Hello and welcome to the seventh session of The Man Who Knew Nothing from Neurodiversity to Practical Schizophrenia. We have two presentations today. One is by Aladdin and one is by Nikki. And I'll now pass the microphone to Reza. Thank you very much, Alex. Thank you everyone. So today we will look into something that we haven't talked about yet. So far we are talking about the construction of the self. That if self is unreal, then perhaps it is a subject of construction.
It's like a world that doesn't exist but we can imagine it, rationally imagine it and go forward to make it concrete. Today however we are going to take a different path. You're talking about unmaking of the world. So far we are talking about making of the world, of the self, now we are talking about unmaking of this world. And that would be our antechamber toward the last session where we talk about the consequences, the ethical consequences, the ethical and axiological consequences of neuroscientific
or maybe even physicalistic accounts on the absence of self. So with that said, maybe we should start with presentations. Who would like to go first? I can go. Can you hear me? Yes. Because I read the introduction, and I think Aleda did the chapter one on the menu of life. So I will start.
So the book by Jason Babag Mohakhig, Omnicide, Mania, Fatality, and the Future in Delirium. First, we should ask, what is Omnicide? Omnicide, the killing of everything. But we'll get more into that later. The foreword by Robin Mackay starts with the idea of mania, mania as a pressure of activity. The proliferation of manias has entered into the DSM-5, the standard manual for mental disorders. Symptoms include a person noticing things like accelerated speed, elevated mood, hyper expressivity, sensitivity, intentionality, sleeplessness,
triumphalism, risk, and psychic gatewaying, which was interesting as a it's a bridge to other mental disorders like schizophrenia. So the book starts with a taxonomy of manias, manias of on the side, They're set relations that cannot be reduced to an axiom or essence for like a psychoanalysis to cure. Because a psychologist would seek to reduce symptoms to paranoia. Also, there is this event where naming a phenomenon kills it or can flatten it or essentialize it. So we are asked to not diagnose mania, the disease, but rather enter into the logic of mania.
meaning also to explore extremist compulsions and personal ones. Does mania beget omnicide or why is madness useful? Well, a metaphysical agency with the external can be very useful. For instance, pyromania, obsession with fire. Hedimania, obsession with hell, ebluetomania, obsession with washing. In a tour of 10 manias, Mohagic borrows texts from Middle Eastern writers. He does this because the myth and mysticism of Southwest Asian and North African writers
have been able to evade the Western canon. And by doing this, we also can get rid of the Western dialect of master and slave. So rather these methodologies permit a type of access and ear. So like one secret passage can lead to another and excavate into elaborate worlds in each chapter. A thread of mania is unraveled like a puzzle box is kind of coaxed open. worlds are violent and poetic, but the world of like a bibliomaniac one who's obsessed with books would be very different than the one of a kinetomaniac or a person obsessed
with continual movement. The introduction is called movements of the lost cause. And I think we can infer this is maybe like psychic and physical phenomenon. But what happens in the desert though it's a confrontation with death i like how makai says talks about the desert in the foreword as an invitation to abyssal contemplation a geographical metaphysical mythical and spiritual topos for the middle east and then later the libyan novelist ibrahim Alconi is said to have carved out his own definitions of otherworldliness in his meditations on the desert.
As he stares upon the arid region before him, its excess, its waste, its many barren natures, a line is drawn between ambulomania, the obsession with walking, and androcyde, the extermination of human species. So here we find ourselves at the end of a line. One would naturally draw between the mania and its event of omnicide. Desertification happens at the point when the maniac becomes the island of one. But false truths can be very useful and maybe that is why we ought to study the deceptive architecture of thought. But if we had to, would we position the lie or the fantasy at the opposing end of modernity?
Separating them would definitely allow us to engage with the neo-magical without things like higher power and dogma. the sampling of Middle Eastern texts, we were able to make tangible certain terrains of omnicide, which could be like a labyrinth space embracing anomaly, revelation, and death, an art form of collusion with dark commerce between desires for the particular and predatory drives, a fixation that gradually expands into a lethal event. The motives for omnicide and make clear the relationship between adoration and annihilation, which are like two very natural forces. And of course, the end of things, the annihilation,
will always precede beginnings. The Stoic term ekipirosis is brought up, a catastrophic ending of the cosmos, one that could begin a new cycle. And McKay also references Nietzsche's eternal return. It is said that Omnicide is not like a literal killing of everything. Manias are chosen and extrapolated through observations of specific symptoms latent in the text. But he does this with the suspension of like making any diagnoses. And his writing is world building on its own. I really like the quote he uses from Nietzsche. that's a warning that the artist forgets most things so as to do the one thing unjust to what lies behind him.
The existential trials latent in the writings is what comes of living with Omnicide, the old world of doing things, which is like marginalized against totalitarianism of modernities and neologisms. These old worlds are having sometimes arcs of justice or freedom, but what is the relation of the neo-magical to the political? If we don't want to diagnose manias, what do we want of them? Probably to use the art of deception with as many tactics at its disposal. At its disposal, and that could mean approaches of like a neo-phenomenological sensorial nature, narrative of situational shifts of atmospheres,
conceptual ideas or like moving our way around through conceptual figures. The nature of mania is compulsion, is always repetition, concentration, precision, speed, but there's a lot of emphasis on the craft of language, language as form of incantation, as a production from the constraints of living, as the mood or atmosphere, or as all those things being the same thing made me think about Lacan and how he thought subconscious is structured like language and that letter forms are the material support that concrete discourse borrows from language so we ask is reality conjured with words in realities with no rules
no thing can be argued out of possibility and we are reminded of an ancient Aramaic incantation abracadabra i create what i speak or like how in the world of alice in wonderland one should always say what they mean these are worlds where willing untruth open doors to real events willed with intense and literary observing of rituals duels worship images of love and torture a strange relationship to time gravitational sounds attention between lived modernity and intense apocalyptic register manipulation it is a dangerous mode but not employed to harm or mechanized destruction but rather to make a successful deception and this had a lot of
relevance to me with like post-truth problems of the west and other movements of lost causes we end with the idea that by exiting the world we take down the world with us and that is possibly the future in delirium which is reference um yeah i saw a lot of relationships to uh frenzy's concept of alien will from last class um drives leading to compulsion leading to neuroses counterfactual scenarios that can be fairly useful but not in the the type like kirk allen to make your own world and be the master of it.
I also saw some similarities to like stoics and practices of self-mastery, but I thought the maniacs are kind of living more external lives than the stoics or embracing a nature with external forces to drive their will. Thank you so much, Nicky. Really thank you. I have a question for you. This is something that struck me when I reread Robin's intro. So it seems that he pits the Middle Eastern plethora of manias against the legacy of Western
modernity, something that you also kind of touched on earlier on. But this is actually what I, when I, Robin sent me the introduction, I told him and he actually toned it down. But I still think that it is not toned down enough. You see, Western modernity is actually not Western in its origin. Western Enlightenment is not Western in its origin. It's a hybrid phenomenon. And the engine of this phenomenon, which we might call to be modernity or enlightenment
101, is something quite peculiar. That we exercise the reason, and only by reason we act and we see the world. But there is an implicit clause here that has been throughout times by Western and Eastern commentators has brought up. the fact that the very engine of reason is risk. Risk for an all-out extinction.
