, um, I couldn't do really a presentation. I just wrote some ideas because I had some issues last week and I already did a good research for my presentation in the last session. So I, I'll just present these ideas and I'll be very glad to hear from Reza and anyone who wants to comment. So, and some people asked for me to upload my presentation and probably I think it's

better for me to upload my essay because I will develop my presentation to the essay and it will be far better after I can upload my essay in the classroom, Google classroom or something. So first, the title I thought for my presentation, for my essay, sorry, it will be the Modern Prometheanism and its Demons, the Russian Lesson or the Russian Znilism Lesson. But lesson is not a good term. So I'm thinking of that. Probably I'm going to begin with Brassier's defense of Prometheanism against Heideggerian ontologization of finitude. Prometheanism's temporality introduces for Brassier a disequilibrium

in the natural order between man and God, between what is made and what is given. that ontological finitude wants to avoid. Yes, as Brassier puts it, the Promethean trespass resides in making the given for this ontologization of finitude. And any attempt to disregard the givenness of finitude of death and suffering will lead to terror and pure destruction as the actualization of the absolute. So this will be the kickstart for my essay. and I will address Russian nihilism because Bolshevik revolution and mostly the history of the Russian nihilist movement that precedes it usually are

considered the highest points of Promethean terror and annihilation I would like to evaluate to what extent the Russian nihilist movement of the 19th century was really Promethean by recovering the Hegelian influence on these movements and in Russian 19th century thought. Our focus on their account of negativity as the historical destructive force of creation. It seems that a projective account of the Hegelian radical retrospective philosophy of history already put forward by left Hegelianism is on the basis of the nihilist terrorism and its impossibility to think of thinking the future in non-negative terms. There's a temporality based on the political actualization of the absolute

that would justify terrorism as a means to achieve and to maintain power since this actualization is always postponed in the future, substituting the role previously performed by the kingdom of heaven in Christianity. To point this temporality is not the same as pointing at a ground against the idea of global transformation. It is not a liberal point that I want to make, but my aim is to highlight that the presupposed conception of absolute to be historically actualized departs from a misconception of the Hegelian absolute, a conception of absolute that springs from the understanding and not from reason in Hegel's terms. Although the negative powers of

understanding the fundamental aspect of Hegelian absolute and reason so that nihilism and terror has a place in it and I will develop more this in the say also. I chose a quotation from Zizek from his last book on Hegel and his conception of the one that I'm thinking of in relation to the absolute. So I'm going to read it. So Zizek says that it is not a Hegel subordinates inconsistencies and antagonisms to some higher unity. It is on the contrary that for Hegel identity, the unity of the one is a form of self differentiation. Identity is difference brought

to the extreme of self-relating. The unity of the one is not permanently threatened by cracks and inconsistencies. The unity of the one is the crack as such. What this means is that Hegelian totality is paradoxical, inconsistent, but not critical in the sense of resisting the power center. Hegel is not the critical thinker. His basic instance, his basic stance is that of Reconciliation, not risk reconciliation as a long term goal, like the right Hegelians, like the right Hegelianism thought. But reconciliation as a fact which confronts us with the unexpected bitter truth of the actualized ideal. If there is a Hegelian motto,

It is something like find the truth in how things go wrong. The message of Hegel is not the spirit of trust, the title of Brandon's latest book on Hegel's phenomenology, but rather the spirit of distrust. His premise is that every large human project goes wrong and only in this way attests to its truth. And I would say that Hegel wants superior forms of corruption, like Shen of Femme manifesto says. And so the problem is the justifying temporality of nihilists and Bolsheviks or Stalinists and diamet material, dialectical materialism which assumes an absolute that is itself free

from contradiction, negativity and split and host actualization is always postponed to the future. That's what Camus correctly criticizes in his book, The Revolted Man. And I want to have a dialogue with this book in my essay. But Camus rejects Prometheanism as anything that resembles historical actualization of the absolute. My hypothesis will be that it is possible to reclaim a Prometheanism in agreement with Hegel, one that doesn't fall into the illusion of an absolute without contradiction to be realized what would be an absolute of the understanding so a prometheanism without any mission messianism

one whose emancipation is not bound with a projection of the paradise into the future but as a continuous process of dialectical destructive creation conforming to the true project of the Enlightenment. So the sketch of my essay, the structure, will follow partially my presentation. It will start with a political historical introduction to the influence of German idealism, mainly Hegel and left Hegelianism, in the nihilist movement of the 60s and 70s in the of the 19th century Russia, both in thought and action. I will develop what was very condensed in my presentation, the influence of Hegel in the first generation of thinkers,

like in Belinsky, Herzl and Bakunin, and then in the next generation of proper nihilists like Tchanshevsky, Pisarev and others. I'll continue the presentation of the actions of the revolutionary nihilists in the 60s and the 70s and their relation to Bakunin and the Hegelianism of the previous generation. I will briefly sketch the influence of nihilism on Lenin in his account of Hegel idealism to end with the proper discussion on of what I said already. On nihilist temporality and Hegelian absolute in relation to Prometheanism. So yeah, I think that's it.

Reza, you are muted. My apologies. Many, many thanks. I would actually love to read this essay. I'm drooling, sorry. Because I have so much stuff to talk about. It's because, you know, it's something that I am very interested in. Um, so I don't know where to start. Uh, yeah, for example, yes. So there are really good bits here, uh, like negative power of understanding. Yes. Understanding, as I mentioned, is always negative. And it is always what you might call to be the organome of the problem of demonology.

