On the Practical Necessity of Having Demons (Session 9)

Okay. Hello and welcome to the ninth session of On the Practical Necessity of Having Demons by Reza Nigaristani. I'm now going to pass the mic. Reza, please take it away. Thank you very much. Hello, everyone. I hope you are plate free still. So we are continuing Espinoza and Bruno because obviously, you know, whatever we talked about Bruno and Espinoza last session is not going to be enough. People want to get more juicy stuff after that. Red, good suggestion actually.

So I'm going to present on Bruno in the first half. Yes. I'm sure everyone can talk about Forenzia actually. So we maybe divide the two between the break and just do the beforehand. Yes, yes, surely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't worry about the, essentially, you know, you can go flash forward, back, flashback, all sorts of that kind of, you know, Michael Bay moves. It's all fine with me. Don't worry about it. Yes. I'm actually going this session talk a little bit about Bruno. I talked a little bit about Espinoza's idea of determinism and how it basically determines his idea of ethics. With

Bruno things are a little bit more intricate precisely because he's coming from a very, very diverse ancestry of philosophical and esoteric ideas. And that's precisely why he got, you know, kaput at the end of the day by the Inquisition. He wasn't really actually, Bruno wasn't really a hero of enlightenment. as many people understand him. No, actually the reason that Bruno got, you know, gagged

and by gagging you should understand what medieval idea of gagging means, gagged and Bernd had a stake was precisely because he turned religion upside down. So he talked to the Catholics of his time and created a massive amount of quake between them. That what Catholicism is about, what is Catholic ethics? What is this idea of evil and stuff? Of course, it was coming from what I'm going to talk about today. It was coming from a very naturalistic perspective.

So as Spinoza, you should understand that by the late Middle Ages, higher scholasticism, these ideas took root fundamentally among intellectuals. It's just like, you know, you say that, oh, a speculative realism. Well, speculative realism is like, what? 2008. But no, the whole thing is that certain kind of trends can take root. And those kind of naturalistic trends, which gave rise to Bruno, Espinoza, Hobbes, Francis

Bacon, were really dominant around that time. And the reason that he got executed was precisely because he was trying to inject that naturalism which was already in the higher scholasticist theology back into Catholicism. That's why he's not really a martyr of enlightenment. He's a heresy arch. A good example that can be compared with Giordano Bruno is Minoxio.

Does anyone know anything about Minoxio? The Great Heresy Arc. From the Ginsburg book? Yes, yes. Cheese and Born. Yes. That's the one. And Minogitir is just essentially a peasant. He doesn't know anything. But he's, for some goddamn reason, he starts to read some naturalistic philosophy of his tongue. And he gets this funny idea that what if the world is actually a cheese and made of putrefaction, right?

So he talks about this stuff in his village. First, the Catholic people are saying that just shut the fuck up. This is not the kind of peasant talk. And then it consistently expands this naturalistic cosmology within Catholicism, within Christianity, to the point that it becomes a fundamental annoyance for the Catholic Church, such that Pope will basically send a diktat that this guy is a heresy rock meaning that you know he's just like an enemy

public enemy number one of catholicism but but wasn't he like judged by a by a secular um by secular authorities like you see this is the whole point giordano barona also was judged by secular authorities you see we are talking about High Scholasticism. During the time of High Scholasticism, the Catholic Church had this nice kind of way to not deal with these cases directly, but using, for example, the governor, the king, so on and so forth, the secular authority to deal with them. But it was always

on behalf of the Catholic Church. It's just like Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia doesn't want to fucking behead you right away. It asks secular authorities to do a trial and then cut your head away. Yes, that's essentially a very interesting thing that you brought up. It's a sociological lesson that I think that people usually do ignore. History of religious cruelty changed right at that moment. Essentially, secular authorities began to persecute people on

behalf of implicit injunctions coming from the church. Did I mention to you last time to watch the movie Giordano Bruno? Yeah you did but I didn't get ran to it unfortunately. It's magnificent, magnificent. Jean-Marie Elbelotte as Giordano Bruno. What else do you want? I mean the greatest actor of all time playing Giordano Bruno. Okay, my sir, initiate.

Sure. Yeah, so unfortunately I have to read everything out because I'll forget if I don't forget what I was going to say. So I'm sorry if it comes off a little bit prosaic. But yeah, so I want to do two things. Firstly, I want to contextualize Bruno. And I think this will be specifically with respect to his art of memory, and not so much his contemporary milieu. But I think that will be more interesting for our purposes. And then at the end, I'm going to try and add some broader questions, maybe relating to the theme of the course and some of the questions we've had so far. Many thanks. The art of memory is supposed to have originated with the classical Greek poet of Simonides, of Sios. In a pretty moribund anecdote, Simonides is said to have invented the art

when having temporarily absented himself from a banquet in which he was performing on the roof suddenly collapses basically. And it mutilates all the guests beyond visual recognition. And it's said that Simonides using a certain visual memorizing technique identifies the bodies based on where they'd been seated. So this story is recounted a couple of classical Latin sources where we find that the cultivation of artificial memory is being studied under the general heading of rhetoric and taught in rhetorical schools. And there's two basic principles to the art of memory at this stage. One is a place and the other is of image. The mnemonic, I'm going to get this word wrong a couple of times, of place is a bit

less interesting to us. It just kind of mirrors what Simonides' original method of placing things around the room and memorizing them in that kind of order. But the second principle concerning images is championed in particular by Cicero. And in the classical art, Cicero basically describes a technique using inner visual impressions of incredible intensity. And he says that the most powerful of all senses is the sense of sight. And we can see that there's already a couple of Neoplatonist tendencies emerging in this kind of image model of memory. So we know that Cicero kind of takes it beyond being a tool just for rhetorical training. He brings it more directly

under the heading of virtue and he ascribes the cultivation of artificial memory within the virtue of prudence. And he uses a stoic definition for virtue as well, which is kind of interesting. He He says it's a habit of mind in harmony with reason and the order of nature. So we can already see how the technique we're talking about begins to converge upon the domain of ethics conceived of as theory and practice or theory and exercise. So by the Middle Ages, and I think this is what you were talking about a minute ago, it's kind of picked up and it kind of moves more directly from rhetoric to ethics. And it's adopted by thinkers like Thomas Aquinas. and it kind of the ethical dimension here takes on a more theological kind of aspect as you would kind of expect. So Aquinas likens the faculty of memory to that of the imagination. Memory is the

sensitive part of the soul which takes in sense impressions but it also is the intellectual part since the abstracting intellect works within it to create phantasmal imagery. So and the scholastic tradition follows Cicero in stressing the important role of intense arresting imagery. However, the theological dimension gives these images and the art itself a different role in character. So what Yeats says in the book, the images chosen for their memorable quality in the Roman orator's art have been changed by medieval piety into corporeal simitudes of subtle and spiritual intentions. The role of artificial memory plays, the role artificial memory plays for Aquinas and his contemporaries is essentially that of reinforcing virtues of piety and worldly abstinence within a general moral code.

So Bon Campagno, who's like another scholastic philosopher, says, we must assiduously remember the invisible joys of paradise and the eternal torments of hell in the memory section of his rhetoric, giving a list of virtues and vices as memorial notes through which we may frequently direct ourselves in the paths of remembrance. So the sense in which the arts of memory were being used throughout this period is, you know, we see numerous descriptions of paradise and hell frequently involving diagrams to uptake into artificial memory technique. And Yeats actually moots the possibility that Dante's Inferno could originally have been conceived of and intended as an elaborate memory system. And I guess that's interesting also to think about the parallels between that text and the Adaviraf, which we read earlier on in the course.

So I'm going to jump roughly three centuries forward to Bruno, who himself professed a really great admiration for Aquinas, and in particular for the Thomist art of memory. But we see him clearly diverge in his unbridled deployment of magic and occult, which is specifically excluded in Aquinas' account. So Bruno's artificial memory is radical to the point of lunacy in its unflinching embrace of occult magic, as well as its terrifying and brilliant degree of complexity. So in a complete break with tradition, Bruno's most radical claim is that his art of memory is capable of granting access to divine knowledge and will thereby confer extraordinary powers onto those who have gained mastery in practicing it. Using a recombinatory technique adopted from a predecessor by the name of Ramon Lull, Bruno's

initial mnemonic system involves concentric wheels divided into 30 segments subdivided in each case into a further five sections. these wheels are intended to revolve in such a way that can allow multiple different combinations in which different results can be derived. Yates also remarks here on the content of the imagery being used by Bruno, decans of the zodiac, planets, houses of horoscope, things like that. The system is supposed to work by way of magic and I guess some of this is going to go over what Zay said last week as well but I think it's good to recap. It's not incidental that he is referring to the 30 divisions of his wheel as 30 seals, so that the power here is of celestial provenance and the title of the book kind of bears some pretty clear uh neo-platonist overtones as well uh the shadows of ideas these uh shadows are objects

beyond the stars in the ideal or the shadows of the objects beyond the stars in the ideal world uh so they're kind of like an intermediary between the celestial plane and the profane world of experience. And a footnote in the book from from Yeats says, he says that eternal ideas are received as an influx through the medium of the stars. And it's important here to remember also with relation to magic, although I know we've covered this point already, it seems important to stress. For Bruno, magic assumes laws and forces running through the universe which the operator can use once he knows the way to capture them. So it's not like a kind of cryptic unknown agency. It's definitely like a systematic and kind of rigorous discipline, which is,

I guess, where this prefigures science for at least for Yeats, but I think for others as well. And this was, yeah, this is just kind of a reminder because I know Zay brought this up last week. And yeah, beyond memorizing its best conceived of as a way of grouping, coordinating, unifying the multiplicity of phenomena in memory by basing memory on the higher forms of things, this can only be achieved within the realm of ideas and its externalization as a concrete image is always imperfect. So we can take stock of Bruno here in relation to his predecessors. Not only are the images of memory art of an intense and striking nature, but they're all also linked associatively, subsumed under the occult rubric of seals. Bruno's artificial memory is nothing less than a kind of interface with the one beyond the multiplicity of appearances.