Essentially, reason without risk as its engine is just an empty idea. reason without risk without the assessment or the epistemology of risk of what we talk about the world and how we act towards it would be either moving toward something that you might call suicidal reason a reason that cannibalizes itself and eats everything in the course, every other thing, or a cynical reason,
a reason that is fundamentally resignatory. So the pathologies of enlightenment, I would say, are coming from this fact that we never actually understood what drives the reason or what is at the core of reason. Risk assessment in the broadest possible sense.
And if you can't see reason in terms of risk, an inbuilt risk, then obviously you either become so afraid of risk that you resign, you don't do anything as we see today, or you do the opposite, the bipolar opposite. it. You do everything that reason commands you without actually looking into where this reason actually is from. And that will be the suicidal reason. So with that said, if
this is the case, if modernity is not truly a Western idea, it's an idea that, you know, that comes from human maturation across different cultures, where reason has an inbuilt prime factor of risk, existential risk, then why should we pit it against or oppose it against
something like these kinds of Middle Eastern compulsion toward maniots. So I thought that it was pitted not in the compulsion aspects, but more in the modernity's mode or methodology of prescription. And the Middle Eastern is more of a method of strategy and tactical reason.
Yes, yes. That's a good answer. However, then someone might actually object here, a Western might actually object that, you know, basically very fact that we see our extinction as palpable and not some sort of religious apocalyptic fantasy is precisely because of how modernity reasons. So modernity is not that kind of what you might call to be keeping the hostile forces of nature at bay, but rather to think about them as unbound, but unintelligible, rendering them intelligible.
That's what I think modernity is about. at the end of the day. So my, and this is not a question, it's something that I have also been working on, still trying to, you know, figure out the problem. It seems to To me, the dichotomy between Middle Eastern, what Jason talks about, omnicide, or a plethora of manias, and modernity is a false dichotomy, because it didn't begin with in the first place, because modernity was never Western to begin with.
Modernity was always a hybrid idea. Historically, however, it was appropriated, but originally it was not. Enlightenment was absolutely the first thought that humans could come up with, and that thought's target was an all-out extinction of human being. It became palpable to them, no longer
a subject matter of religious fantasies. Thank you so much though, Niki, really thank you, thank you very much. Should we go on to Aladdin's talk? Yeah, sure. It's fine for Reza. Yes, yes. My apologies. Yes, please do a sort. Okay, okay. I started. Just going to share my screen. Okay, can you can you see my screen like the slides?
Yes, yes. Okay. Thank you. So I will start. So just prior to anything, I would just like to know to say that I don't have much background in philosophy and even less in psychoanalysis. This is my first dig into it. So if I do mistake, just excuse me and don't hesitate to interrupt. So in his book, Jason didn't classify mania. He did the opposite. He unfolded them in order to understand the richness of human manias. To some extent, we could say that he deconstructs the unified theory of fraud. The book is divided in a hundred different types of mania, like a catalog of mania. and we will focus on the first one of the book, which is the one of light.
So Jason regroups manias not by character, but by the mania itself as a thing or phenomenon. Orgo mania, as he calls it, is the mania of light. Prior to our encounter with the first orgo maniac, there is a very brief anthropological note where Jason question a persistent error, as he calls it, which consists to see the first human beings as a being that would only react to the immediate material experience. This question has been like answer for a long time in anthropology, and we have seen now numerous amount of examples of fascinating metaphysics developed by indigenous people or support that.
But once we have positively answered this question that Jason asked, I call him. What if the first maniacal dreams belong to the barbarians? This could lead us to another one. What if the human history was actually determined by maniacal dreams? After this, the book jumps into our first bunch of maniac. Even though we're grouped under a specific phenomenon, which is light, each maniac has a different representation and pursuit of its own mania. From the ephemeral violence of the blighting sparse of the first ogomaniac, to the second and his synthetical light and mechanistic ogomaniac coupled with the sphere
of northern light, to the third one for whom light is equated with both downfall and war, To the fourth, that connects the most distant experience, which is the vanishing point of death to the most intimate, which is the lover's body. To the fifth, that equates light with impurity over purity, and elaborates on the tyranny of daylight. To the sixth, underlining a paradox that the force of the light increases while vanishing. to the seventh that trade with the devil, with Lucifer, literally the light bearer, in order to accuse the false paradise of the silent night, to the eighth that encounter the darkness of enlightenment in the glowing globes of the fortune teller,
to the ninth with whom Jason establishes axiomatic proposition regarding physical investigation of light and time, and time, yet the symbol of the tunnel, until the 10th, in which two humans' blond heads erected as gold, metaphorical figures of sun following a circadian walk, illuminate the darkness district, introducing us to the following mania, which is the heliomania, the maniacal pushti of the sun. Hence, for all of them, light has a different meaning and definition. It is all of these fragments, once regrouped, that can help us to understand what light as a thing and a phenomena itself means for those ogomaniacs.
There is more definition of light than there is ogomaniac for sure. The first ogomaniac follow, as we see, a projective light, a short beam at the top of the mountain at the end of the day. But this is not the sunlight, this is the falling star which flashed. He is giving a nihilist outlook of light, and I quote Jason, light, which is no longer a universal constant, but rather an atypical tinge of counter-universal experience, something that should never have happened. Indeed light is the source of life on earth, but the presence of it in the universe is an anomaly. Light is not a continuous presence, but the opposite.
With the Roar of Abjason, light is, I quote, an emergent force that violates the supposed essence of the world. Light is also physical, like for the second Orgo maniac, who fears the accelerated dance of protons and electrons of the Northern light. Light is bound to the sun, but to see light as only coming from the sun is what is to fall into, you Reza calls in the paper, heliocentric slavery. Our maniacs are looking for ways to escape this heliocentric slavery. While being still physically bounded to the sun, the northern line seems to bring us closer to a cosmic contingency. Near the end of this investigation of orgomaniacs, Jason Dawes, who I call the conceptual death
tool. It uses the figure of the fortune teller, this in order to develop, I quote, an esoteric link between mania, the future and the unknown. This link is clear in the second ogomaniac quote. It is the interaction of these two lines about norder lights and light bulbs that interested us most pressingly. For perhaps it suggests a special conjoinment whereby the primordial and the futuristic follow an identical method of delirium, that of sheer contrivance, both manufactured across a platform of rotating pedal, disc, siphons, and harnesses. The second ogomaniac is also fascinated by synthetic lights. Using the word of Red Abyss
Meyer, compare the men to an instrument panel with the tires and light bulbs. Orgo in old English and proto Germanic means eyes. In Norwegian, he also means visions. Lights will be as being seen as the source of photography. This machine that replaced human vision for the last 200 years and they use light to shape and document the world. Jump slide, sorry. Anyway, so to illustrate our second Ergomaniac, we could use a photography of Jeff Wall called Invisible Man by Ralph Waldo Ellison, the prologue. It is a picture made by Jeff Wall in 1999 and inspired by the novel of Ellison called
The Invisible Man that he wrote in 1952. The novel's protagonist, an unnamed African-American man, relates that he lives secretly in a wall in the basement, where he has wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it, with 1,269 light bulbs, powered by illegally siphoned off electricity. In addition to the prologue, Jeff Wall drew from all the parts of the invisible man and his own imagination to create this scene that is on my screen. His intention was not to make a literal illustration of the text, but to give form to the picture inspired in his mind, which he calls accident of reading. Hence, Jeff Wall's representation and Ellison's character
are both ogre maniacs. They are similar to the second one imagined by Jason, but at the same time we deserve an entire chapter for themselves. Alison in his book says, I quote, without light, I'm not only invisible, but formless as well. And to be unaware of one's form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some 20 years, did not become until I discovered my invisibility. This led us to the question that we are looking in this class. How can we be playfully mad without being a sociopath? Is the monomaniac push-it of Jason's character can help us?