Why? Precisely because understanding has sense perception, lived experience in it. So understanding situates between senses and reasons, and obviously it is the most fragile task, the most fragile task, and it can be in any sort of either negative or positive way to be infected, right? by negative demons, positive demons, and so on and so forth, precisely because it tries to bring together two fundamentally homogeneous and perhaps even opposing poles, sensation

and reason, body and mind, or form, structure. With regard to Hegel, I would say that, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. I would say that, ah, that was a little bit of an ungenerous reading of Hegel. I would say... Three minutes. Three, three minutes is sufficient for this. I would say that the greatest reader of Hegel is actually Marx. The rest, all of these people who were cited, can be actually seen as the bad or perhaps

the worst readers of Hagor. And the source for that is that very section on Sain's Acts, Maxis Turner, the most escaping. assault ever launched by a person on an opponent. So you mentioned then that Hegel is fundamentally against this kind of, that every grand project goes wrong or goes awry. Yes, but that's what absolute is important. Absolute is not the same kind of thing some of these people like Bakunin and Rache Niel

think. Absolute is essentially a kind of speculative suspension of the immediate affairs by way of a certain kind of what you might call to be universal method from which we cannot actually a step back, we have to use it always retroactively, hence historically. And that absolute is what Brandon calls the link between suspicion and trust. So yes, from the perspective of immediate affairs, every grand project will fail.

But if that is the case, then why is that Hegel or Marx, as a great reader of Hegel, proposed the communist hypothesis, precisely because they think by way of absolute, that the ultimate means that we have, the ultimate scenario that we have is the dialectics between suspicion and trust, and not merely trust or suspicion, because that wouldn't be history, that would be just the immediate state of affairs. Thanks Reza. Just a comment, an idea I want to put, and maybe I want to develop it later,

because not only Marx obviously is the best reader of Hegel by far in the 19th century, but not as a reader of Hegel, but I think Dostoyevsky has a real Hegelian accent, a real Regalian accent, not like Pizzarev and... Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I will develop it later. But this is more like a mature Dostoyevsky after he comes from Goulart, right? Yeah. And that's why he actually thinks that there is a certain thing good that he took all those kind of nihilist looking, Russian nihilist looking actions and he was humiliated. He saw

the whole nightmare and then he's actually laying down a certain kind of you know thesis about history yes okay we have to move now I would like to invite someone here said someone here said I'm the best reader of Hegel who is that show your face coward I will have time for this at the end Jonathan, please. Jonathan Leinstein, Yes. Hi, thanks for having me. I'm going to share my screen with you guys. Jonathan Leinstein, Can everyone hear me and see the text and an appropriate size. Jonathan Leinstein, Yes, thank you. So the title my presentation is science deliver me from Phil's bring forth more fields. And so I'm going to run through three artists projects and I'm going to try and

Jonathan Leinstein, Sort of string along and you construct some of the text that we've talked about throughout the course. So with case one, the problem of defilement. So I'm following the work of a Miko Iwa From a 2018 project. So this is an ongoing presentation of images, lectures and published essays by Miko Iwa Her project considers ways that fecal microbiota transplant FMT would be integral for a more chemically balanced transition of trans bodies. So the procedure is quite ancient dating back to traditions in India and China involving the oral or suppository consumption of fecal matter. When the artist presented the work alongside her collaborator, the audience partook in a faux yellow soup ceremony. The name given to fermented stool teas set to treat abdominal illnesses that date back to the herbalist practices of fourth century Chinese physicians.

A healthy tummy is a shitty tummy. So fecal transplant used alongside, I was going to remove that, I thought, but I thought it was really funny, so I'm keeping it. So fecal transplant used alongside hormone replacement therapy would introduce the missing microbiota that come natural to cis bodies. And actually this line, I'm just responding to some of these very cute drawings and stickers that Umi has used. And in this study, so she's also publishing essays in biological journals. And so she's using an early study where they did this fecal transplant procedure on mice and they found that for male mice, young male mice, it resulted in this super high dosage of testosterone and this then became a the testosterone levels were maintained for the duration of their life. So this actually has kind

of a huge consequences, I think, for trans life and bodies and health, etc. So I would first be using the art of viroth. So there are inexhaustible entries of menstruation and sodomy in the Sori Austrian text. But we have to recall that these are primarily prohibitions that are based on hygienic properties that haven't been properly resolved. So if douching technology or the diva cups were present in the ninth century, then the limitations of those zones of defilement would have been stated differently. If the limits are known, science should be able to deliver us from filth. And so this is where I borrow the title of the paper. And the term biohacking isn't quite appropriate for me. I want to avoid this term because there's something about pollution that isn't, I think, being articulated well enough. And neither, I think, so object-oriented ontologies are likewise, I think, poorly situated to handle

this topic. Moving on into case two, cheese or self-sufficient cannibalism. I'm using a biological kind of artist biosynthetic project by Christina Agapes. She's a biologist and she worked, she collaborated with a number of artists and designers for this work self-made from 2013. So cheese colonies from human microbiota were taken from scholars and thinkers. It includes bacteria derived cheese made from the tears of Olafur Eliasson and the nose of Hans Ulrich Oberst. Just a small aside, when I showed this project to a religious friend of mine, he said that it was the work of the devil. This created this big rupture in our friendship because he didn't know what kind of art I was into and this really upset him. Since day one, I've had

that episode in my mind and just wondering how I would have responded and I feel like now after this class I have a better idea. But anyway, so often it is in the excess of human use and work that evil is found. There's an essay by Foucault on a formality that I'm sort of borrowing here, but in this essay, so he provides an example of a hermaphrodite. So after the 17th century, hermaphrodites were punished not for any biological alterity, but for exercising their second sex. So he mentions the case of Marie Lamarcus, who was only denounced when Marie decided to live as a man to wed a widow. So there's something here about, I think, the corporeality of sin and where we are finding it that I'm interested in. And I just got this The Cheese and the Worms book that has sort of come up in class.