It's definitely kind of anti-Aristotelian in favor of kind of associative magical linkages binding together the different groupings within nature. Ultimately, it's a kind of ethical device. It's kind of meant to culminate in this thing where give access to the seal of seals, which I guess might be thought of as the absolute unity of the one, the totality of knowledge and so on. So to maybe tangentially respond to a question that Daman raised last week about the relationship of philosophy to art, and this is kind of a real interest of mine also. Bruno said, according to Yeats, Bruno suggests that the thinker, the poet and the artists are all one, and that one cannot truly be a practitioner of any of these disciplines without possessing the skills of others. Yeats tells us that for Bruno, the mind only works in images, albeit of

different degrees of potency, and that there is no faculty of abstraction. So, yeah, I mean, Bruno's kind of, in his later works, he kind of develops more complex methods for dealing with the same principles. He kind of reintroduces the architectural methodologies of loci, which were, you know, when I mentioned that there were two kind of aspects of memory arts and artificial memory. But I guess what I was really interested in was the appeal to a certain mythical or literary figure and the nature of these intense images. Bruno says to think is to think in terms of images, basically. I'm quite interested in how this might relate to our question about demons, which seems to have a kind of... When we talk

about demons were clearly invoking a kind of maybe literary or imaginary or visual kind of dimension to make the case. So yeah, I mean, I guess this is kind of like maybe a difference between him and Cicero also in Aquinas and the Scholastics. These images that he's bringing up aren't necessarily meant to aid memory. They seem to be about drawing the subject to the outer rims of thinking and practicing itself. At most, one might say that images in these systems signify instances of these kinds of experiences without intending to

directly induce them. However, with Bruno, I would say there's a possible interpretation which suggests that in practice, these systems are precisely an attempt to reach the outer edges of experience, wherein demons are invoked and the self might cease to be self. So I guess just like kind of a closing question that I had, and I just want to throw this out there rather than make any direct claim about it was, you know, what does Bruno's memory system actually mean in practice? What is it for? How is it performed? You know, how does it look? And I these questions are relevant because at the time at which Bruno was writing, we had the introduction of the printing press and there was a lot of opposition to what he was saying from the likes of Erasmus, other humanists who were saying this is a residue of the Middle Ages that we need to

look beyond in the early Renaissance period. But Bruno's ultimate demise was at the hands of someone who had solicited him to teach the technique of memory. So it's clear that he was still in demand and still quite clearly kind of known for this. But I'm kind of curious about, you know, what its relevance in that period was and also, yeah, like what it looks like. And I, you know, I have some other kind of questions. They're a little bit more inchoate, but around, you know, I know he's a kind of a bet noir in this class, but Stiegler talking about hyponesis and anamnesis around the relationship of the exteriorization of memory into various cultural forms. And then what Bruno seems to be doing is more of like a kind of a mastery of it within the self or a kind of a technique for

navigating based on a kind of compression. So, I mean, I don't have, I mean, I have, I think I need some more time to think through that, but I wanted to introduce it as a kind of an inchoate question that maybe we could address in the course. Yeah, and I think I'll leave it there. I mean, you can maybe ask questions instead if that helps. My apologies. Many, many thanks. Fantastic, fantastic. Really good stuff. I have some thoughts. I can throw one question at you and then ask other people to intervene.

So you see, for example, as we talked about, demons from the ancient times are limit conditions of the self that we know. But the thing is that what kind of limit condition is for a scholastic self, idea of self, right? It is not as if that the art of memory in Brunelian sense is actually about the rational self. No, it is actually about the upturning of the theological self.

There is nothing bad with it, but we should take it with a grain of salt. For example, when we are talking about Spinoza, Bruno, Hobbes, and so on and so forth, you understand that for many, many years, self is just a given. It is not even a Platonist, neoplatonistic self right it is a self that is constituted by god so as you start to kind of explore the rims

of the self and correspondingly the rims the inner realms of cosmos, you begin to understand that there is, at a certain level, at a certain level, there is no distinction between the self and the universe. So, hence, a certain kind of insurrection arises in the late Middle Ages, leading to Renaissance, the Project of Enlightenment, and other kinds of stuff.

It is the one that... Memory, simply in the Brunouian sense, is a kind of eclectical idea of natural archive. You see, Bruno is not really... he talks about magic and all that kind of jazz. it's all good and really you know offbeat techno as we say today but he really doesn't talk about for example rational self like Kant or Hegel. The idea of self and how it is implicated within

the art of memory is purely naturalistic precisely due to that kind of insurrection which is the ambient environment of his time. Bruno is not really that exceptional if you think about it because no thinker is exceptional. We are all children of our own time and place, our own history. And if you look into the context of where Bruno comes from, you see that he has read Ficino's book on nature, right? Everything is nature. He has read some other kind of naturalistic stuff

which tell that, you know, causal determination is the only thing that we have. Natural laws is the only thing that we have. Just like Menocchio that I mentioned earlier in Carl Gensburg's book. So it is obvious that his idea of the art of memory is essentially what you might call to be a proto-Darwinian idea of nature, laced with a little bit of magic of its own time, right?

But it is not anything more than that. It is really good. But I think that people who see Bruno as this kind of mad hats magician don't really realize where he comes from. It comes from a very, very secular brand of naturalism, which was essentially erected during that time to fight off the dogmas of the church. And of course, if he was simply a naturalist, he most probably wouldn't have been

get whacked at the end of the day. The reason that he got whacked was precisely because he tried to lace these naturalistic ideas which became the undergirding of the Enlightenment form of ethics with certain kind of theological magical mindset that was you know somehow to an extent conversions upon the way

the church was thinking at that time. You see, this is what happens usually with heresy arcs that heresy arcs are people who come up with some sort of revolutionary idea that is always historically context sensitive. It is actually a historical movement. But then they try to make it less, you know, acute, less revolutionary by giving it a little bit of the stuff that usually authority wants to hear.

And that's what heresy is. Heresy is essentially when you actually put Marxism into Catholicism. You know? So, any questions? Any questions from our presenter? It was superb, by the way. Really great. Really, really great. Reza, there's something unclear for me. The question is to you, actually, Reza. You said that these kind of forestacles, they put some kind of, inject some ideas of their

time into the revolutionary idea to make it less acute. Do you mean like they do it intentionally with that regards or is it something that happens inevitably to any kind of revolutionary ideas? when I think about other contexts, for example, you mentioned Marxism, right? Uncle Joseph really disagree with you at this time. What? Uncle Joseph. Uncle Joseph, yeah, probably. Uncle Joseph. I'd like to know if Uncle Jay disagrees with you as well or not. Is it inevitable what happens? It is inevitable, yes. Yes, it is inevitable to a certain extent.

Yes, it is. But the thing is that this is a difference between a Harassiarch and a revolutionary mercenary of the Enlightenment. Why? Because the Harassiarchs doesn't know any better. He essentially lives in a historical context and anything that he learns, any knowledge, any kind of ethics that he garners will be within the limitation of his own historical

time. Whereas the revolutionary, a la Marx, C. N. Sands, tries, but of course we cannot say to much extent he can succeed, or she can succeed. He tries to first revise the historical time and then deliver the message. And this is why he often fails. Heresies are far more effective than revolutions. So it's a matter of methodology, right? Yes. It's a matter of historical methodology, yes.

So Uncle Jay disagrees with you as well, I guess. You know, Stalin would say that, do I need to give a shit about history? No, I don't. Talks, questions, my friends, about Bruno. Particularly one of the greatest things that our friend brought up was this idea of art of memory as creating an artifact. That's, that I think is just like genius idea of Bruno.

Any person who can say something about it? Carl, you a snake. Come on now. I can try maybe also related to your last last question, because I was I was also thinking, in a sense about the or making a case for for Bruno's idea of the imaginary architecture as related to what we've been talking about as talking about as well constructing and the contrafactual world building. I wrote something down while reading the Bruno text if you don't mind reading it. Absolutely, absolutely, please. It was also based on this idea that

Bruno calls the art of memory a method of significance of things which in a sense sounds like a system of semiotics and those those two ideas could could maybe relate. Yeats suggests that the inventory of the memory palace has a demonic and mystic connection to that which it in the first place is a mere representation of. In semiotic terms it is more indexical than it than just symbolic. The distance between representation represented, signify and signified marks the distinction between the two traditions within which Bruno places his images, the mnemonic and the talismanic.

We can interpret his imaginary architecture as contrafactual worldbuilding by calling it method of significance of things, as he does, and also speculations with images. He admits in a sense to its constructive contrafactual potential and we can consider it as a pictorial semiotics Does the memorized image constitute the very integration of ideals? Or does his technique merely serve an organizational purpose? Both probably his metaphysical yet indexical talisman witness of a soft pantheism opposing Spinoza's hard pantheism,

which contains a complete identity between nature and God. Oliver, if I may, how much then do you think that Bruno converges upon someone like Charles Sanders Peirce? That was what I was thinking about, the idea of the indexical. I mean, when Bruno talks about the image and the sign, and the, Yates puts a lot of emphasis on the talisman or the talismanic aspect of Bruno's image and the idea of the letter or the image or the word or whatever it is that serves as a memory device,

as having some sort of direct relation to that which it represents. So there's a sort of a spirit inside the image. So even though that's what I call his metaphysical yet indexical talisman. So you have a memory palace, which is completely, well, in your head, nonetheless, it's a direct relation to what it is that you want to represent with it. I see, I see. It's interesting that, you see, there are very few actually works that have been written on the genealogy of Hegel, right?