I use monomaniac here, not in the sense used by Jason in his book, but as a vulgar and tautological definition of a maniac that channels his energy into one specific quest. In the foreword, Maki defines mania using the DSM-5. And I quote him saying, the maniac taps into an inexhaustible reservoir of energy to fuel an unchecked spiritual deletion. Jason is pursuing a definition of madness, such as the one that is capable of obliterate everything just to push through one thing. However, any type of mania is pharmacological, in the sense that can be a poison and a remedy,
depending on how they are channeled. To be playfully mad, we probably need the distinct abnormally of the maniac, and also his goal-directed energy in order to commit to lifelong projects. Our mania give us some form. Our mania are given as form. But a mania like light and darkness could also be perilous and the wrongly challenged energy of a maniac could become dangerous. And to use Jason Ward's quote, this could transform a man or a woman into an armament, an improvised explosive device. How can an obsessive maniac focus can be transmitted into a homicide, a radical impulse to destroy everything is what Jason is exploring in his book. In the world of Robin McKay in the preface,
no actually from the podcast that you were talking about before, he said that mania is the origin of both terrorism and poetry. Hence ought to avoid being a sociopath and avoid the mania to turn into a fatalist's will. Maybe involve being surrounded by other maniacs in order to help each other to channel this energy and it's maybe what we are doing right now but to answer the question i will leave the floor to Wenza thank you this was one of the most magnificent experimental presentations absolutely i cherish it thank you so much thank you Rosa i'm just a bit lost in my eyes so Thank you.
I have some thoughts, but I need to refresh my soda at this point. So how about this? We'll have three minutes break, and then we will shoot at the latest presentation. How about that? Sounds good. Okay.
Before I start any commentary on any of these presentations, Sean, you have been very, very silent the whole course. I'm going to pester you from now on, which is only one more session. Can you hear me? Yes. Oh, okay. I'm still thinking about all the presentations of today.
I don't really have a thought right now. Sorry. No worries. As long as you speak, it's all fine. All right. Any person who might have some thoughts? Well, I mean, I'll get my thoughts. So I don't know if, so I reviewed this book for a philosophy journal called Philosophy East and West that focuses primarily on Middle Eastern philosophies engagement with Western philosophy and after I after I reviewed the book I sent you know it took a few months like eight months to get published and then I sent it to Jason about two weeks ago and Jason really liked the review
because you know I myself being Turkish tried to engage with it from a Middle Eastern perspective whatever that really means. And we had a conversation and it was a pretty interesting conversation. So I wanted to mention that in one of the chapters, I don't remember which mania it is, but Jason starts dropping some bird seats, we could say, about who he is actually sparring with. And he's, of course, sparring with psychoanalysis and therefore he's sparring, you know, with Freud, in particular, I believe it's page 263. He talks about disbelief, self-mystification,
and how in psychoanalysis we have to always uncover anxiety as the root cause of robust disorientation, such that the everyday object, and this is what he quotes, he said, a household article once well acquainted but now turned threateningly peculiar. So he takes these objects and they devolve into haunted sites of drives and wrecked alienation. And his purpose is to sort of challenge the Freudian lacanian castration complex and the necessity of a remedy through the cure. That's why so often Jason speaks of willed dementia. It's actually like a poetic practice, this use of language. alliteration and so on. I feel like it's a text that bears reading out loud at times
because the will dementia is supposed to reinstate itself through the omnipotence of language and thought. And, you know, there's so many teratological forces that he calls funeral bells, smoke rings, anti-dancers, he uses the term anti-dancer, shriveled fingers, elbows, twitching bulges. So these are streaks of mania that he tries to foreclose almost like in this, in the catacombs that he talks about, he tries to also give these images, these lapsing images. One curiosity that I had when reading this, and I felt a bit silly because Jason says,
the attentive reader will have noticed that there is a certain philosopher in the background whom I'm challenging. And he says a Western philosopher. And I thought to myself, well, who is this Western philosopher? Like, you know, he's already mentioned Freud and Lacan, or at least like he's sort of intuited towards psychoanalysis and challenging the history of psychoanalysis. But who is the philosopher in the background? All he says is it's a Western philosopher that the attentive reader will have noticed I'm challenging. I did ask him this question slightly out of fear because he says the attentive reader will have noticed this. And I thought to myself, am I not an attentive reader? I have been reading. No, you are not.
If you haven't got that. Go on. Go on. Go on. Well, do you know who it is? I think it's either Nietzsche or Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer? So that, you know, it will either have to be Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or somebody who picks up the torch of pessimism, right? Like maybe, I thought it can't be Eugene Dacher or someone too contaminated. It is most probably Schopenhauer. Yeah, it was between each and Schopenhauer in my thought. But yeah, I mean, I think it's a very interesting way to frame this project. Not only is he plucking paragraphs from a number of writers whom I think Western audiences
and admittedly myself, I was not entirely aware. I mean, I knew from our course about Ahmad Shamloo and Ibrahim Al-Khouni. but I mean there's many authors from Iran, Algeria, Syria, Egypt, one Mahmoud Darwish from Palestine, Hassim Blasim from Iraq that he calls. Yeah, I mean I don't really have like a conclusion here other than these are just some aspects of it that I appreciate. Yes, so I think, well, we might be mistaken, but if it is truly Schopenhauer as a Western
philosopher, I think it is rather misguided because Schopenhauer has an extremely superficial understanding of unmaking of the world of the self. Whereas Middle Easterners, you see, See, this is the whole thing. So imagine you're living in a world where it is obscene. It's totally shit, like the world of ours, right? So obviously we can go two different ways.
on the first side one positive possibility of a different world and say that the the the point is not to live in this world but to abandon it proposition one proposition two Let us unmake this world. Unmaking of this world has far more significant consequences about making a new world. Because any kind of world that you make, any kind of self that
you make, as long as you have left the old world, the old self intact, might actually come under the influence of the old self. So you have to incinerate, literally, or unmake the old world before going on and making a new world. So unmaking and making come hand in hand. One just cannot make a new world, a new self. Because if you make a new self, you are deceiving yourselves
because you're still in the orbit, the gravitational orbit of the old self. You have to get rid of it. But to get rid of a world, it's not like burning a piece of paper. No, it is a systematic endeavor. It's a labor, a labor that goes into the construction of a new self or a new world. So I would say that Schopenhauer, unfortunately, is not that kind of person who thinks about such things.