I'm still running through it, but it's really interesting. but there's something here that I think perhaps could relate to like the eternal return and sort of Agapes's project really relating really well to Minocchio's cosmology of how the earth and the earth is formed. But I'm still sort of trying to resolve that. But to get to I think the locability of sin and here I would be using some of Agostin's confessions. So there's an interesting takeaway from the confessions about the location of sin as a child. The quote is, what then was my sin? Was it that I hung upon the breast and cried? And the cause appears to be partly a corporeal limitation, the weakness then of infant limbs, not its will, it's innocence.

And adulthood is what typically corrects the crippling innocence of weak limbs, and why someone crying for food is more profane in adulthood. Quote, for should I now so do for food suitable to my age, justly should I be laughed at and reproved. So the evil of the envious child can't be found in testimonial or their inner memory. Quote, who reminded me of the sins of my infancy? It can only be tested through the sight of others, like the observations of mothers and nurses who can confirm that they have observed the bitter resentment of children under their care. But what we are, I think, being held to a higher standard of sight here that perhaps is being, isn't being articulated. He says, quote, for in thy sight, none is pure from sight, from sin, not even the infant.

And my postulation here is I think maybe Augustine's mistake is that he can't see that this is our sight as well, that we can change thy eyes. And I think that this reasoning is partly some of Minocchio's heresy as well, that we have the gifts of God within us. And so this conversation about sight, which I also sort of want—I mean, Resta, you've brought up, I think, examples of optics as they're explored in the Middle Ages and even sort of before that. And so then I want to talk about that through Project 3, Animalized Eyes, Annie-Laurie Erickson's Maunder Minimum, in which she made an artificial retinal membrane using 3D mapping of her eye.

And actually, I think it was both her eye and her collaborator. So this robotic eye is actually a combination of two different eyes. And then the images were made on sort of hydropolymer material that included, that has embedded these crystal particles of strontium and aluminum. And then these are some of the images that are generated from that. I would bring in some of the anyads here. There was this really great line that stuck out to me. The beast is the body that has been vivified. So my project in the end deals with matter, with the matter of animated zombies, feces that complete you, human-derived cheese, and finally an animalized eye that works like a demotion of vision. As you can see, the results here are these various degraded photographs,

or if you prefer a kind of demonization of vision. I love this image because of its just kind of hellscape aesthetics. And in closing, so I would, I need to read through more of this Nietzsche sort of segment, but he has a segment on the rabble which can be traced back to Hegelian, this Hegelian sort of word. For Hegel, the rabble is this entity of mass impoverishment that can unbind and disintegrate the social fabric. And so there are several sort of lines that Nietzsche sort of provides about the rabble, although I guess he's speaking as Zarathustra, but the quote is, in their hands, like the rabble,

the fruits become sickly sweet and overripe. Their gaze makes fruit trees prone to windfall and withered at the crown. So I think what we are being precluded here in that quote is to a coming poverty that we wait in anticipation and when it arrives, it'll be an organ capable of optical annihilation. So Augustine's confessions, they also include recollection of his acquisition of speech, which is one thing that I really haven't been able to get over, the fact that he can remember how he acquired speech. He says, quote, not in any set method, longing by cries and broken accents, I practiced the sounds of my memory. So what then, what were the evils, how were evils arranged in that time period to allow for these powers of retention?

And so ultimately the demonological practices and ethics of science, which is not biohacking or simple kind of OO studies, but zombie hacks like engineering the dead is what I'm after. So a richer reconstruction of terrestrial experience. And that's really, I guess that's sort of where I am. I did have this other case about a speculative scenario of a woman that would give birth and be a surrogate mother for extinct species. But I think I'll just keep it here. Should I keep the presentation on, or should I stop sharing? You can stop sharing for now.

Many times. And please do correct me if I'm wrong. If I understood correctly, you are essentially working on certain kind of materialist thesis about the idea of demons, right? Right. Where, as I mentioned last session, you know, with different kinds of paradigms of evil, there comes also different typologies. different kinds of idea of evil comes different typologies of demons. And not all of them pertain to the idea of mind or soul.

Some of them are actually about the body. Usually in a kind of a Christian sense, or what you might call to be the post-Christian sense, post-high scholastic. The idea of what is a body can also be approached skeptically. and that skepticism is very the question of defilements of the body that for example you can you can think about this in terms of

certain kind of phenomenological approaches to the body through which you develop a certain kind of perception a particular kind of perception what does it mean to be for example actually there are cases of this right cases of this and I'm not joking what does it mean to be a mantis shrimp what does it mean to be a mantis shrimp You know what a manuscript vision looks like, right? So, yes, that's something that you can actually read about a certain kind of analytic tradition

but also contents of tradition. What does it mean to have a different body? And of course with the question of trance, this is becoming an ever more critical question. What does it mean to have another body? one you talked again about vision and I think that you you can you can actually broaden this right to something far better like visions of AI how they see

the world right so there is there's this essay I've forgotten I can I can find it it's a blog post actually. It's about the notion of the terminal identity. So you see terminal identity is actually a classical example of demonism. Terminal identity is that whenever, for example, we look at AI, Terminator, for example, we always see how they look at the world by way of a certain kind of sinister coding, right? Which are actually quite trivial because it's ingrained in a certain kind of culture of the interface.