So obviously Hegel was, just like Newton, was very much into occult ideas of his time and from the late Middle Ages. he had read Bruno, the very idea of Bergiv concept, not the idea, the concept, is something like that. So the concept of, what was the word? Concept, concept, concept in the Hegelian sense, not the idea, concept, concept with capital C, where you see the progress of the concept to be the progress of the real. change that happens in the concept is a change that happens in reality.

There is a reason that I would say, of course, we cannot talk about Bruno ideas, But with Charles Sanders' purse, there is a reason that he has a certain kind of Hegelian undergirding, Hegelian inclination. I think it's this, that idea of indexicality shows in the concept, in the Hegelian concept, the concept is not a free-floating, what you might call to be semantic content. It is always constrained by reality and that constrainment shows, as a matter of fact,

within the development of the concept itself. So the history of consciousness, the history of ethics, because simply in the Hegelian or Persian sense, the consciousness of the concept, that's what ethics is at the end of the day. What we do in the realm of cognition is always what we have already done, what we have already basically made a mark in reality.

And what is a mark in reality, what is the constraint of reality is also a positive or negative constraint within the realm of theoretical and practical cognitions. Ethics 101. But this couldn't actually arise by itself. You needed to have a certain kind of naturalistic tendency to actually see that there is a reality out there in a certain sense, not in all senses, in a certain sense, to be independent of you.

Not epistemologically, but ontologically. That ontological independence of nature leads to what we now have as what you might call to be secular ethics. Positive constraints, negative constraints of nature hang together with the positive and negative cognitions of theoretical and practical kinds.

I have a question. Sure, sure, absolutely, absolutely, please. Yeah, connecting it to what we were talking about in the production of this model, this semiotic kind of apparatus that we were connecting to Peirce, and then the role of demons. I I was thinking, like, I think I kind of tend to read this through a concept that is very important to me in general, which is the Lezenguattari's conception of the diagram, which is also, I think, one recent phase in this same discussion.

I think there's a discussion with Pierce there, and like, one of the places where they get the diagram from is from Foucault's idea of the disciplinary apparatus and the panopticon and other examples which is basically a building that is abstracted but a non-concrete building that serves as this kind of abstract model that is used to navigate and to construct reality but i think the specific um turn that to lose puts in this discussion and i think this is connected to the demons discussion is that for him it's not so much

about this this diagram serving as a model that is going to mediate um a self and an object that are ontologically separate but rather he thinks that the self is always already um diagrammatic yeah so so you're already like ontologically entangled with those yes yes of course of course yes yes demons in in this in this discussion by bruno is it it kind of suggests that for this Cognition and which is also like a practical engagement to take place you have to already have a kind of business with demons which doesn't make you exactly like you know separate ontologically but rather you kind of have to enter into a kind of

Practical necessity of having demons to be in fact the self in the first place To be a self in a sense that's um that's ontologically separate but i think that i mean that's like the the question like um why would we why do we have to be ontologically separate and can we sustain that with like i don't know like the kind of extended mind discussions that we have if you want to put it like in a different tradition you know like the idea that the extended mind what are you talking about like Timothy Morsett or these kinds of shit? No. Which one are you talking about then? Dombecio or Valera? No, I like scientific stuff for that side. I forgot the name of the people.

These scientific people are not actually scientists. I mean, there are scientists with a massive amount of philosophy called narcissism. Essentially, yeah, maybe Andy Clark. Well, Andy Clark is not that bad. I mean, I could go along with Andy. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. Yeah, but the thing is that, like, for example, Andy Clark simply wants to do what we might call in analytic philosophy, complex reduction. So you shouldn't come off as a reductionist because that's bad, bad for your reputation and PR.

Do a complex reduction, such as by way of extended mind. And then, for example, we is the stuff about, you know, predictive processing brain. That's just, you know, is this what really mind is? Is this what really what we are? what ethics can be bottomed out no i actually take side with the scary folk and you know that a scary folk a scary guy james ladyman i don't agree with him on many many

topics, but James would have said that, you know, okay guys, this is all good and fantastic, but do you know that you are using representation to talk about representation and pretending as if you were not talking about representations? You see, we are stuck with certain kinds of constraints. We cannot just pretend as if we were outside of them. That's also the problem of ethics. Yeah, but couldn't you say it like, because I feel

like the same could be said the other way around when you think that you are already participating in a lot of entangled stuff that... Oh, yeah. Okay, now, no, no, no. Oh, see. Now, you see, when people say that entangled stuff, that's when I reach for my revolver. What is the entangled stuff? You know, it's usually a term for metaphysical bloatware. But yeah, you don't have to say like, you don't have to be able to, it would be even

like contradictory to try to objectivate it. But at the same time, it's hard to understand how you could just assume that you are like a sovereign in relation, like independent from this kind of... No, no, no, no. This is the whole point. The point of ethics, the point of epistemology, and I think one of the greatest ideas that Neocantians, like Paul Nator, Herman Cohen came up, to create a bridge between principles of epistemology, namely Kantian question of could jurists, by what right, and principles

of ethics. So we cannot assume anything, but we can do assume that anything that is outside of the scope of the epistemological inquiry is not a great assumption. That which is unknown, unknown doesn't have a case. was that just like God demons are real though by the way I can tell you couldn't this idea that this the idea of distributed cognition in this in this

cybernetical sense or that was how I heard you say it say couldn't that relate to what we talked about last time that we spoke of Peirce as abduction? Or couldn't those two relate? Yes, yes, yes. But of course, this is the whole point that I remember there is this, it's not translated yet. Someone, maybe you should do it. You're a German from your accent. Danish. Danish, I mean, guys are all the same. bunch of Nazis. Translate what? There is this essay, fantastic essay, by Paul Nautor, and the idea of the good in

Plato, where he actually frames this problem really carefully. It was considered to be one of the best essays at the turn of the 20th century. So, yes, absolutely, what you say is correct. But then, okay, there should be a certain kind of safety trigger, right? Before

we take all this stuff as ontological real, ontologically real. Because wouldn't be the same case that Scott Atron talks about in God We Trust, that precisely the kind of caprice, human caprice, which is not really a rational caprice, it's a naturalistic caprice, is what basically leads us to believe that there are actually

existing gods and demons. The problem is to use that safety valve and switch this over such that the problem of having a god or having demons becomes a problem of rational ethics and not a problem of naturalistic ontology. That, I think, Plato did. But no, Plato, he overturned it. And then we had to wait for a long time until the Enlightenment came. And then the Enlightenment created the shittiest

idea of atheism. Atheism is good. Atheism is something that we should strive for. But I mean, look at these new atheists these days. I mean, like, they are witless people. Yes, God doesn't exist, nor demons, but can you understand these are abductive hypotheses for us to construct the very idea of human? If I find that, who's that neo-atheist guy, you know? Dawkins?

Dawkins. Oh my God. If I find him, I will punch him in the face like no other. Yesterday I said to someone on Twitter that he was punchable. Punchable. Punchable he is. What was the name again of the guy and the paper you mentioned? Oh, and Scott Atron. No, before that, the German guy. Oh, Paul Natorp. Paul, I'm N-A-T-O-R-P. Do you remember the essay also? I think that the English translation, I can't remember the original German title, but I

think it's called Unplato and the Good. Thanks. Okay, let's have a break and then Romolo will be burnt at the stake for his latest comments. Don't worry. I'll be presenting so you can burn me at the stage. Yes, yes. Okay, let's have a break and then we can be.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. So, who's having the latest gossip in the town?

Richard? I don't have any gossip, but I have a question. Yeah, go on. So in the Confessions, in Book 10, Augustine makes an equivalence between mind and memory. He draws that explicit, strong equivalence. And then he goes on to spatialize memory as an underground system of caves and caverns that are a direct echo of a sort of myth of the afterlife that Socrates relates to his companions right before he commits suicide at the end of the Phaedo.

And I guess one of the things that's been sort of haunting me for these last few weeks is this idea that anamnesis is a sort of revealing form of memory, whereas the sorts of memory systems that post-Platinian, post-Augustinian thinkers like Bruno are talking about are constructive memories. Yes, constructive memories. So by remembering the forms, you're sort of appealing to higher and higher orders of reality, whereas in Bruno, you've got this sort of like empiricist, naturalistic, to your point, focusing on more and more.

There your answer is, essentially that, as I mentioned, Bruno is a child of naturalistic texts. He has sniffed way too much naturalism of his time, right? So it is obvious that for him, memory is not Platonistic in any sort of sense. It's not a recollection, the idea of recollecting the forms. Because it doesn't even in fact believe in the no-platonistic, let alone the platonistic idea of the soul as a vehicle for recollection.