He just wants it to burn down. because Schopenhauer is, I actually do agree with Wittgenstein for once, where where he says where the real death starts Schopenhauer ends. Schopenhauer just very much like Max Esterler is so hung up on this idea of the will precisely because he has actually conflated or elided the distinction between
free will and will as a rational category, as a rational ability. You see, we humans don't have free will. But we do have will as a rational capacity, and that's far more important than the capacity of free choice in a canonical sense of philosophy. Coming back to Al-Adeen's presentation, there was this thing that reminded me of Bataille, But of course, you know, Bataille is not really a good person to talk about this.
That we can imagine the very idea of Western enlightenment. I wouldn't call it Western. I would simply put it in the parentheses. I would just call it enlightenment. As I mentioned to Nikki's presentation, these ideas are hybrid. Yeah. Some Western historian might say to us that, oh, they are Western, but no, they are not really, historically. So the idea of enlightenment is very much like blindness.
A blindness that does not fall back on theistic worldview, namely a dogmatic blindness. It's a blindness that is very much like struggling in the dark, touching the stuff step by step. Ibrahim Al-Kuni has this fantastic metaphor in one of his books, I think it's in the Oasis trilogy, where he talks about the idea of enlightenment as living in a desert.
So if you are living in a desert, you are constantly being blinded by the sun, by light. And in desert, there is no signpost. You don't follow signposts because there are none. So you have to create your own mirages, your own illusions, to navigate the desert. To live in a desert is the very idea of enlightenment. Even if the mirage of a lake was not real,
of a lake was not real, you should make one. People who have read Tintin, what was it, the first one where Captain Haddock showed that know this metaphor very well. Questions? Heckling, swearing, whatever. There's this figure of the sacred firefall temple, Astroshad, and it's never extinguishing
flame. Mohagib talks about this on pages 222 to 223. Do you know of this? Do you know of this flame? To be honest, here, I think it's another one of those, it's a little bit overextended metaphor with regard to Zoroastrianism and the unburning flame. First of all, fire for them is not an act of enlightenment. It's a signpost. So, it is quite well documented that, for example, in Zartosh Kaaba, which is close to my hometown, Shiraz,
it was one of the first temples where they had fire. And the thing is that when you read the translation of the scripts, you realize that for these people, fire was not an act of enlightenment, an act of blinding. but rather this idea that, you know, there is a goal out there that we should pursue. As simple as that, unfortunately. This is very interesting because, you know,
we have Prometheus, the Promethean man, and fire as you know the first tool that's which makes mankind enlightened as you say and then yeah that an antipentacle way to view fire because it's it's no longer a tool if it's always burning as in this case right it's like no longer something that you it's just a telus it's just a telus Yeah. I think that, you see, Middle Eastern mysticism, at the end of the day, is a very
a species of Prometheanism. Like I, two, two, you know, canonical examples I can give. One, you know, Aino Kossat Hamadani. Do I need to type it or Alex is going to find it on Wikipedia. Eino Khozant Hamidani and the other one Mansour Al-Hallaj. Both are considered to be martyrs. Skinned alive, crucified and burnt at stake.
Strangely, both of them wrote books on something called the Black Flame. How cool is that? So what do you think the Black Flame is? Black flame. Flame when you cook?
This is just a random idea. Now you are getting too Turkish now. No, black flame is this idea that You see, first of all, you should understand where Middle Eastern mysticism came from. It was a mixture of an unannihilated Zoroastrianism, residual sub-Zoroastrianism, Iranian nationalism,
and pre-Islamic mysticism. They became one at some point and essentially they created what we now know as the cult of martyrdom, Shia Islam. At the core of this doctrine is something very simple, that light, and light can be basically a synonymous truth to God,
whatever, you know. Light blinds us. And in the blindness, we must act blindly. You see, this is the whole point of mania. Mania is to act blindly according to light. Because there is a light that blinds you. and you have an access to it. This, however, even though creates extreme versions of personal pathology as we have
seen it in Shia Islam, it also creates a really systematic way to understand that how we should unmake ourselves, abolish dogmatic visions of all kinds. and isn't it the very idea of enlightenment
Thank you. I'm not sure if this is a relevant link, but somehow this idea of acting blindly reminds me of what you were saying previously about reason as being suicidal when you simply follow it blindly,
or you don't understand its association with risk. Is there any comparison there? Or why are those not the same. No, no, it is exactly like that. Essentially, the idea that you see, so we have different grades of mysticism, right? And in mysticism, you get the shitty negative theology. You know, you get the unknown unknowns. And then you might actually get unknowments by virtue of which you can know more.
This is the highest, what you might call to be, status of mysticism in the Middle East. in the sense that what really blinds us is not the unknowing but knowledge itself and if knowledge blinds us then we can tap into the unknowing That's basically the principle of Middle Eastern mysticism, as a way of reconstructing the self.
in this section Ectomomania wandering there's this what page is it page 147 page 147 Jesus Christ. 147. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not fleeing from some random violence, but reeling from the drunken mixture of delight and guilt in betraying what was once closest
fatalities own adapt from the Persian Siyahmas, literally black drunk, the final stage of the intemperate drinker. Siyah in Turkish also black. Ahosh is the drunk, not must, but still. But we don't have this black drunk, we don't, this is not a saying in Turkish, but is this a figure? Is this, what is the black drunk? who see our masks do yeah unfortunately it's a very racist thing uh you see in persian in persian literature in old persian literature there there are always uh references to uh a black drunk It's essentially an African man who has got drunk and wields a dagger or a sword.
It is essentially a reference to chaos. Yeah. Well, this makes sense. Quite racistic though. No, no, no. But he sort of returns to the figure in his other literature of the assassin, of the knife wielder, and the Bedouin, the Bedouin, North African Arab character, the wanderer. I mean, I'm not saying he's reclaiming the use of it or anything. It's just a mention of this.
Yes, yes. But the thing is that the reason I'm saying that it's inappropriate and racist precisely because you see, I don't have any sort of qualm against the idea someone gets, you know, wielding dagger and killing others. people for the good cause. It's just that if you know the reference, it means that a black man is predisposed to get inebriated and once gets drunk, he becomes barbaric,
wild, killing other people. Well, this is what the omnicidal mania sort of induces in the figure of the wanderer, the figure of the... Not really by way of alcohol, though. You see, the whole idea of the mania is the idea that, you know, We can invent fantasies without becoming inebriated. Right, yeah. And then we can become omnicidal. And that's, I would say, a true ethical lesson. Yes, we all need to have fantasies.
Fantasies, you see, with a maniac, a maniac is not a person who simply acts out on fantasies, but someone who dilates fantasies, who enriches the fantasies. to the point, like a masochist, to the point that when the fantasy becomes realized, the world will be burnt. It's essentially like, why do you think serial killers usually get married to each other?
because they have the same kind of burning fantasy, a fantasy that kills other people. But in this manias and the ones that are described in the book, it seems that these fantasies are coming from very ubiquitous entities. So it's something that we'd consider that we encounter every day, something that is not specifically... Sexual. Exactly, yeah. Absolutely. But this is the whole point that you see when you look at, for example, in the history of psychoanalysis,
like the conversation between Freud and Frenzy in the three-volume letters that they sent to each other, They actually settled on this idea that serial killers don't act out from sex, from sexual compulsion often. They might actually have different kinds of triggers. So I'm not making a kind of what you might call too blatant comparison between serial killers and people of the sort that Jason talks about.