The problem of vision, and that's the demonic side of it, my apologies, one second, the demonic side of it is that the interface doesn't have any characteristics. The actual code, the actual vision doesn't have any characteristics. But we always see the vision of humans and AI and demons looking into the world by way of a certain kind of interface, an interface which we have established. But if we scratch on that surface, we see that certain kind of abyssal figure lies in

the very ideal vision. I will find this blog post. It's a good one. I will post it. Okay, let's have a rest. I really need to go to the bathroom and then we will take it from there. Okay, yes. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. okay where is it okay i'm putting this here

yes so one comment before we start you see the problem of demonic also should be equated as at a certain level with the problem of human vision in the in the broadest possible sense of vision. Humans see conceptually and ethically to always an interface, an interface that they themselves have established, whereas demons don't. And there is a reason that, for example, you get in the dark sci-fi stories, that the loss of that interface, when you actually see that it's just merely

an illusion, it's something that's just like a terminal, right? Like a computer terminal or electromagnetic terminal. When you get rid of it, then you get a vision of human itself as a sinister AI. Right? Okay. well it seems like nobody else show up who was expected to give a presentation I'll just go through I think because of my comment on the sidebar

less people than were at the beginning of the session but I'll just say names if any one of is here and i just don't notice please interrupt so aladdin uh frederick arias richard chambliss sepida and matteo anyone is here or not uh okay probably not then we can proceed with this session as you wish we can open the floor for any sort of discussion or if you have any um alexey um what about the people that got like that didn't weren't going to present today like because some people were left out like me and

ze and uh james i think what about you you don't have anything to present yeah that's that's what Alexei told me. Just improvise, just improvise, you know, ask questions, ask questions, anything. Then film a video like I'd rather I'd rather just just do this. Okay, I understand, I understand, I understand. Plus it's actually better if you do that because then I will actually swear at you privately rather than publicly. No, no, no, exactly. What I was saying was the opposite. I'd rather present right now than present on video because then Reza won't be able to curse on...

To exact true revenge. Well, if it's okay with you Reza... Yes, of course, absolutely. and you can in fact do the video presentation too i will look at it and i will give you feedback but yes any any sort of questions that you have about uh the teams uh that we have talked about yeah absolutely feel free yeah so uh i have wrote something already um but i will uh continue to edit it after your remarks, right? But the article is about, well, it's mainly from Flusser, since I

was presented about him, and trying to figure out how nature itself could be demonic, right? So it's kind of like a philosophy of nature, or some sort of basis for a philosophy of nature, in which nature is evil or demonic. And a sort of- Nature or naturalization? Yeah, the naturalistic world, right? Yes, okay, yeah. There's a very idea of nature, most probably, it can be demonic, and we are seeing it, you know, all these back to nature, pagan ritual,

yeah let's go you know do the new thing uh yes it can be it can be actually quite uh demonic precisely because that kind of nature is essentially a residue of a certain kind of ego that doesn't make nature demonic precisely because the idea of nature is so nebulous they creates a demonic ego and we are seeing it in the nearest trend most often yeah also that um that there is a sort of um uh that nature is always this will there's this boundless will

in nature which is always imposing constraints on itself right so if the demons it's is what is the constraint. Nature is this constant, there's this constant expansion of beings and then beings reaching their inevitable limits within this status of rules, right? So it's a question of possibility, how much there's this genocidal tendency to destroy possibilities because all that exists is like to one thing exists there should be death of a million possibilities and the development of life must be like a

series of abortions so like thinking about like gravity for instance like the stock of a plant, it has this will to grow as high as it can and to reach the Sun, right? And this will is hindered by the the weight of gravity. And this works like the same analogy can be made with the from the various like everything that happens in nature all the time. Like the root needs to suck off nitrogen from the earth and there's this hardness of the ground that impedes this, right? And so the shapes of nature is the result of life kind of transposing this filter of possibilities.

And so there's this array of textures and colors and smells and tastes in nature because of the pulverization of possibilities. So that's kind of the gift of it. And I was trying to think a lot about like the difference between two between mechanism and organism and trying to propose some sort of anti vitalist approach that at the same time doesn't doesn't end up being like just positivistic, like the hard sciences imagination of nature, right. So an imagination of nature that, uh, in which it's, it's not really romantic or sees life as this, this beautiful thing, but at the same time, doesn't just take the, the imaginative effort out of, uh, trying to figure out nature.

So, yeah. And, yeah, and I was, I was reading like WEC School and, and also trying to figure out how from a set of rules, something new can emerge. Like, because the evolution entails that something, something emerges from this, the same set of rules, right? A set of rule is always in constant change because of evolution and nature goes in this direction. It's not really random, the evolution. There's a lot of, there's been a lot of talk about this, how evolution needs

a like a sort of platonic library of forms to work because in biology I mean because genotypes and phenotypes they there would be a variation too large to comprehend if it was just random right and life wouldn't be able to thrive like proteins need this sort of array of of pre-made forms that it arrives at. And that's what I explain like, what could explain the the relative poorness or uncreativity of nature. Because like there's only one or two types of eyes, right? The eye is always photographical. That's kind of a shitty imagination for how

seeing can be done, right? And the fact that different, different strays of different fields arrive at the same structures of evolution, like coming from different origins in the evolutionary line, this like really like proves the point that nature is not really that creative and really that there are some fixed structures that nature must achieve, and like destroying the possibility of what could be different, right? Yeah, and also how humans are artists at the top of like the invention of new set,

the new modifications to the set of rules of nature and how philosophy and art and science expand the set of rules constantly. And here I have recurred to like Michel Serres. I don't know if you like him or not. Don't worry, don't worry. I don't hate him, but I hate him. Yeah, but that's what I imagine too. And because he has this book called Hamo, I don't know which is the English translation, but it's about how variation is a function of each

species capacity for fabulation and invention. And freedom is just this escape from, this is this emergence of a possibility, right? Is this possibility that was doomed already, we can recover it and insert it into the ramification of life. So we can revise the set of rules and put a new possibility in it. That's what freedom means, right? And Sehe says that this happens not only in humans, but also in animals, when animals do something different from their nature and follow some different path and even in natural processes like erosion, the erosion of a river,

it only happens because the river follows the same path over and over because it's the more easy path, it's the more functional path. So to create something new is to escape from this from this formatted routine, right? And this is what makes evolution happen. Like the coming of life from known life and the coming of man from non-man and and futurely even the coming of like post-man from man, right? What else? Yeah. Yeah, just talking a little bit about contingency and how the myriad of beings that exist are just suffering this contortion of this from the set of rules, right?