Yeah. So I guess what I, at that fulcrum of sort of, we're ever right before Bruno, after Augustine, it seems like we transition from a point where memory is the way of accessing mind in the sense of the good, the intellectual principle, the one. And after that, it becomes a way of accessing cognition or intellect or the materiality of thought and it becomes a faculty. It becomes a faculty. I mean you can see it actually far more strongly in Kant's idea of memory, which he never talks about memory. Transcendental idea of time, which is one of

of the greatest ideas that Kant ever put forward in transcendental aesthetics is essentially memory. And what is the task of this memory? Simply access to things is merely a faculty, not something that defines intelligence itself. This trend, however, is being undone by Hegel. So it goes from, you know, latest scholasticism through Bruno to Kant, ultimately. But then German idealism undoes that for good. Yes, as you say, it's just like a kind of

a faculty to know stuff. That's all what memory is for them. It's sort of interesting to me, though, that like, in that cave system that Socrates was hypothesizing about, you know, the last tale that he tells before he dies, because it's sort of sweet and pleasurable to think about the next world, i.e. the true limit of the self, like whatever happens after death. And that what Augustine would populate that with was not the forms, but just the ordinary quotidian contents of everyday experience. So when he's spatializing memory in that 10th book of the Confessions, he's talking about this girl's name or that quote from Cicero or whatever it was being tucked away in the

cave system, not this sort of higher order of reality that the Platonists and Neoplatonists would expect. Yes. And do you know why this spatialization actually takes place? You see, because it is tantamount with the scientific progress of the time, specialization of time, specialization of everything. That's actually quite very interesting. The only person that I have known to talk about this is Julian Barber. Can you recommend anything?

History of Dynamics is the greatest book. It's superb. I'm still about that same thing from before. I don't even know like very much about the Untangled thing. I haven't really read the people who use that specific term. I know it's a big like new materialist term that triggers Reza. Reza goes into full range. But I think this is more like, I think we could talk about this in terms of like Einstein's notion of a form of life, right?

That for you to participate in this kind of, in any kind of game in which you would be able to give and ask for reasons or whatever, you have to first share a kind of form of life and you couldn't um game with the lion because the lion has a completely separate form of life but in order for you to be able to you know build a house you should have told me about this before i actually posted that fox tweets on twitter well i get You missed the whole thing probably. So I made this idea about that, guys, this is very unwisely to tickle foxes

who don't have human surrogates. I should have said that if you have shared a form of life with a fox, it's all okay. I hope it fucking mulls you to death. But yeah, so in order for you to be able to reference stuff and such, you need to have a form of life that involves those things. And I think that this isn't something that you're going to know either ontologically or epistemologically, that you're going to try to have any kind of objective knowledge about. That's not so much like the question, whether it's naturalistic or critical, or it's just that you can't escape the fact that that is also presupposed

in the production of this abstract model that then you're going to bring upon this whole process to kind of take it into kind of rational handle, right? Yes, absolutely. This is something that I'm going to suggest, a new reading material for the last session. It's Thompson's book. I've forgotten Theory Action or some Mind and Action. I can't remember the name, but yes, that's exactly what we are talking about. The presupposition for any sort of ethics,

moralistic, whatever, is, as you say, to have an implicit assumption on the very form of life that we do share and then actually then the problem of ethics becomes even more screwed up because does this mean that we can ever talk about alien ethics I'm talking about David Rodin's disconnection thesis so what does that even mean to talk about

aliens and their ethics is it's wilty cognitively will they know probably it is not no as you say any sort of talk about ethics already has at its basic assumption that we do share a form of life and to understand that form of life is a task of ethics theoretically and practically. You know, there's like, I think Latin American saying in Spanish, which is

I don't believe in witches, but there are. There is a better English pronouncement of that. It's in Ridley Scott's movie, Counselor. I've heard all about coincidences, but I have never seen one. That's how the cartel thinks. The Mexican cartel. We have seen coincidences. We have heard about coincidences, but we have never seen one.

I mean, what is this stuff you are talking about? Yeah, sure, witches actually do exist. Demons also. I mean there are so many fighting demons out there but would you be able to tell me how we should actually manage this legion of demons? Yeah I think like the distinction that matters there for me at least is this distinction between the epistemological and the ontological dimension of the thing like you don't believe in them but that's not so much what is the question because Essentially, it's not as if you are simply saying that they don't exist. You actually create a sort of kind of counterfactual scenario, as if they could ever exist.

Right? And that's the problem of ethics. The problem of ethics, the problem of having demons, is really the problem of creating robust counterfactual scenarios. Let us pretend in rigor and in a systematic way, pretend as if they were existing. But then Kantian dilemma shows its threatening face. So Kant does that with nominal.

All right? Essentially at the beginning of the CPR, critical appeal reason, he says that, let us pretend as if the thing itself existed, as if the nominum existed, right? That's essentially the problem of demonology in the contemporary sense. Hence, you see all sorts of these kinds of demon frenzy people like Nick Land and so on and so forth. But then he says later on that as if arguments are a species of regulative judgments and

And you cannot use regulative judgments in lieu or in favor of constitutive judgments. Right? But then a few chapters onwards, he pretends as if the goddamned nominal was a constitutive judgment. Kant was into demonism. That's why he got cancelled by German idealism. Kids don't take demons seriously because you get cancelled.

They are just regulative judgments and ethics is all about regulative judgments. In the realm of the regular judgments we can make abductions, hypotheses, counterfactuals about legions of demons coming from the outside at the outer rims of the self. But the moment you take them as constitutive judgments, you are just a Twitter shit poster. That's all you are. So let us begin with the response.

Is someone responding or is it me with the next presentation? You're making another representation or presentation. I'm gonna present. Okay, cool. Well, yeah, if, if, if that's what you mean, yeah, cool. I'll go ahead. Um, right. So, um, I made this diagram, but before I get into that, I've got a little context on the man himself.

Who's the man himself? What is the topic of the gossip? That's what I want to know. I'm presenting on Sandor Ferenczi's... Oh, Sandor Ferenczi, I thought you were talking about old Nick. Sorry. Oh, no, no. God forbid. Okay, cool. Yeah. So maybe, maybe making it speaker view if you if it's not like that might help see the diagram. But yeah, anyway. So, yeah, I've picked out some passages for those who didn't get the message.

But things kind of in parts of the diary relating to demons and demonology that I thought sort of engaged that interface quite well. So sorry if I jump around a little bit, but you can tear it apart afterwards. So, yeah, but for some context, yeah, he was born in 1873 and he was a Hungarian psychoanalyst whose work was published in German. Is it inverted for you? Okay, wait. Okay, hang on. You're in the hot red realm, my friend. At this point. Don't worry, don't worry. We are going to make jokes about it on Twitter.

I did a forward one and a backwards one because it reverses the camera on your own on your own webcam. So I've double reversed it, which must mean I'm in a demon world. Hang on. Let me fix that. Choose virtual background. It's all fine. Okay. Back to the boring self. Is this the right way around or is it still? Yes, this is the right one. The red one is the right one. Okay, now go on.

Okay, cool. Um, so yeah, um, he wrote some other texts. um oh it's not the right one i'll fix it in a minute um he wrote uh some other texts including the last uh a theory of genitality which i kind of thought i'd be presenting on um a bit which is a an interesting text quite a weird one i won't get into it too much but uh this kind of matrix of desires where he influenced he's sort of influenced by darwinian theory and recapitulates sum of evolution through this regression to ad regressus ad uterum. I won't get into that too much but yeah, stay on task. So he was a correspondent and friend of Freud and lots of these diaries kind of engage in this dialogue that he had with Freud. And his first experience with Freud and

his work was quite negative. When Frenchie was living in Vienna, he read Freud and Breuer's studies on pathogenesis of hysteria but he disliked them so much he forgot about them for years afterwards and upon forming a friendship with Freud he became a convert to the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis catalyzing the creation of the international journal of psychoanalysis and became president of the international psychoanalytical association from 1918 to 19 but yeah he still had lots of differences which we'll get into in a sec with Freud and a lot of yeah a lot of these differences I kind of expand upon um uh and I think like um yeah on some levels the differences with Freud are very important in understanding some more broad philosophical

discussions um uh about like the difference uh the idea of the observer in relation to the observation and things um but I'll get into that in a minute um his time serving in the first world Wars physician would help to eliminate some of the demonic potentialities of human psyche and experience. And it would be the much discussed catalyst for the expansion of the discipline of psychoanalysis more generally. So a lot of people returning from the First World War would kind of take the discipline further. And so yeah, this is sort of where he sort of started to think about trauma more broadly and yeah like the way in which he deals with trauma

really differentiates him from Freud takes trauma seriously in a way that Freud perhaps doesn't as much this mostly relates to this idea of like child abuse which I kind of going to talk about in a minute, which I should probably say if that's a subject anyone is finding difficult. Yeah. But anyway. Turn off the camera and recording. But yeah. Okay. So Ferenczi in some ways develops practical ethics of psychoanalysis in contrast to Freud's immutable moralistic version of psychoanalysis. he believes that all patients who asked for help should receive it and it was up to the

psychoanalyst to devise the most appropriate response to the problems presented to him so forensic he became the last resort for cases considered hopeless cases that his colleagues referred to him from all corners of the earth and this would cause great friction between Sandor and Zygmunt. And he died in 1933 of pernicious anema. So these diary entries, which we're reading, written at the very end of his life, like, look, the ones I've picked date from 1932. So they're kind of him at the maturity of his oeuvre. And he's like recording his clinical activity in the 1930s. And there was a large delay between their translation into French and then English in the 1980s. So yeah, he's not really had as much of a notoriety in the