But nevertheless, we should realize that there is an element of fantasy, and fantasy can originate from anything. But if you intensify a fantasy, and I think Deleuze is really great on this point, with regard to the question of who is a masochist, You can get a great deal of pleasure out of it. Yes, I would say that we should all be masochists. We should all cultivate our fantasies, withdraw them, make them ferment,
and don't act out in a casual manner. I wonder about the relationship between, I'm just thinking back to this text about Kirk Alan and how like he was in what was kind of termed a psychosis and it wasn't until uh there was someone else participating in the psychosis that it was broken for him whereas it seems like this discussion with manias it's the participation of like another um maybe even can improve or like
accelerate and yeah i'm interested to know what you think about that or if there's any uh there's anything there between the participatory nature of manias? I think that absolutely. You see, manias, all manias, I would say that are participatory in nature. There are interactions. There are a species of interaction. Interaction in sense of confrontation of some belief laden actions. And then how does, yeah, and then for fantasies playing into that, but then yeah, where is the point, like where in the case of psychosis, and not that this is about the
definitions of these things, but yeah, I guess it's curious to me that in the case of yeah, kirk allen like it was really the fantasy could only be could only exist don't you think that essentially this is what basically divides canonical psychosis from neurosis in this or in the sense that psychosis is usually individuals who are really focused on a specific mania and this mania simply is theirs whereas in
neurosis where manias can actually diversify there is always another other that other can be a human an animal i don't know nature so on so forth god even Can you turn to page 311? Now you're asking me too much. Three hundred what? 11.
Yes. Now we are nearing the end and in the second paragraph here he says one of the grossest mistakes of early psychoanalysis was to construct taxonomies in which symptoms were seen as inherent to a disorder itself rather than as byproducts of the collision between said disorder and the social reality that names condemns and persecutes it and then he goes on to talk about schizophrenia and whether the schizophrenia, the person who possesses schizophrenia, it's unresolved whether this person possesses an essential propensity towards violence,
which we were just talking about, or whether the schizophrenic violence emerges because the, quote, rancorous confrontation between the schizoid imagination and the surrounding majority, confident in the rigid presumption of their own general sanity. So whether it's a secondary byproduct. I think there is a little bit of misreading of early psychoanalysis here. So you say he's making straw man? Sorry? So you say he's creating straw man? I wouldn't call it a straw man. I would say that misreading, misreading of early psychoanalysis. no no no early psychoanalysis completely understands the difference between symptom
and the cause of course where psychoanalysis becomes important is precisely because it's a detective true detective a story about the cause You know, like very much in the sense of true detective. For example, think about something like this, that in Frenzy, as I mentioned last time, you
stories of child abuse. So the majority of child abuse cases are actually happening in the domain of family by relatives, parents, so on and so forth. In the sense that, you know, I'm a child, I say that I want to play mommy and daddy. And my dad actually confuses this with sleeping together in a sexual sense.
Now, this is I think one of the greatest findings of psychoanalysis. With regard to the drives, mobilizations of consciousness and so on and so forth, symbolic Symbolic language does matter and symbolic language is in fact the very surface of psychoanalysis. It's just that you have to tap into it, you have to dig into it.
Like we have selves, which are composed of such and such characteristics. But these characteristics are symbolic, socially given. How can we scrap the surface and get into the nitty gritty stuff? Well you can't do it unless and until you unmake the symbolic order.
You can't unmake the symbolic order by a discourse about causes and empirical processes so on and so forth in the wane of physicalism or new materialism. It's just that you have to do it again by the symbolic order. It's just like this idea that the only way out of anthropocentrism is by to recognize the human. Because only sapiens can disassemble anthropocentrism brick by brick.
thoughts comments um yeah i have a few thoughts perhaps as per usual can you hear me yes yes of course yes thank you Great. I mean, I would just like to go back and sort of make a note when we say that enlightenment or enlightenment reason isn't a Western idea, but it's a hybrid idea. I would have sort of perhaps it's a little bit beside point of the seminar, but I would perhaps have liked a bit more specificity there. It's very, it's very possible something is hybrid, but then
leave it at that. You see, I mentioned earlier on that within the idea of enlightenment, there is the idea of risk. It is the absolute prime factor of enlightenment. So where the idea of risk comes from? That's the most important question. You see, so up to almost 1400, the canon of logic within the scholastic framework didn't have a
a robust sense of possibility or necessity, namely modal vocabularies. For then, possibility was simply like this, that something might actually happen. But then, in virtue of the impingement of Islamic logic, and most probably also Chinese Far Eastern logic, on the Western logic, we learned that possibility is not actually about things happening. It is about things that might not have happened,
nevertheless they are actual, as actual as the world in which we live. So this was the origin of counterfactuals. And counterfactuals, you might think about them as how we think about risk today, in terms of climate change, in terms of existential risk, so on and so forth. Yeah, thank you for clarifying that. That makes a lot more sense now. The other
thing I was wondering about, unfortunately I was trying to find reading it this morning but I couldn't find it anywhere, but we talked a a bit about, I mean, earlier in response to one of the presentations, the creation of a world and the creation of a self. I think it would perhaps be helpful to clarify the relationship between these two creations, or if there is a relationship, or if it's the same thing even. Does one create the world or does one create the self? Okay, now you are basically putting a short leash on me. Yes, I am. Well, I need to think about whether creation of a world is the same as creation of a self.
But however, I can create or talk about how possibly they can be related to one another. In the sense that isn't self about recognition. So, self in German idealism, you don't have a self unless you cognize something other than you. Right? And if you recognize that which is other than you, then you most probably reinvent yourself. That's the very problem of self-consciousness in Hegel as a practical matter.
The same thing can be said about worlds. So we are living in this world. We are inhabitants of this world. But just imagine that we could be inhabitants of a different world where we could recognize this very world in which we live. But unfortunately, for all we had, it's a matter, it was a matter of our entrenched cognition. So there is always, when we are talking about world and self,
and reconstruction of them is a matter of recognition. To cognize a world is to recognize the old world. To cognize a new self is to recognize a new self. Re being in bold, bold face. I kind of like that. And perhaps when one does one of the two things, perhaps one also engages in the other to some
extent. Yeah. It's a very nice way of thinking about it, I think. I will continue to sort of try to consider this. Please do presser me. Thank you. I've been reading a lot of Brandon recently, and I would say that he sort of carves this along the relationship between perception, world, and apperception, self, as a parallel. That's just one consideration, but... Yeah, but I mean that's kind of the thing, right? And I think that's what I'm interested in here,
sort of where exactly do we sort of locate this cut and this distribution where we're talking about this distinction here. It is kind of like this old slogan that there is no perception unless it is an apperception. So, which means that the resources of world making or world unmaking are not coming from individual experiences but are coming from something else, something impersonal, something
timeless or atemporal. thoughts ideas you know that i really don't mind if you swear at me When you said resources there, the resources for world making or unmaking, were you meaning like the cognitive entrenchments that you were mentioning earlier, or is not specifically
cognitive resources that you were talking about? Well, yes, cognitive resources. But you see, this is the whole point, that cognitive resources that we have are unfortunately tethered with the kinds of intuitions, sensorial intuitions that we have. We imagine that we either disconnect cognitive resources from sensorial intuition, a la Wittgenstein, the sense of wittgenstein's thinks that logic as the organ of all scientific constitution
should not be the handmaiden of sensorial intuition a lot transcendental logic this or Or the fact that we slowly learn that maybe our sensorial intuitions, entrenched sensorial intuitions were shed to begin with. And we have to reassess them historically. Hey, you! Stop it. My apologies. My cat is doing some nasty stuff.