the beings are trying to exist are trying to grow and uh they have this oppositional pressures that make them result uh make them have this this this existence they have with their like uh habits and forms and shapes and uh and colors and everything their attributes are a result of their contortion of their suffering right so everything's like kind of an orgy of forms uh they are suffering a lot because they to exist they are facing this oppositional pressures and i guess that's it yeah and i'm ready for the critic thank you thank you no no okay no thank you i think first and foremost uh i think the scope of the project or the paper or the presentation

that you're going is vast you have to kind of compress it a little bit right because then it would be uh kind of like some sort of dideroyan encyclopedia of nature yeah actually i wrote it and it it has 20 23 pages so i have to cut it down oh my god are you kidding me i don't get paid to read that kind of paper. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have to, I have to keep it down. The job is to find what part is better and present like five. Right. So, so there are certain kinds of parts that I will actually, you know,

counteract. I criticize, I will say that you see, so you brought the question of being opinion thought, right, that nature strangulates or snuffs out certain kind of possibilities. And that's the kind of problem of immunology. So we cannot imagine different possibilities. That I think is not true. I think nature is just nature. anything that ever is going to be talked about nature is actually coming from our arsenal

of counterfactual scenarios and possibilities because otherwise there is no such a thing as nature. Like quantum mechanics is a very good idea of causation in quantum mechanics. It's a very good example, right? So it is obviously a theory, right? A theory, edifice that we have put together. So when you look into the sea and see waves approaching the shore, you can easily create

by way of this theory, not just mere observation or a given idea of nature, that this shore could easily with the same probability recede from me from the shore that gives you an idea of nature and not idea of nature in whole but a more expansive idea of nature and It's a result that possibilities are not given actually by nature.

In fact, in attributing the notion of possibility to nature, I would say is one of the worst ideas as if it was a metaphysical idea. Right? If it is a physical idea, it's utterly bankrupt, doesn't go anywhere, possibility is coming from a certain kind of understanding of nature and systematically developing that idea of nature within theory, probability, statistics, imagination, so on and so forth. The evil of nature, I would say, or the demonic part of nature, is not coming from nature,

because nature is not demonic at all. It comes from the question of human freedom, how we do think about nature. Even the fact that nature, even the most basic facts about it, are not immediately given to us, furthermore the totality of nature is not given to us either, then everything that we do think about nature arises from our own side of the story. So, when, for example, you say, why should we have this kind of war, or that kind of

war, right, in a biological sense? These are the kind of questions that you can only ask within the framework of theoretical biology. There are not supposed to be questions about the nature of nature, because that would be just highest scholasticism, Medieval Philosophy 101. And that precisely puts the responsibility and accountability on us rather than nature. Yeah, I think you have grasped exactly what I did actually.

But I would say that one important thing that I started the paper as a sort of, I wanted to understand fantasy from a biological perspective. So it was like the Goodman, the Nelson Goodman thing with like word making and actually trying to understand how can there be counterfactuals of nature, right? Because this is what fantasy is. Like, Pokemons are animals kind of twisted. Well, there are different levels of fantasy, right? There are different levels of fantasy. Yeah, I mean fantasy in the vulgar term, like fantasy in the fantastical, like, five-five. Right, right, right. So it was about really understanding how can there

there be counterfactuals to nature and then i think the what happened was that my concept of nature there is not anymore the the philosophical concept of nature as the reality or as a whole but just something different just this vulgar term for the naturalistic phenomenon uh so there is possibility so there is something outside of it right it's not absolute no it's not absolutely it's not it's something given totality right uh and the thing is that However, any sort of idea of nature that you have can only be procured or acquired by the kind of counterfactuals that you implement. It's not the possibility of nature, because those possibilities, if you take them as a given, then you are in a sort of lot of metaphysical trouble, right?

So any sort of, for example, account of causation, any sort of account of what is going on in nature is actually implicitly based on counterfactual scenarios that we do ourselves implement. So that one, one last point. Ah, God, my God, that's just fucking deleted. Like, positivist imagination of nature. What does the difference actually? I mean, you know what positivism was? Because as a project, positivism was not going to give an imagination of nature as such and

such. All positivism or logical empiricism wanted was that if you have a certain kind of experience of nature and you cannot logically reconstruct it, then most probably it's just a delusion. Yeah, I mean in the sense that I'm not interested in the what nature is, what the truth about nature, but I'm interested in making up an image of nature. It's not just, it's not this philosophical like inquiry, it's like trying to... Yes, but then you see that the problem starts, I think that positivists, I mean logical impurities were into something good.

even though having the project failed ultimately, you see, if you are talking about the forces of outside, demons, demons, the legion out there, and nature and these kinds of stuff, you have to go a certain kind of route by saying that to yourself that can it be logically reconstructed and shared intersubjectively among other people.