Franco sphere, the Anglosphere as some other psychoanalysts might be more familiar with. But yes, this is I really liked this and I'll sort of expand on some ideas in it. So this sort of this thing I've made behind me is so it's the wrong way around for everyone. Let me just try again to fix this. Is that is it still the wrong way around or should I ask Greenishet? It's all good. It's all good. We like you in that. Behind the mirror yeah and kind of but is the text the right way around or is it the wrong way around? um wrong way hard to say really okay um i'll send it through i'll send it through later but um i'll try and explain anyway there's

not too much um there's not too much to say about there's not too much tech so it shouldn't hamper it too much i spent a little while earlier testing it so i'm pissed off it's gone wrong anyway um So we've got some different accounts of his interactions with patients. And the first one I've picked out is the 3rd of April 1932, which is page 76 onwards. So what we have here is the patients discussing aspects of an alien presence linked with perhaps both with this alcoholism and with what's described as from schizophrenia and the barrier between inner and outer world is indistinct in the patient's perspective displaying a lack of awareness of object permanence which

Frenzy writes once he's a certain difficulty in resting her out of that state namely the effort she requires to take her arms away from her face quite often she looks at me afterward as though astonished saying words like so you are here how remarkable you're a Dr F and you've been here the whole time um and um what i what i'm kind of like what i'm kind of exploring um with with these diagrams is the way that like the the conception of like different basically forensic talks about like the body as a site for um for entry points of the superego um in particular with his um notion of well with with with the idea of his his exploration of childhood sexual abuse which he

in contrast to Freud who believes it was fully metaphorical Ferenczi takes it seriously and says it's real so in this ingress of the superego which I kind of have as this entry point into the bottom, into the psyche, what we have is this literal penetrative trauma which Ferenczi is dealing with in his account and it forms the self and it's the way the demons can enter in these accounts that Ferenczi's talking about. So compared to Freud's idea that the sort of Oedipus complex as an immutable, time-oriented

certainty. Ferenczi talks about trauma and the relation between the parents and the development of the self is a much more contingent process where acts of historical violence can produce this neurotic and to possess subject. So in many ways that allows for a much more mechanical or materialist perspective where the body has agency and the body is a site of sort of transgression, which can lead to like, yeah, it can lead to, so I presented it as a site for like demonic ingress where the superego of the sociality enters to affect the mind.

um and um yeah so next on on this we've got we've also got this counter counter end of the pole where sorry i don't know if my hand's showing but um we've got we've got the uh unconscious where there's kind of more this node between like um dreams and in for this patient that we identified there's this narcotic, hallucinatory and dream sort of triumvirate where they're kind of dealt dealing with the other end of the body. So I've obviously taken this in a very speculative direction, but just to sort of expand on that a little bit. Um, um, and you can,

you can tell me I've taken this far too liberally afterwards, but, um, my idea of this is, um, so, so, um, I've lost my train of thought there. Um, um, So just I'll come back to that. But on the other end, I present like this similar diagram. And I've got like, I've got it inverse, I've got it slightly on its side for sort of extra space that's there's no significance to that.

But I'm looking at like how his his mode of like mutual mutual analysis is like non hierarchical and co constitutive form of analysis where which he found broke down a lot of the patient doctor hierarchies and allow for both to to sort of sort of co evolve and co analyze each other in a way which I felt like maybe gave rise to something like later like Guattari's experiments in the ball and so what we have is this social super ego as a means to

expel the demons and to move into the future in this diachronic way which I've put this arrow pointing down um where where the past of the of the super well sorry the feet the superego relates to the future and the unconscious relates to the past um so what we have um contra freud is like is a much more um a much more like uh social socialist like um socially constituted vision of the future in which patients and like so patients and doctors can work together to to expel their demons in a social way so I've got these modes of lines of flight kind of coming out

that way and it's not like it's not as maybe literally as the modes of ingress that we see on this side but um yeah that's my speculative account of that um what else to say yeah maybe i was thinking someone who who knows a bit more about anti-odipus could talk about the judge Schreber stuff but I didn't have time to get into that too much. And yeah I mean I so perhaps the diachronicity at play in this view with the essential view that the past was traumatic in the future whilst indeterminate allows at least for the possibility of living the good life. Ferenczi writes

By contrast with the present there is thus a better and quicker prospect of sinking back into the traumatic past and from this a recovery can be expected that will be definitive spontaneous and no longer based on authority and yeah I mean Ferenczi is often sort of attacked for being a mystic but I mean like definitely like Thalassa's kind of he tries to ground it in like Darwinian science you know it's quite like understandable why people level that sort of accusation but in some ways I think that he's more of a pragmatist than Freud in some aspects and I will

explain why because where was that bit so yeah I mean he grounds his like some of his like demonologies and very like imminent causes um there's things like interpersonal conflicts which he identifies in patients he initially sort of writes that they're like um like confronted by a demonological possession um but i guess to sort of use that like trite sartrean maps in that hell is other people like he um in in on the on the sort of um account on the 23rd of June, he just finds that what he thought formally was a very obscure neurotic affliction was just a mode of interpersonal disagreement between two of the patients,

which no one had taken the time to unravel. So yeah, I mean, I think that some of this demystifying of really like overly like the demystifying of demons can be unraveled by perhaps like very mundane sets of circumstances is way of thinking. And what else did I have to say? It's been 10 minutes. So we have to. Okay, perfect. Thanks. Many, many thanks. Fantastic. Fantastic.

There is a lot that I have to talk about this precisely because this is a bridge. What we we might call from a fully naturalistic account of ethics by way of Bruno and Espinosa to a semi-naturalistic account of ethics in early times of psychoanalysis. So, um... First, perhaps it's best to ask what other people think about the work of Frenzy, creating

some comments about his earlier works and later works. But unlike Freud, Frenzy actually, for the most part, stick to this idea of will as a cornerstone of human psyche. By that he didn't mean simply free will. He actually understood will as certain kind of architectonics that is constituted of what

you might call to be naturalistic elements, rational elements, so on and so forth. So before me talking about this, any person who wants to talk and respond at this point? Well, I think I was supposed to respond to James. So if I may just postulate some questions. Thank you. So I was wondering, rereading these passages on the demonic and the alien will in Ferenczi's text, in how he mentions one thing that was, I don't know, it made me think about how he talks about hypersensitivity as leading to this living of death in lived experience.

and this leading to one losing one's will. Like he says, Ferenczi says something like, I think this was in page 132 to 137, that the body, it seems that it's not like it's disconnected, the body of the person, the patient that he has, I think it's R.M., how this person actually actually turns not into the state of complete numbness, but actually the reverse, that the person actually goes into a state of hypersensitivity, and that actually is what leads to this leap of the alien well.

So I wanted to know what James thinks about this. Like, what I was thinking, let's say, is limit experience via the saturation of, let's say, the naturalistic account of experience towards the limit, what leads us to the alien will, let's say the saturation itself. And let's say in lieu of not being able to build upon the saturation of the naturalistic account, do we like lose ourselves completely instead of building upon the demonic that appears to take possession?

Like, I think that there's two roads. You either become self-extinct in the psyche and you mentioned Trevor. I remember that Leotard, for example, in his famous book, he talks about how Trevor actually becomes a sort of, well, I don't like his description, but it's like he says, oh, Trevor is like the prostitute of this alien well. uh like becoming subject to the alien will or building upon the demonic and uh let's say taking dominion of the possession so i wanted to ask if let's say if uh there's two two paths to be

taken there and uh if if the limited experience of let's say of the naturalistic account leads to the the alien world. That's it. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. I guess like, perhaps I didn't elaborate enough on this idea of like, sphincter morality that some sort of psychoanalysts grapple with. And someone like Winnicott talks talks about how a child is taught to behave in society by controlling their bowels and things and how that's like the imposition of the superego over the self. But in this

sense, you know, the alien will is something which violates that, like that center of morality and that, I mean, maybe I won't give you the answer you really, like the rich answer, I probably should but um uh I don't know I was thinking just like really flippantly about how like these ideas of like alien abduction always come back with like the the person's always had like an anal probe when they've when they've come back from an anal probe um but yeah I mean if you want to like um maybe just to go to sort of throw that back at you I'm not sure I fully like get that distinction between like the naturalistic and the counter

counter perspective that you presented I may could you just maybe reiterate that a little bit and might be able to respond a bit more seriously yeah well I was thinking let's say in regards to naturalistic account it's more in the line of of what we've spoken let's say the given probably taken to the extreme, the given reality and its empirical dimension leads to, let's say it can lead to this demonic possession toward the alien will. And let's say that if one is not in control of the, let's say, this demonic possession

Oh, you've caught out. Oh, God. Can you hear me now? Yes. Yeah, I'm sorry. So, yeah, basically, just to recap, I'm thinking that the naturalistic account I'm talking about is basically basically uh in line with uh the brick account into the extremes and that this leads to the alien will or or well that's my question like the saturation of the given uh this empirical account might give in let's say to the hypersensitivity via via sentience via sense

leads to receding one's will. And then there's the other path that is like taking hold of the possession, taking hold of the demonic to build something else. So the kind of the two avenues, one being like everything, these demonic things can be explained in like very ordinary like imminent terms or you know almost like leaning into this new or mononical kind of mode of like there is this mystical set of logics that we don't understand and engaging with it on those terms is that is that that's kind of what I'm getting from

what you mean Guys, may I also join in the discussion? Federico is apparently cut out again. It's a question. Federico, you mean there are, let's put it into, divide it into two categories. One is through enrichment of the reality. One might achieve a higher state or an alien state, what we call

alien will, and in opposition to that. The other is that through letting go of the reality through this legitimizing the reality that one could reach the alien will did I understand it correctly yeah it might it might be uh sort of like like that uh maybe like I'm thinking also it comes to mind the concept of alienation let's say positive or determined to determine if determinate I'm sorry alienation towards this enrichment of reality and then there's the other uh the other path effectively that it's like losing absolute control of that reality and just it's just like the

saturation the absolute saturation uh res i think you're muted Okay, unmuted. My apologies. If I may ask, so it looks like to me that you associate alien will in the frenzied sense with a kind of, what you might call to be unconstrained, naturalistic fallacy of the will. yes okay okay and they wanted to know like like if it could be interpreted that way well the the thing is really tricky here you see uh we are obviously talking about early psychoanalysis

Right? Um, I think that Frenzy would disagree. He would actually, uh, most probably equate alien will not with an unhinged naturalistic fallacy of the will, you know, a kind of free-floating one, but with the condition of exploitation. You see, the alien will always comes from another rational will, in Francis' terms.