Okay. Hey, you. Stop it. My apologies. My cat is doing some nasty stuff. People who haven't talked. Geronimo, yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, say something. I'm sort of metabolizing all this information.
But I'll just like say something that it kind of, well, what we've been talking about. taps into something that I recently read, and that's a book called A Billion Black Anthropocene. And it sort of explores that idea of recognition, recognitioning a world in order to like suggest the creation of a new one. I haven't read this book. Is it any good? Is it something that I should actually check?
I think it's interesting. Yeah. I've just read the first 20 pages. And the premise is basically that the whole notion of the Anthropocene, it's very much caused by Eurocentric. uh thinking in a way and and yeah it's it's kind of a similar to a a book i've read before uh written by a portuguese anthropologist named a buaventura de sosa santos the book is called the epistemologies of the south would you would you be able to uh uh post that uh
uh title on the sidebar yeah yeah i appreciate it sure i i apologize for not giving like the no no no don't don't worry framework but i'm i'm i'm merely uh uh you know kind of like uh doing a sneaky stuff and basically uh called one student at the time. Don't worry about it. You see, one of the things about new materialism and all these new animist anthologies that I have found rather disturbing is that, so yes, if there is a way to move forward, we have to recognize the universe in all its richness.
Right, you know, talking about, you know, I don't know, a bee's dance around an orchid, an army of ants dead reckoning, so on and so forth. But unfortunately, I have noticed that in these kinds of scenarios that people are usually talking about, recognition does not have cognition and that's bad you see recognition is a species of cognition
it's simply the world tells you you have to cognize the world and then you have to recognize the world. So if everything is stuff, basically interacting with one another, then that's not really so informative for us. If every self is new and void already, that doesn't tell us. how we should make or unmake ourselves.
Thoughts? thoughts yes yes yes um i would like to rewind on something that you said about um world making being something extra temporal or going beyond time i don't know if that was what you said but if that's the case, would you be thinking about this platonic idea of the extra temporal?
Like, I don't know, this thing that guides us, like Plato's daemon. Are you trying to bathe me here? I'm not sure yet. You know that I'm very platonic on this issue. essentially that I see that the very idea of time that we as agents have is temporal. It is a sense not about time, but it is about the time of experience. But if experience is a certain kind of stuff, organized stuff, which has its own characteristics
at certain time and space, then why do I need to actually think about experience? You see, the point of philosophy is to arrive at the new facts of experience, just like the point of ethics is to arrive at new selves. And you cannot do that. simply by saying that, oh, I have this experience of this world, and it was temporal, or I had this experience of the self, which was this or that.
No, no, you have to arrive at new selves and new facts of experience. Otherwise, literally, you are living in an antiquated world. Those people who think they live in a fixed world are those people who get antiquated very quickly. Any question for all of you?
You see, I talked about the metaphor of desert with regard to the idea of unmaking the self. You see, in the canon of philosophy and ethics, you can unmake the self along two different vectors. by assimilating the self inside a non-place, a thoroughgoing exteriority where all characteristics of self will diminish or will evaporate.
Another one is by way of time. You slowly, step by step, time-wise, annihilate the self. So my question for you would be what do you think the course of ethics should be? A mixture of the two or either of these?
new spaces then? Or I guess I'm like a little unclear about sort of jumping to... Yeah, that's a really good question. Yeah, I think that a step-by-step annihilation creates new spaces. And in that sense, we might ask a further question. what does it take to get rid of a self? You see, Western Buddhists,
I have actually been in communication with a lot of them, they always say to me that, well, no, I talk to them about the problem of the self and so on and so forth. and they say that, well, we don't believe in self. Well, you know, the problem is that it's not the idea of belief in self that gravitates you toward certain kinds of pathologies. It's the idea that how you can get rid of yourself. So yes, in that sense, I would say that this step-by-step way of getting rid of the self
is good. It's ethical. People who usually think that they don't have a self most probably are assholes, ontological assholes. You guys are kind of getting lazy today. I'm trying to understand what you mean by the annihilation of the self.
At what level are you speaking of self? Even if I annihilate myself. Phenomenal self. Phenomenal self. You see, I mentioned that, you see, there are two different, basically, variations of the will, which you can connect them with two variations of the self. So one is free choice, you know, in a kind of voluntaristic understanding of the will.
And the other one is irrational will. That will is utterly irrational and nothing else. It is not a species of consciousness or brute consciousness, but it is a species of self-conceptual consciousness. You can translate this to the difference between selves. So in one scenario, you can think of self as merely an illusion that we have basically cherished, used and abused for so long.
But there is also a self that is not an empirical fact. It is actually a rational construct. It's something that ought to be constructed. so you mean the annihilation of uh self is also a passage from self as uh free choice to as a deeper deeper yes yeah as an empirical uh self to a to a deeper level of uh rational self Yes, rational will. So this rational will also corresponds to what you say the resources of the world?
Yes, precisely because you need to have certain kinds of logical resources to in fact think about what this will can or cannot do. Of course all of your what you might call to be reports about these negative and positive constraints as long as we are talking about the rational self are themselves revisable because you might actually arrive at a
different, a higher order, logical toolbox which allows you to think of the self as fundamentally different from the kind of self that we associated with ourselves. And isn't it the whole point that we are arriving today by way of science and technology?
So, ethics, I would say, if ethics cannot commensurate itself, it cannot synchronize itself with techniques of science and technology, it is not ethics. It is just simply morality. Carl, you're burning. Yes, I am burning.
It's actually quite hot here. I have a question. I haven't really formulated it yet. But it's kind of in between what we're talking about and Catherine Yusuf's book. I haven't read it, but I had the opportunity to actually meet her a couple of weeks ago, and she talked about a similar theme. Since this is being recorded, I don't want to misattribute anything to her, so what I'm saying is, of course, my own rotation. But yeah, Catherine Yusuf, the author of the A Billion Black Anthropocene's book that was mentioned earlier. Anyway, she draws on a number of Afro-pessimist writers and the Black feminists. I think one of the things she posits is during
slavery and the extreme reduction and to the extent she argues of the becoming inhuman of the slave? And is this not also a form of brutal and deprivation of self from outside, a sort of situation where one is prohibited from actually having a self in some sense? And I think perhaps it is warranted to sort of think a little bit about who gets to embark on this sort of perhaps vain journey of reconstructing and destroying one's one's own self in light of historical um are you uh my apologies uh if i understand you correctly
does your question bottom out to this very question that how can a victim can actually become wholesome ever again? I think there are two questions. That is one of the questions. And the other question is, how can someone... I think perhaps let us begin there. Let us begin there. And I will have to think a little bit about the other question I'm trying to ask. Go on, Carl.
Great, great. Okay. I shall try. I think that is certainly one of the questions. How can someone who has been deprived of their ability or opportunity to make themselves any kind of self actually create one? And on the other hand, is that not the opportunity where a self actually must be created? And given the facts of history, how can someone willingly depart on this sort of vain and willful sort of annihilation of one's own self, given how certain deprivations of selves have in fact played out?