Because otherwise if you can't do that then you run into the problem of the psychological idea of nature and the psychological idea of nature as psychoanalysis shows us is already quite a heavy back with its own internal demons and unconscious forces or in fact the Marxist one, material conditions such as capitalism. Capitalism can assimilate many social relations to the extent that the social cognition becomes distorted.

thinks that exploitation is actually a means of liberation, right? Or it doesn't actually see exploitation. So, these are all these kinds of stuff that come with these kinds of questions. Edna, is it your turn? I've got nothing to say today. I'll have a video for you. Okay, video, video. And then you get the private swearing. Oh yeah, no problem. It's my favorite time. I think they had something to... Is there anyone else, such as, who's our friend? Did he leave the room? The greatest Hegelian reader?

It was James. Yeah. I'd be the greatest Segalian reader if I got around to reading it. Yeah, I wasn't expecting to present, so my ideas were a bit harsh forms, but it would be good to kind of throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks. So yeah, let me just so sorry if it's not that lucid. Let's just try and give it a try. So yeah, broadly speaking, the question I'm looking at interrogating is whether demons represent a shifting set of warnings against like destabilizing behavior. So I'm looking at thinking through

demons as a kind of in terms of functionalism, this like part of cybernetic code of behavior in which theological and like moral texts generally kind of create a set of codes in which behaviors that will destabilize society are warned against. And these manifestations of destructive behavior kind of adapt and shift as the specific needs of um and the context in which the subject um changes um so um yeah my presentation maybe will

focus mostly on seminar materials um as a point of departure but i intend to expand the scope a bit as i continue reading around things um um so maybe if like the demons of moral system come with a set of fixed axioms pointing us in the cardinal direction towards the good and away from the evil as if like diametric poles on a compass the demons of a context specific practical set of ethics point us in shifting directions allowing us to navigate like a labyrinthine field which sometimes requires to turn back on ourselves and so I'm thinking about this dynamicity involved with practical ethics as opposed to morality and thinking about how that scales up to an

intersubjective level through the system of interacting subjects whose behavior interlocks. So one way in which perhaps we can find like a destabilizing demonic behavior as in like is in Zola's La Bête Humaine, where the original abuse that Severine suffered as a child also poetically propagates to create the plot of the book in which murders and suffering and this cycle of abuse, as it were, starts to ramify. So I'm thinking about that as like a

positive feedback loop and how violence begets violence. So, um, if we, if we're thinking about demons as these warnings against, um, sinful behavior, then perhaps, um, uh, they are ways in which, uh, positive feedback is controlled and sort of, um, is, is, is, is systemically closed off. So, um, uh, perhaps thinking also, um, about like, maybe like a forewarning of like the antagonisms that like marxism would would kind of um would would delineate in terms of like um class antagonisms um uh and i and i was thinking about this passage from the art of veraf where um uh about the inequality um where so it's so

so i'll just i'll read it first actually so it says what sin was committed by this body um swash the pious and adar the angel said thus this is the soul of that wicked man who in the world collected much wealth and he consumed it not himself and neither gave it nor allowed a share to the good but kept it in store so i'm i'm kind of uh i'm thinking about linking that and saying you know, perhaps these like destabilizing antagonisms of wealth inequality that would, would come to define like this Marxist like politics could be like forewarned in this demonology as a way of saying that if you accumulate too much that can be a form of

of autoproietic destabilization. So, and perhaps maybe, maybe thinking about like this, maybe like geotraumatic idea of like what Ovid's talking about in metamorphosis, where he's saying that, how the bronze and iron age and digging underground expanded the remit for warfare and misery and how people, once they started to mine minerals and things, started to be able to conduct warfare on a greater scale. So this idea that we are sort of beginning to,

and we're beginning to go to like, literally in a physical sense into the unknown, and like start to mine minerals and things is kind of reflected in different sort of demonic traditions. I know it doesn't correlate to what I've just talked about exactly, but the figure of the kobold and German folklore, sort of these like spirit demonic figures which which would sort of ward you off from venturing underground. So, um, it's, uh, yeah, that's, that's one example I'm thinking of sort of looking towards, uh, but yeah, rather than pursuing a sort of neo-pagan or primitivist capitulation to demons,

the usefulness of these warnings perhaps serves as a study of how the intersubjective wager we make in forming society against the best efforts of demons can sometimes fail. So as in any system of dynamic feedback, we risk over correcting by either capitulating or defying one's demons. So maybe they're not like a vital part of our nature of, or our process rather of complexification. Yeah, I have some more to say, but I might just sort of leave it there because I think might be some more things to comment on. Oh, actually, one more point that maybe I would like to make. I'm thinking about, yeah, perhaps this shifting context a bit more and how, like,

so this idea that, like, the Assyrian Empire had so many demons that they forgot all their names. So these sort of warnings against doing specific actions. And of course, as, like, society becomes more individuated and complex and move beyond, like, an agrarian kind of, you don't do this if you're a farmer, you don't do that, as sort of the roles that are possible and the specific destabilizing behaviors that are possible as society becomes more individuated, become more diverse, we get this sort of legion of demons. and perhaps this that sort of like very large piece of code in which you should do this and

you shouldn't do that and you have many different demons to correlate to that becomes a context specific code in a Christian canon of do unto others which fits more ethical and variegated mode of relation in which empire and network sort of roles allowed for destabilizing behaviors to be multi, like, like multifarious and far more. Yeah. Yeah, I'll leave it there actually, but got some developing ideas with that. So thanks. Good, good, good. Great.

I think that the idea of destabilizing demons as destabilizing agents was not actually taken seriously until the Age of Enlightenment. The kind of demons that were talked about in the Age of Enlightenment were not actually what you might call to be older demons of the medieval or antiquity.