Like for example, how does a child abuse begin? A child abuse according to frenzy is always a species of playing off the signs. So he has this idea that usually pedophiles, child abusers, are, by the way, for those of you who don't know, alien will is actually, as our presenters have been talking about,

usually in Francis' terms is basically a way of child abuse. But alien will of course is far more broader in the scope, but the exemplification of it is in child abuse. So So we should actually pay attention to Francis' older works, like the Confusion of Tongues discussion. The problem arises here, and this is also the problem of evil, really. As Paul Riker said, it's symbolic at the end of the day.

But of course, you know, the extent of what it means for something, for evil to be symbolic, we just don't understand the extent of it. So this is the problem. That Francis says that, for example, you know, the majority of child abuse happen during, you know, mama and daddy games. between a child and an adult. So the child doesn't have a grasp of the symbols. He or she uses them, but doesn't have the grasp of them.

But the adult does have the grasp of those symbols. And the thing is that throughout this process of playing, the adult misinterpret, willingly, actually, the meaning of the symbols or their representational capacity. Such that, for example, when I say that, you know, now don't, don't say that Reza said this on twitter when i say that daddy i want

for example my socks to be removed or daddy i am hot you don't really misinterpret these ideas. Not any kind of adult. This is the whole point that frenzy actually is starting to talk about certain kinds of pathological adulthood. Not any sort of adult. Pathological adulthood. The ones who misinterpret symbols.

in a child's psyche. So when I'm saying that, Daddy, I am hot, it doesn't mean that I am actually sexually hot. I mean, fucking I am basically baking. But that kind of pathological person misinterpret according to Frenzy, Daddy I am hot, as a certain kind of invitation. And hence, like a parasite, like the thing in John Carpenter, it attaches itself to that

symbolic regime of the child and slowly and slowly we forge it anew. So you get a child that is both abused but also now have become a victimizer, a potential predator, classical serial killer pedophilia 101. That's what Francis is actually talking about. Yeah, like, you know, this idea of this reproduction of, and if I'm using the term

demons perhaps too loosely, like, say so, but, you know, this reproduction of demons in the the cycle of abuse where, I mean, he writes that the aggressor annexes the naive state of peaceful happiness untroubled by anxiety in which the victim had existed until recently. So it's kind of like this idea that you're envious of that without your own neurosis. Yes. The sociality of demons and cultural contingency thereof is summarized in this closing passage of one of the diary entries where Frenzy asks like how much of the Oedipus complex is really inherited and how much is passed on by tradition one generation to the other which um yeah I think

kind of engages with that. There is, you see unlike for example Espinoza or all of the people that we have so far talked about, frenzy actually thinks cause as manipulation of symbols in the broadest possible way. Symbols are what interfere with the will, not the natural causes, according to that kind of psychoanalytical thesis. So you get this idea that the case of RN, and by the

way, it doesn't pertain to me, you know, it's a different RN. It's one of the most gruesome cases of psychoanalysis. It's just something coming from Brut in Cronenberg's movie. So there is this woman who was a subject of child abuse. And she feels that the entirety of her body is disintegrating. Not the psyche though.

The psyche is intact. The body is integrating. The psyche remains, as Frenzy talks, like a volcano, and this is what he says at the end of that chapter. The psyche remains like a volcano that spews ashes into the sky, like a firework that has stopped after a few days of celebration. Fuck! That's sinister. This is why I talked about the problem of the Will last session.

You see, because the problem of the Will is a very, very, what you might call to be fragile kind of concept. What kind of will are we talking about? Are we talking about rational will? Are we talking about natural will, namely free choice, capacity to make free choices? Or are we talking about a dynasty of these problems and as if they were integrated? psychoanalysis, I would say, is probably, early psychoanalysis, though, the first rational

ethics. Why? Precisely because it sees the will both in the light of its naturalistic constraints and it's a rational positivity. But then you get a kind of Schopenhauerian epic here in the realm of ethics, in the realm of the will. such as Schopenhauer says that the bulldog ants of Australia have the habits if you cut them in half

The head stings and bites the tail, and the tail stings the head. That is unfortunately the problem of the will. To have naturalistic tendencies and to have rational will is to be a bulldog ant of Australia. My friend, that is the very problem from which ethics should start rather than ending with it. Can I ask a question, Reza?

Absolutely. So, ethics are sort of a function of rational will, and rational will is something which appeals to a collective set of sort of regulative ideas that are constantly updated through this collective activity of language or whatever it was that we were talking about last session. Is there a species of ethics of pseudo-rational will that could be produced at the scale of a collective of an alien will in dialogue with an atrophying will that it's sort of parasitical on top of. And then, yeah. So like, could those two species of will inside the same self presume

that they are a collective to the extent that they sort of imitate the action? Richard, tell me the truth. Are you trying to make a new manga for the rational will? Because that sounds like a new manga. I can't believe it. Yes, of course. But the thing is that, that will be just the inhuman ethics. ethics. A human who has the courage of, as Nina Powers said, to carry out a surgery on itself by himself or by herself. This is not really, unfortunately, this is not possible

in the classical humanism. That requires a new definition of humanity and hence human It is not impossible, it's just that we can't simply use the extent, the Phoenician of humanity to talk about such kinds of ethics. I absolutely believe in that, that yes, it is absolutely possible and it's actually necessary. what you said, the kind of ethics that you are putting forward. If that's the case, do you believe that it's necessary that we all be

inseminated with an alien will that can start that process? How else do we have the separation of the will and the alien will that allows the dialogic re-approximation of the rational will appealing to the collective as a field for... Yes, but the problem then becomes that what would be the assimilation of the alien will? You see, alien will as frenzy knew it, if it is assimilated without any sort of reasoning or will, that's just hysterionics hysteria and neurosis one-on-one in psychoanalytic terms but the thing

is that I would say that scientific rationalism allows us to digest this finally because scientific rationalism is impersonal it doesn't have a psyche it is not personal at any level whatsoever and that's what you might call to be the medium by a way of which we can create a collectivity through which individuals becomes finally alien abductions or abductees.

with that we are talking about enlightenment version three not even two yeah there's something in what you just said that echoes a question that Yeah, that was what Federico was asking earlier, which was about the saturation of the self up to the point of the limit condition, and is that what's necessary for sort of this alien will to be introduced? Well, I think the saturation is necessary,

but you need to have a certain kind of apparatus. You see, for example, We have got saturated by religious ideas, right? But did it make us better people? Better atheists? No, actually it fucking led to the rise of new atheism as the best option, which is like shit. I think saturation is a positive constraint for us to tackle such a problem in earnest.

We should also create better cognitive apparatus. And those cognitive apparatus don't come for free. They are not individually based. This is why Marx and Engels were talking about that communism's idea is to create a certain kind of consciousness or self-consciousness. We can deal with such problems. Essentially what we want is a mobile self-conscious unit, which is impersonal and collectively written. Otherwise, everything that befalls us, we take it either as tragedy or farce.

Yeah, there's something about you need to abduct the alien. And if you do it purely along sort of emotional or psychological lines, then yeah you're going to end up with a fractured self and yes you should you should you should have a you should have a con a con a plan a stink you know george roy hill movie a sink you should have a plan to abduct aliens but otherwise why the do i need to get abduct aliens that's just stupid i am already an alien you know i'm self-alienated You have to have that con, that Matisse, that conning intelligence, what Hegel called the

rules of reason. That's what we need. Marx called it communism. I have a question. yeah kind of on a biographical side note the rn person is it is this elizabeth civerne and she wrote this what's it called the discovery of the self which in the context of mutual analysis i suppose could be like the other half of the diary and sure sure i had no idea

about this. Go on, go on. No, it's not. I mean, I haven't, this particular book, I haven't, I haven't read it. I've only read about it. But in trying to discover the character of the alien, well, I suppose it would be a good lead. Would you be able to post the title on the sidebar? Yes, it's called The Discovery of the Self. I can just... There is also So, have you read this novel, Russian sci-fi novel? It is one of the greatest sci-fis of all time. It's actually called The Discovery of the Self. It is about a kind of consciousness

that is always basically emerging cybernetically through mutual discovery. What was the name of the author you were talking about again? Let me see, I've forgotten. I mean, I'm a goddamn Persian. I can't remember Russian names. Devladimir Savchenko. Yes, yes, that's it, that's it. It's actually translated to English.

I think by Theodor Estrosian, if I'm not wrong, or maybe someone else. What I do know about the Severn and Ferenczi relationship is that she was also a psychoanalysis. So it's, but it started with her being a patient of his and so she paid him for these sessions. sessions. But then after the mutual analysis started, she refused to pay him because now he was also a client of hers. Yes. I mean, from a gossip perspective, you should understand that you probably have watched

Cronenberg's movie on Freud and Jung. So the actual fight was between Freud and Frenzy over Sabina Spierlin, you know, Sabina Spierlin being one of the greatest psychoanalysts of all times. The thing is that they both fell in love with her. And the thing is that, so frenzy had this idea of mutual psychoanalysis and essentially Freud thought of it as a certain kind of manipulation or seduction of Sabina

and that led essentially to their basically becoming the enemies So, good friends, before we go for questions, heckling and swearing, we're going to actually present next session.