You see, I think, well, this is, I have only a partial answer to this. And it's only answer to the extent of my own experience. So it is not really a truthful answer. I would say that, yeah, sure, I have experienced all of this. But you see, the strategy should be revised in the sense that, okay, you were the kind of person who were deprived of all of this stuff, right?
But maybe you should actually, as a matter of strategical thinking, and by that I mean you know, anti-victimhood, turn the table around and say that the choices that I made have far more consequences than the choices that you made. You see, I have seen, as an Iranian, so many of my fellow countrymen who wallow in their own misery.
because they can't go outside of Iran. They're just stuck. They're just literally stuck. And if you think that Iranian, you know, basically scenario is not worse than an African scenario, I think that you probably haven't visited Iran. These are the people who are utterly, utterly, have been nuked socially, politically, culturally from every other direction.
So I'm simply trying to share my experience. I don't know whether it is good or not. I don't know whether it can actually help you or not. What I thought about this was that, yes, this is all good, but then I can actually con-Western civilization. You see, in the sense that I will give them what they always wanted to have,
a bit of exoticism, a bit of otherness, and it worked. To be honest with you, people like us who are deprived, we don't have so much ammunition. We have to con Western civilization at some point. And that is the dangerous game. what do you mean you gave exoticism and what they want well let's not talk about it I've done so many bad things in my life
but yes the whole point is that westerners sitting on their comfortable sofa and talking about other worlds. But other worlds are very, very different. Because other worlds are deprived. And as an inhabitant of other worlds, unfortunately don't have any choice other than conning the Western civilization which I am all for it
unfortunately that's all it is if you think that an African person can eject himself or herself from Africa talk about what he or she wants to talk about without the fear of persecution, that's just a Western fantasy. No. You have to do something. You have to create a spaceship that looks exotic to the Western people. That's why I always say that, you see, Orientalism is bad, but Orientalism is also good.
Why? Precisely because it allows us to escape from the cage in which we were born. reality is not as black and white people think. It requires a lot of nasty, nitty-gritty maneuvering. So it's a bit worth mentioning, I think, that in discussing this book, after I wrote the
review a few iranians uh messaged me on academia.edu where i uploaded the review for free because it was issued by a journal that if you don't have academic access to you have to pay a lot of academic journals are like this so i always upload it for free and a few iranians messaged me and they said we're so happy that you've written this we actually don't have access to the book so the only way that we can read this book is through the review it's the closest we can get to reading this book and it i asked you last time you know i was thinking about physically sending a copy to the book and you said no don't do this it's a terrible idea if you do this it's just going to be taken
at customs and these people are going to be questioned so please don't add it and uh you know This brings up a question that for us living in the West, even those of us who are not Westerners, but living in the West, there's a certain comfort that we approach these texts with. And it certainly affects how we read them. And this is the whole thing that I was trying to make a point about. That, you know, we have a world of comfortable self. Right. Yes, we can criticize about Western hubris. We can talk about how Easterners are good, which they are not, by the way.
You know, I'm saying this as an Easterner. It is so easy within that kind of constructed world to talk about the rest of the world. But no, the whole point, as I mentioned, is we have to come up with a recipe to unmake our own world. To finally understand what other people experience, what other worlds look like. I know Jason has been committed to this project too,
because in one of his other texts, and I know he's releasing Omnicide too. So perhaps in that text, he will continue this. He would visit people in prisons in different parts of the Middle East and collect poems from them. Writers who were in prison for their writings, political writers and such. I remember he gave a lecture about this. I think you actually shared that lecture on your Facebook wall. Yes, yes. Yeah, but the thing is that, you see, it is very easy to talk about other selves in different worlds,
how they should be respected, and how they should be dignified. But that is not really a practical form of reasoning. It's a theoretical reason or axiological reason at most. What we need at this point is that how can we practically join other selves victims alienated people so on and so forth and to that
extent that's why I mentioned that today's course is not about making a world but on making the world which we are currently inhabiting. So I think that's absolutely sort of the key point here, that it's something practical. And I wonder a little bit, if we were to sort of, just for a moment, go sort of all the way down to earth and sort of how would I make the world or my world or any world in a way that is, you know, that will not remove any dignity from another's world.
Sure. Yes, yes. Definitely so. Definitely so. Yeah. So, any ideas? How should one do this? well I think this comes back to what we have been trying to kind of implicitly talk about essentially the two phases of ethics and what are the two phases of ethics personal cultivation, personal responsibility and accountability culpability and the other one universal ideas. If you don't have either of two
you are just cursed. If you don't have both you're either Middle-Easter or or Westerner, but if you have both a universal idea and certain kind of ethical idea about personal culpability, which has basically came forth from a long time of disciplined reflection then that's when you can solve the problem unfortunately I don't
think that we can solve the problem at this point we are worlds separate from one another. And that is unfortunately going to get even worse in the coming years. There is humanity I think that doesn't have any sort of what you might call to be, I am optimistic about the idea of the human in the Hegelian sense, but the concrete humanity unfortunately doesn't have any chance whatsoever. It is doomed.
But hopefully some people who concretely understand the meaning of what it means for us to be doomed can do something. But unfortunately I don't think that, Cole, you and I can do anything at this point. still though i i it's that cause for resignation or should one do as beckett and simply fail better fail better fail better absolutely that is uh that is my conviction too no resignation resignation resignation absolutely no world resignation works failing better is the only recipe to move forward
Yes. Reza, I have a question for you. It's sort of stepping backwards a little bit. But yeah, just go ahead. So it seems that, I mean, to talk about Kirk Allen as the example, if he were to have, It seems that you need to be traversing multiple worlds and multiple selves at one single time because if you ever go into a kind of singular vision of self or of world, then you disallow
the possibility to reconstruct the self, right? So if you go into one world... You can actually get disconnected, yes. Yeah, so I just want to see how to reconcile that with something we were talking about of this kind of the systematic engineering over time or something that reminds me of like a militant approach, like militancy, meaning, you know, that you're not just fighting on the street, but that you're also fighting when you're on the toilet, for example.
So like, how do you reconcile the idea of how comprehensive and systematic an approach is required to create a new world or to disassemble the self with the fact that you can never be in, like, that it would be damaging to be in only one world at a time? I don't know if I've made that clear. So yeah. No, no, this is actually a really fantastic question and extremely difficult question. Oh, Jesus Christ, true almighty. Okay, well, you see, I think,
One of the things that comes from Kirk Allen, not to answer your question, because I'm unfortunately at this point very much under-equipped to answer your question. It doesn't matter, it doesn't mean that your question was wrong, it's just that it was, it is so substantial that I really don't have any, what you may call to be a bullet point answer to that. But I would say one thing. The idea is that very much like a military doctrine.
So, in military doctrine, we usually distribute our military hardware across a very expansive area, such that they cannot be hit hard. by designated missiles. That's why basically naval carriers were invented. They can move airplanes from one point to another point. And there are so many of them might be a station, for example, in the Sea of China. Right.