They were destabilizing precisely because they could show, what you might call to be, cracks and holes within either an epistemological paradigm, a metaphysical paradigm, or an ethical As I mentioned, probably you weren't there before the class, I was talking about the idea of doubt, fundamental doubt in Descartes.

Descartes, in Meditations, has that kind of demon. Actually, he has different kinds of demons representing that. It's either the omnipotent God, deceiving God, or an evil demon. The evil demon, unfortunately, is not omnipotent, but nevertheless it possesses massive amounts of power. Powers that cannot be impinged on the formal structure of thought, right, like mathematics,

logic and so on so forth but they can be exerted upon any source of understanding or what you might call to be relationship between reason and sensation mind and body Descartes created a hypothesis out of this, and this hypothesis, as I mentioned, is quite often read in a very trivial manner, in a very shallow philosophical sense.

So just like Plato has different versions of the cave allegory, epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, formal, so on and so forth, Descartes also talks about the allegory of the evil demon in different senses. The majority of people talk about the epistemological side of it. But I think what is really important is the ethical side of it. In the sense that Descartes actually thinks that you need to construct this demon for

yourself. demon of pure doubt and deception. A demon that can cast shadow over your most intimate, cherished ideas of what it means to be a human, what it means to have experience, what it means to have a perception of the world, so on and so forth. why and of course this demon that Descartes puts forward is quite conic the point of Descartes hypothetical thesis which is an ethical constructive

at the end of the day is that you absolutely need to adopt a doubt a doubt so fierce so based from which you cannot escape because Because then you see the limitations and fragilities of your perceptions. You can still say that what if that even when I try to affirm this demon or negate this

demon these are all the results of demonic possession. But actually, the whole point of hypothesis is this, the affirmation of demon leads you to a different stage. In what sense? In the sense that Descartes says that if you manage to get yourself intellectually out out of this thought, out of this demon, nothing again looks demonic. Nothing again looks doubtful.

Right? That's a kind of a really good strategy to fight an affair of a demon. And then he says that unfortunately you can only do this once per life. You cannot always be promissuous with demons. You have to create the best of all demons. And through that, reconstruct the very idea of rationality, conviction, volition, will, ethics, so on and so forth. and the thing is that Descartes says that

yes the products might actually be temptations of that demon too the result of those temptations but then precisely because you created them and now you are following through with them and allow them to be investigated further and further, you have exercised yourself. So that's one. Then you mentioned, you know, kind of geotraumatic aspects.

I mean, yeah, for example, think about the Hittites, you know, at the dawn of the Bronze Age. So obviously, any sort of human development is always under the constraints of material conditions are given to us, right, in a specific historical moment. And yes, there are unconscious forces, demonic material, so on so forth, in a kind of a cultic sense, but the thing is that

what is missing in this historical story is that there are so many other material conditions that influence us and our history than the list we have currently and how how to actually go and see these kinds of material conditions, you know, the impinging material conditions, demonic forces, whatever you might call it. Well, to do that you need to have a certain kind of basic method, a basic

method of search and navigation that can be shared, which means that you can no longer back to a certain kind of individualism, merely. Right? Because that method ought to be collected. It ought to be investigated in the broadest sense. Um... Yeah, a good point, I don't have any comments, but I think that it's a good point that you should elaborate a little bit more on that, is that the Assyrians' proliferation of demons is something like excessive individualism.

It's kind of like a new libertarian Cheshire, right? So how do you actually put a cap, put a constraint on such a proliferation? That's something to be addressed. Well, I guess maybe they found that workaround by saying... They didn't find any workaround around it. The only workaround was that they were utterly crushed by all the existing nations of the

old world. Eskiel the prophet had this prophecy that the city of Nineveh will be purged out of existence. There will be no birds singing there, no humans living there. Even ghosts are afraid of visiting this city. They didn't manage to do that. They basically, before even actually get a hold of this, they were utterly decimated. Maybe they were so, you know, unsuccessful because they spent so much time thinking about, you know, how everything they did related to all the very, very long and diverse codes

of demonology, where if it was shortened and simplified, then they'd live in a much more efficient system of... No, I think that this is some really good lesson for also our contemporary times. I mean, not just Assyria, but the Babylonian Empire had this thing. I mean, some kind of excessive demonic individualism, right? Like everyone wants to construct itself. It just doesn't work. It really doesn't work. Because the essence of construction should come from people

first and not from the individual. Yes, there should be a bridge between the two, between individual ethics and collective ethics, between the two sides of construction, but any sort of individual constructivism is doomed to fail. And now we see it in America. I mean, everyone wants to be an individual. I mean, fuck individual. I want wasps and insects. Good communist wasps, that's what I want.

No, but I'm just joking here. No, obviously human psyche requires a certain kind of nurturing. But turning this into certain kind of saga of emancipation is wrong. Thank you for the tips. Absolutely. My pleasure. So, my dear friends, all the cowards escaped. and I will catch them, by the way, when they actually present their video presentations,

questions, stuff, concerns, if I'm making wasp jokes too often or gulag jokes, whatever you want. Did you mean mosques in that sense or did you mean it in another sense? You really want to? Yeah, I, whenever actually there was something I wrote here with regard to to our friends who presented about nature. Have you read Darwin's citation, Darwin's passage about wasps? So Darwin really doesn't believe in a sort of creative design as if

nature is too slow or too fast because that's just nature and something that only we retroactively within our theories such as the Arbenian theory can grasp of. But then he gets too overexcited in one passage and he says that I have seen this wasp, Echemonidia wasp. wasp. It's a parasitoid, really a vicious wasp. And I think that I have finally stumbled across the evidence that there is no such a thing as a benevolent god. I mean, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants really do a disservice to the wasps that you

would find Darwin. But you should understand that wasps from the back, I mean, it's just part of the nature, right? They're just doing their own things and stuff. But this is it. The man of science, such as Darwin, projecting his own morality upon this poor creature. I mean, he's just a positive. It doesn't do anything other than just like, you know, creating zombie ants and these kinds of stuff. Who cares? You know, it's not as if this stuff is not going in nature.