Sepideh, I think that you should go because your hair is blonde now. Anyone? Who's the next victim? Come on now. well what are we reading oh what the are we reading i don't know you said there was also something new that we're we're going to be oh yes but there's no no no that that i will uh assign it for the last session uh what is what is the next session um I mean we have Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Sula.

Okay, how about this? Dostoevsky versus Nietzsche. Sorry, could you say it again? Dostoevsky versus Nietzsche. That I think is a fair fight. Do you have a section of the demons that you would recommend? Or are you suggesting we try to plow through all thousand pages? No, I don't have any. I already presumed that everyone has read Demons, but

okay, if that's too, you know, okay, how about this? Reading an introduction on Demons and Notes from the Underground. I think that's good. Fair enough. Richard, why do you need to bring this up? Like as if we have read Nietzsche. I haven't read Nietzsche. I can't even spell his name. I was asking about Dostoevsky, or as I...

I think that Demons is absolutely one of the greatest works of literature. The only book that comes close to that is The Human Beast by Emil Zola. God these two books are just like out of this world. They capture a prophecy which is not yet unfolded. Zola Dostoevsky had this idea that there is a kind of political gene among us, a political

virus, Zola thought that there is actually a natural gene that makes us demons. And the way that they wrote the best novels of all time, The Beast Within, The human beasts and demons. These are just like... you really get scared about the idea of being a human. I know I'm not talking about tickling boxes.

So questions now. Carl, you have been so silent. Yeah, I've been giving that a try for once. But no, I mean, I wonder a little bit about, you know, I'm always, it's always strange sort of reading these early psychoanalytic texts because they feel so, In a sense, I feel that they are quite confused in sort of... Speculative. They are way too speculative. Especially nosologically speaking. They don't really know exactly what kinds of illnesses

they are dealing with, and it's just always the same kind of approach to schizophrenia and to neurosis and to everything. What's interesting with this, what I'm trying to sort of lead to word is sort of, you know, forensic calls RN or Elizabeth C. Verne is sort of a progressive schizophrenic or something. And I wonder a little bit, what is the context of this sort of, first of all, I remain a little bit unclear about the exact status of the alien will, because the way we are talking about it here, or have been talking about it here, it does not... It's the will to exploit. Alien will is the will to exploit. Yes, fair enough. But you know, Ferenczi seems to situate it as a sort of a replacement almost of the superego. He refers at one point sort of as another superego that has sort of displaced it,

but in another place it's also a self that has sort of been put to the side. So it's a little bit sort of, the exact status of it is slightly unclear, and I wonder sort of does Ferenczi use this term in particular in his other works. I haven't read Talas. No, he doesn't. He absolutely doesn't. That's the only work that he uses that very specific term. No, absolutely not. No. Yeah, because it feels like he is sort of, he's onto something, but he doesn't exactly sort of, haven't really figured it out what it is he wants to say with sort of the notion of the... Yes, yes, yes. But yes, I wonder sort of what is the relationship of this, you know, the alien will in relation to different types of sort of nosologically different types of

psychological malady or mental illness, right? So is there a difference in, for instance, in this case of the schizophrenic and the case of the erotic in the case of hysteric so on so yes yes yes no i think that uh this is not uh this is not what frenzy wants to actually talk about at all this is why uh he's not as famous as freud when it comes to psychoanalysis or i don't know Klein are all later psychoanalysis. Essentially what he wants to talk about is a psychoanalytic idea of Marxian exploitation,

that there comes a certain kind of conditions of exploitation which we cannot run from, which cannot escape from. And those conditions of exploitation are called the alien will. And the kind of psyches that they produce are such and such. I think frenzy, people usually say that modernism began with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. I would say that no, modernism in a Marxian sense began with Marx, Nietzsche, and Frenzy

rather than Freud. Freud was too lax. I mean his idea of cosmological trauma is simply a kind of like a whitewash over centuries of enlightenment back to the very idea of naturalistic determinism a la Ficino or other kind of higher scholastics. Thoughts? Slanders?

This is maybe sort of an aside question but I just had a thought whether, are Are you familiar with the appel du vide, like the call of the void, or this kind of psychological phenomenon where you're on the edge of a tall building or a cliff and you feel compelled to jump off? I was wondering whether this might be somehow like a sublimated form of the alien world or- Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, I know that. I mean, this is of course, part of the Greek tragedy as well. You know, the idea of katabasis. to descend is the only way to ascend. That's just like Odysseus 101. And yes, there is

this kind of thing in early 20th century psychoanalysis, but also in 1990s death culture. You can see it in land, in CCRU, in so many, many, many, you know, works written during that time. Yes. It's a certain kind of doomerism, right? which has been repeated too often for it to be actually either exciting or give us an ethical

injunction. You see, one of the first examples of this kind of Dumerism is actually Seneca, Seneca the Elder, I think in the second book of his letters to Lucius, he talks about the famous example that he talks about this slave gladiator. Yes, who puts the thing that he uses for the power of business down his throat. But the thing with Seneca is that he's a Stoic.

when he talks about suicide he actually talks about certain kinds of parameters of life which we should not accept as human beings he doesn't glorify it but with these kind of trends there is a kind of glorification to fall off of the cliff is what gives us enlightenment. You know, literally the oldest lesson from Greek tragedy, katapasis is anabasis.

To descend is to ascend. But that's just bullshit. It looks good on the epistemological side of things. But on the ethical side of things, what does it even mean, really? I mean, just to speak from what I imagine these kinds of situations, it's not so much. I mean, it's always the sheer possibility that I could jump off the edge of a building that seems so frightening about these kind of situations, right? and I don't know where that's leading, but certainly, yeah, I don't know. I think it's... Well, you see, this is kind of Odyssean glorification of certain kind of ethics. So, whereas Seneca,

All he means is that, you know, as humans, we can't take all sorts of pains. At some point, we should say no, right? That's all good and fine. Rational suicide, if all things considered, is not a bad thing. you know, Duluth, for example, the man was suffering from massive amounts of lung injury. He has every right to fall off of a cliff, right? Defenestration.

But the thing is that with these kinds of ideas usually comes a certain kind of glorification. That death is a kind of reprieve. No, death is not a reprieve. Just like life isn't. None of these things are reprieved. These are just human ideas. That kind of human glorification where the human jumps off the cliff to show that I am courageous is just a stupidest idea.

It has nothing to do with ethics. Ethics is about labor. But of course, when it comes to a certain kind of amount of physical pain, which can never be restored, which can never be cured. Of course, if you take the suicide route, so be it. You are simply trying to put off what makes you less of an agent. Essentially, everything that we are talking about in the realm of ethics

is about personhood, about to be an agent. But, as I said, when things impinge of your agenthood to such hard degrees that you can no longer even be most minimal agent, then of course suicide might be a good solution. And that's why I actually think that, you know, if rational suicide is really within

this prospect, within this scope, there is nothing, there is no argument against it. Reza, how about regarding to the ones who descend or the ones who ascend kind of thing. It reminded me of Nietzsche, right? He speaks specifically about it in Das Spokes Arthussara, about this concept, this idea. I was reading it in this way that in order to make place, make a space for the future self, let us do the labor of diminishing the current self, which is, as you said, the product of our

contextual sensitive time and presence, the given. Can you read it in that way? like I'm not talking about suicide but I'm talking about a masochistic way of approaching self and what it could be and what it would be in the future hence how one becomes who one is yes well the thing is that you know Nietzsche unlike so many other philosophers who came after him was a true ethicist. In fact, he was not a philosopher in the canonical sense. He was a man of practical reason rather than theoretical reason. And to that extent,

He had this idea which he practiced in his own life. I don't think that all people, unfortunately, can do that. Essentially, this is why I think, contra to Nietzsche, that there should be instituted a certain kind of government, a certain kind of governing body, not government, a governing body that allows people to find the middle term. We don't want to be both or either this or that.

We want just to live like humans. For something to live like a human, there should be a certain kind of protocols of ethics that allows it to live freely and die freely. And that's, I think, Nietzsche's point at the end of the day. I mean, the man definitely is not Nick Lant. He was a great man, a true philosopher, no matter what we think of him at this point.

But you see, he unfortunately, like Mark Fisher, began to glorify a certain idea of humanity, either under the name of Obermeng, the super overman, or like Mark, the new Marxist. That sounds really good. It never works. Unfortunately all such people begin to deteriorate.

Because reality is far worse, far more sinister, far more imposing than we philosophers think about it. Your remark, Reza, reminded me exactly of one of Alconi's novels, The Bleeding of the Stone, where he highlights the cruelty of reality in contrast to the novelty of the idea of the man of humanity and what it could be and what might be and how it unfolds

beneath the under the influence of the plot which is always the cruelty, right? Yes, always the cruelty, yes. But the thing is that however, I actually like Al-Kuny very, very, very much. The thing is that such sentiments should not be mistaken for recipes of resignation, ethical resignation. No. Essentially human ethics is to be demonic,

to live consciously with demons and make peace-wise rectifications. Any sorts of overexcitement about a new world will definitely lead to disappointment and tragedy as we have seen it. Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid

Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid Al-Kunid the collective, they inhabit the abyss, right? But they are implicitly collective. For example, they are members of a nomad in some desert, right? You can't be a, you can't live in a desert unless that you're implicitly collective. But that's a different approach as what... Yes, of course, of course.