The same thing can be said about the self. The point of schizophrenia in a Dalusian sense, aka fragmentation of the self, is a defensive strategy against the pathologies of the self. So what you want to do is to fragment yourself already and that's basically it just doesn't come free. Okay, schizophrenia in the Louisiana sense absolutely doesn't come free. It comes with a cost. The first cost is the realization that self is a delusion. Because if you actually
manage to divide yourself on different territories, it means that you don't have a goddamn self. So you see. But nevertheless, this is a kind of a psychic defense mechanism that I think is important. That you have to divide yourself across different continents. such that pathologies, the incoming missiles, cannot fully incinerate who you are as a person. But of course, this was not an answer to your question. It was just a tangential comment,
because I really, to be honest with you, if I thought I had that answer to your question, I wouldn't be depressed, I wouldn't be a person riddled with pathological anxiety, I would be a good person, I would be a happy person, but unfortunately I'm not because I don't know the answer to your question. We'll work on it simultaneously, don't worry. Reza, we have two martyrs for you to post the names of, if you recall who you were speaking of earlier. Black Flame?
There was something to do with the Black Flame. Black Flame, Black Flame, Sholaysia. It's a book by Mansour Al-Allaj. Okay. And there was a second mother as well. I know Ghazat Hamadani. Are you talking about that one? I think so. Yeah, would you mind posting that name in the side, brother? Yeah, yeah, one sec. Unfortunately, I have to get the Latinized name. No, we are all barbarian now, particularly me. Okay. Tam-Hidat.
That's his book. Tam-Hidat. Simply in English means perludes. Okay, I'm going to put it on the sidebar. My mother is always telling me to read this poetry and the philosophy, but Persian philosophy is so much. It's hard to... I don't think that there
is anything like Persian philosophy, to be honest with you. There is a reason for it. I mean, these two figures are a reason for it. You see, how could you actually practice philosophy if you were basically living under the reign of the caliphs. Right? So, Iranians are a bunch of sneaky fuckers. Just like and other Middle Easterners. So, the solution that they came up with is that,
okay, maybe we shouldn't actually talk about philosophy. Let's actually talk about mysticism, which is actually philosophy in their own terms, but let's call it mysticism. So it kind of, you know, it's a wishy-washy, you know, the kings in Baghdad don't pay attention to it much, and so on and so forth. Yeah. The whole thing is that there is no such a thing as Middle Eastern philosophy at all in the Middle Ages. every sort of philosophy that came from that region during that time was a species of mysticism in order to ward off possible persecution.
this is this also brings me back to this idea of you know the unmaking of the self you see that's the most heretical idea because to unmake the self is also to unmake the existing world. And of course, the existing world might be guarded by caliphs if you are in Middle East. But for example, think of Foucault's lecture on negative freedom.
In the sense that, you know, well, we know that positive freedom is all good and great, you know, because positive freedom is what actually rationality is about, the ability to do something. but negative freedom is also important and actually Foucault in all of his works tried to highlight the importance of negative freedom freedom from something you know in in the sense that for example the most trivial corny example like we are being bombarded by media and so on so forth
so at some point it's necessary for us to put our hands on our ears and don't listen anymore create better filters to filter out the junk that we get. The unmaking of the world is exactly like that. Like sometimes if we try to make ethics by way of the world in which we already inhabit, maybe that ethics will end up to be pathological. precisely because it is under the strictures of the current world.
So perhaps the best solution would be the idea to undo this world. Yeah. Now, you know, within Catholicism, there's a sin called worldliness. They're saying something very similar to you. Yeah, but, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, was I just get busted as a closet Catholic? It's not so different, you know, from the point of view of the kingdom of God, vis-a-vis the good meaning of the world.
I have to retire from New Center. Okay, comments, anything? And who's going to present? So we are reading Metzinger, being no one, in the introduction, just the introduction. And those who are interested can actually, I know that there is no one interested, maybe a couple of people. They can read a chapter called Deviant Phenomenological Models of the Self,
something like that. Yeah, well, you can find it. So we are going to read that. So we need two presenters. Can I present one of them? Absolutely. I could do another one. Thank you so much. Who were the two speakers there? Oh. That was Nikita. And me, Celestin. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for allowing me to not be mean to other students and forcing them to talk about Bedsinger. Thank you. It looks like Shilpi would like to also present.
Can we have a third presentation there? Yes, yes, yes. I mean, this is the last session, so why not? All right. Is there anything else that we want to cover in the last couple minutes, or just switch to the end of the recording there? I have a comment. I keep thinking of Hume and empiricism and I mean as an empiricist you would agree that fictions or these manias are method of thoughts, so to say, but then like be like empirically said, you know that your rational capabilities are determined.
by your cognitive habits, right? So then if you want to create new fiction, you need to change these cognitive habits. And I don't know if you are a rationalist, then you think life can be a science and you can achieve some epistemological break, so to say. The greatest comment, Lengla. It's absolutely the greatest comment. It is just literally the greatest comment. Yes. You see, it's essentially what we have been talking about so far is what you might call to be not getting rid of the self,
but the habituating process of having a self. like in a human sense so we have habits of selves but then what does it mean to dehabituate those processes the dehabituation process is what is important not losing the self I mean every goddamn western Buddhist claims to not have a self and they are the most egotistic people on the planet
but you think the more important in this the habituating praxis is the epistemological decision, so to say, or... I would say actual logical decisions, to be honest with you. You see, of course, please, please do counter my response. You see, because, let me tell you this, that I think that Kant, for example, Kant's response
to Hume never actually managed to fundamentally get rid of Hume. So Kant's idea of quid jurists, namely the question of epistemology, by what right we say that we know such and such, is still within an entrenched idea of habituation, habits of perception, habits of sensation, so on and so forth. The thing is that with Hegel we get something rather different in the sense that with the Hegelian scenario, we get this story that if we could manage
to habituate ourselves to different logics of reason and understanding, which are historical, then perhaps we could get rid of the old trap. thoughts Blenka?
Could you repeat the last sentence? Because I think I lost it. Oh, yeah, yeah. I was saying that, you see, with Hegel, we get something different in the sense that, you know, the process of habituation is not fundamentally epistemological. It is actually logical. And this is something that actually became the cornerstone of early analytic science and analytic philosophy, my apologies, in the sense that if we can habituate ourselves or acclimatize ourselves to new forms of logic, like for example, new scenarios of modal vocabularies, counterfactual, so on and so forth.
then we can dehabituate our entrenched experiences. So essentially, the thing is that with regard to Kant and Hegel, it seems to me that the process of dehabituation happens along two fundamentally different vectors. In Kant, the process is happening across what he calls transcendental logic,
from understanding to sensorial intuition. Whereas in Hegel, it happens within logic and reason. And there is a good reason for it. Precisely because, you see, Sellars has some stories about this, Wilfred Sellars. Like, you know, if we are, for example, these kinds of neurophysiological species who have certain kinds of sensorial propensities where we basically see this and such versus that
and such, we say that they are different. But the thing is that if we had a language or logical resources adequate enough, we might could arrive at this idea that this and such this such and that such are actually one thing or this such that we thought it is just simply this such as a uniform sensorial intuition might actually be multiple things
like for example shades of color blue which have different names okay I think I'm ranting now you are getting to the grue I don't want to hear about you and your grew stuff okay my betters
thank you so much I love you all and we'll have our last session next week thanks very much Reza thank you Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Reza. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.