Nature is absolutely a nebulous idea. and to buy into one version or another version of nature so definitively almost ends up in a certain kind of either human egotism or fascism. Just leave nature alone. The responsibility is on you as a human being, not nature. Reza, can I do a question?

Sure. But so what do you think about the scientific naturalism of people like sellers and scientific image of the man in the world as the real one, as what nature really is? Yes. If the reason... Right, right, right. So Sellars is actually, the more I have read of him, he's actually an absolute idealist, right? A very distorted one, though. The thing is that, so in the scientific image of man, the last question that he poses is

that really threatening question which is disconcerting, for good reasons of course, that does the scientific image of man and the world replace the manifest image of the human? But then later on, as he moves forward, he thinks that whatever we do, we are bound to a kind of co-constitution of the manifest image of the human in the world and the scientific

image of human in the world. The scientific image makes the manifest image of the human leaner, right? Gets the fat out, all those metaphysical bloatware. But the manifest image really doesn't go away within his historical understanding of progress of sciences. So Sars, at the end of the day, is what you might call to be a softer version of Kuhn. Right? That science is essentially a social progress. For this to happen, you need a certain kind of manifest image,

arsenal of factors such as conceptualization, how theories are essentially historically social, so on and so forth. But then he's also rather a skeptic at the end that there might actually be a moment the scientific image replaces all of that. But he doesn't want to say that because otherwise it would be just an a historical thesis, right? It would be just like a kind of extreme Hegelianism.

So, it is a normative horizon, this possibility of Normative horizon, yes, a normative horizon which has, which its fad has been rendered or is being rendered, right? So, for example, this is why that it does actually do take side with karma. For example, he asserts with natural language as a kind of something that belongs to the manifest image, precisely because it's biased by certain kinds of perceptions

transcendental structures. And then he wants to move to a certain kind of rational, formal language, a la quain and carnapp. But it's very careful actually in that regard. Does this transition actually get rid of the bloatware of the manifest image? Simply just because you are going toward more formal and scientific doesn't mean that you are reducing the fat of the manifestness right so he he understands this

Jean-Pierre made a good question here in the chat box. In what sense did you talk about an extreme hegelianism and what about picturing that in a sense is embedding all representation in material unfoldings. Who actually put Jean-Pierre on this chat box? That's what I want to know. Well, okay. The extreme hegelianism comes from precisely this idea that

that there is a certain kind of progression toward the scientific image. And that progression is tantalons to also reducing the fat of the manifest image, as if it was already given to us. So the method of arriving at this image, of this scenario, I would say is quite hegerian. In fact, utterly hegerian. Otherwise, I mean, you can also see this, a more extreme version of this, in Jay Rosenberg's

Convergent Realist Thesis, fusing the images. I would say that it's not warranted, right, from a historical perspective. It is warranted from a logical perspective. And that's what makes it a Gery. Right? So that's... about picturing and... I'm not going to talk about picturing. Jean-Pierre, you know my idea about picturing. I don't have anything good to say about it. Well, yes, okay.

Yeah, picturings, yes, are made in material conditions, but in a very rudimentary sense, in a very retroactive context specific sense as well. Obviously, pictures are made not of all material conditions, but certain kinds of material conditions. So yes, so essentially the thesis of picturing in cellars already implies that we have stepped into the borders of the scientific image, right?

And a very specific one. Otherwise, I mean, for example, think about what Marx would have said about this thesis, right? With regard to other kinds of material conditions, I would say that, regardless of what I call the deficiencies of the picturing, the Szilardian picturing, I would say that we should understand

that it is absolutely a thesis that can only unfold historically. Historically not in a Hegelian sense, historically in the sense that we have these kinds of information about what is going on in the neurophysiological stuff that we are aware of. Right?

What was the other one? I can't find the other one. The other Jean-Pierre question. What was the last question? I think it was only these two. Yeah. And he just responded here. Picture is a kind of embedding of material practices. I mean, I wish that Jean-Pierre was here. I would actually say that, what does it mean, a kind of embedding material practices, right?

What kind of material practices, right, first of all? And how do you actually determine what kind of materialism, material practices was in the first place into which picturing was embedded? How did you actually determine that? By what force, what intellectual force, what conceptual force? This is something that I think that is probably, I know that Ray and some of my good friends defend it, but I actually think it's the weakest part of Sevar's work. Something that I think it's just like, you know, something, it's a kind of weak afterthought.

I think that's the best word for it. Weak after thought. But do you agree that they take that path in accordance with the right Selaresian wing as it's so called to argue for a scientific naturalism and that's a problem and what you're defending is more a normative account of this picturing that's social mediated and everything? You see, I actually, I am actually defender of the naturalism, but the thing is that I would say that the process of naturalization, right, is through and through

historical and you cannot simply assume that there is a grand story about naturalization. You see that's basically my position precisely because you You can't sidestep the historical progress of science in lieu of a certain kind of grand narrative of naturalization. And of course, for you to move through that historical process of naturalization, you

need both naturalization methods, methods of naturalization, I think computer science is a good example, but also social norms, right? And by social norms I don't mean like these kinds of watered down ideas of normativity, I actually mean good old-fashioned intersubjectivity within the community of sciences. Can I ask a question? Absolutely. Going back to individuality and collectivity, as you talked about before, a few weeks ago,

we