Because that's also a question that I wanted to ask you, because it's sometimes perplexing when we refer to the collective. Well, what do we mean by that? It could be different approaches, for example, Alcuni and how he approaches collective implicitly, and he insists upon the fact that collective should be approached implicitly and never explicitly. Absolutely. The only writer that I, in my opinion, that has this kind of idea, which I do actually fully agree with, is Howard Barker. Do any of you have read his plays?

one of the greatest, the greatest playwrights of all time. He says, if I remember correctly, I'm just paraphrasing, he says that, you know, collectivity doesn't mean you're whistling with other people. You're holding hands with other people. collectivity means to build a new world. Howard Barker, I don't know, how many of you are British? Yeah, okay.

So, Barker used to be actually a part of this tele-theater, tele-play in BBC, BBC back in the 80s. And he had magnificent, magnificent plays. But the thing is that he went out of favor precisely because with the rise of the British left, his ideas were deemed as anti-Marxist. But no, I think he was Marxist.

He was not a goddamn fucking Keech Marxist like some other god than Braytons. Did you say bread? So, bite of the night is what you should start with. Bite of the night. Did you say Brecht was a kitsch Marxist? Or did I miss it? I probably misspelled it intentionally. I meant Britain, but I said Brecht. Oh, he's really good. I mean, we see this kind of revenge that is coming down on us who basically pretended

that we are having some Marxist tendencies. I mean, look at this. Like, when you say this most stupid, humorous stuff, it's just social warrior thing. People don't like demons anymore. We should have more demons. particularly us Marxists because otherwise what the fuck are we doing here go live with fucking humans monkeys the slander

come on now we have 10 more minutes Jasper you have been so silent today yeah sorry I'm very hung over today to be honest oh Jesus I know I know the feeling I'm recording a metal album these days and these guys won't stop drinking No apologies, Nathan. Regis, Elvin, Elvin.

What happened to Elvin? Sophie? I have a question. Yes, yes, go on. A little thing to pick on. Is there some, like, base cartesianism going on where when you were talking about like the difference well we're talking about the suicides and um on one hand like um on the one hand like deleurs is is understandable because he had a bodily pain but you know mark fisher with his mental demons are you know that was that was something that's you know not allowed for and i don't know is that seems to me in practice like a very Cartesian demonstration of what's in the I think it is

but you see I don't know I mean one of the best books I can recommend on this topic which is one of the greatest books of ethics it's called Thinking Clearly About Death by Jay Rosenberg He was a student of Wilfred Sellars, actually, and thinking clearly about death. So he goes through all these examples of various forms of suicide. I really cannot say

or judge about these scenarios, but I would say that Deleuze's suicide was justified. Marx was not. Physical pain, no one should go through that. Absolutely, no one. Because it impinges on your sense of self-integrity to such an extent that you are no longer human. You are not even an animal.

Psychological problems can be also extremely excruciating, torturing, so on and so forth. I know that. But the thing is that they can be avoided. They can be avoided through certain kinds of measures. Pains cannot, physical pain is absolutely a torturing thing. I mean, this is why Seneca on the section on the suicide, which is, in my opinion, one

of the greatest sections of ethics, tells Lucius, listen, the thing, if you are having, is what he basically paraphrasing if you are having psychological problems right you think that tomorrow will be bad you will be executed so on so forth all that kind of psychological horrors that we do actually have in our regular life He says that, listen Lucius, even tomorrow can be fickle. Even bad fortune can be fickle. That's a great idea. You see, if we take the idea of contingency seriously,

psychological wars become less of a lethal dose than they are. But unfortunately, if you have a certain kind of malady for which there is no cure, then unfortunately this is it. This is it. my apologies flooding rain here reza by avoiding you mean

deviating like deviating because it's it's not powerful for me to think about avoiding psychological No, not avoiding. Yes, avoiding simply I mean, you know, kind of temporary evasion. Evasion, right, right. Okay. Yes. Jay Rosenberg has this idea, which is a fundamental solarism idea, that you see

The entire edifice of ethics is built upon the very idea of personhood. To be a person means to have certain kind of facilities, certain kind of rational will. Otherwise, you are not a person. Is a Ba'ath a person? No, God damn not. Maybe Kimi De Merton says otherwise, but no, it is not. But the thing is that if a person finds itself in a fundamental, from the perspective of time and space in which we live, in a perspective that he or she cannot recuperate, simply is

going to be tortured and tolerate pain for no reason, rational suicide is justifiable. Because this whole idea of life being the platform of ethics is just stupid to begin with. No, life doesn't matter. Living life forms matter. That's a different story altogether. The slanders, Carl is getting anxious now.

By the way, the only reason that I always mention Carl because he's a very, very good person. Totally reza-proofed. I mean, just on the, on the, on the, since I've been, I've been called out. I mean, on the topic of suicide and especially on sort of, since we talked about sort of

Deleuze's suicide. I've always sort of, I'm going to sort of try to tie this into what we've been talking about. I always find it so interesting. I just recently sort of reread his, some of Deleuze's seminars. I think they retranslate them or something. And there's this one from 1980 where he talks about anti-Oedipus. which is obviously like eight years after that was published. And it's very interesting because he hasn't really prepared. It's a session where he's meant to sort of answer questions from students throughout the years. And he sort of becomes very animated, it seems, from reading the transcripts of this. And he talks about this sort of almost deeply ingrained sort of almost...

deep reaction against death and sort of the thinking of death. And it's a very sort of fascinating passage. So it's very interesting to sort of just think about how this person's life sort of ended later on. But I think sort of just tying this back into when I was talking before, there is sort of this tension that is in the discussion of mental illness, right? And especially in terms of how we conceptualize it and how we try to think about it.

And when, because I mean, in this seminar, I think this is one of the sort of the clearest sort of, since James sort of talked about anti-Oedipus before, I think this is one of the sort of clearest sort of articulation about the Le Singularis idea, and it's about sort of contributing to a longer sort of history of seeing schizophrenia in particular as a kind of a journey. They mention called Jaspers, and they mention R.D. and these people. So it's very interesting to sort of see this, to talk about this earlier sort of psychoanalytic perspective, because there is this sort of very completely different conception clearly of mental illness. And I wonder, how do we sort of, or maybe I can ask

you directly, Ress, I guess, how do you sort of think about these terms? Since, I mean, we in the in the previous seminar i'm sorry for those students or participate but yes of course of course practical sort of dimension and i sort of wonder sort of in the tension between these sort of absolutely there is absolutely there is i there is a reason that um the will uh to kill oneself is not part of civilized war, right? Why do you think there is such an injunction? I think that Jay Rosenberg actually goes through a really, really, the long path exemplifying various cases of suicide.

Essentially and ultimately comes to this conclusion that the only kind of suicide that is permissible is a suicide by irrational agents at the time of unnecessary pain that cannot be cured. Any sort of suicide that, as Jay Rosenberg says, can be averted. either a schizophrenic, you know, find help through friends, through professional help,

so on and so forth. But unfortunately there are, there is a certain kind of pain that in our context of our history, here and now, cannot be averted. And why any human should go through it? You see, usually suicide comes hand in hand with the idea of a schizophrenic, right? That I think absolutely is impermissible. It is not really something that should be talked about or glorified. But the kind of suicide that comes with a rational agent who knows certain amounts of

pain, certain amounts of calamity comes, descends upon him or her in the immediate future, that's a rational suicide. So rational suicide is only for Jay Rosenberg, is reserved for a rational agent, essentially a person who can make judgments, theoretical and practical ones, within the immediate state affairs. Like a predictor machine. As Seneca would say that, for example, Seneca would

say that, okay, even bad fortune is difficult. Like, for example, you were condemned to be a skinned alive or quartered next morning. Seneca would say that that's not a good excuse for suicide because even the bad fortune is fickle. What if, for example, tomorrow this empire will fall, as happens with so many cases. But of course, that is not always going to happen. You are most probably going to get skinned alive and co-arted. So

don't get too over happy. However, what Seneca is talking about is something like this, that He talks about a slave. You have read that passage. I know as a matter of fact, that in three months from now, I will be fed to hungry dogs. As a matter of fact, all things considered, I would actually kill myself rather than going

through this humiliation. Now here is a certain kind of vagueness, the vagueness of time and contingency. So in the first example, the contingency seems to be purely contingent. I mean not really that contingent. In the second sense, it's purely contingent. So the real question then becomes a human understanding of contingent unfoldings of events such as I have been given an execution order I'm not going to kill

myself because you know what if the Empire falls tomorrow what if my executor actually gets a Spanish flu or coronavirus. In the second case we get something like that, that if you got the cancer and you're according to a certain kinds of historical records within your specific time frame there is absolutely no way to survive so why go through the pain? Essentially it seems to me that

that this is the cornerstone, the naturalistic cornerstone of ethics. Predictability. Prediction. Our capacity to predict informs us to make ethical injunctions. That's human. So what happens when prediction cannot be trusted or when there are prediction errors sort of present that one aren't necessarily privy to knowing their sort of presence, for

instance, if one has a delusion or something of the kind? People like Locke would say that the joke is on you now, if you took your life. But the thing is that ethics is a rational enterprise and it always acts according to a certain kind of predictability, naturalistic tendencies, right? This is why usually ethicists put a clause when they say this stuff. They say all things considered. But that clause is very vague. What the fuck do you mean by all things considered?

They all mean that it ought to be a rational judgment. If it is a rational judgment, it is all good. Can you, can you, sort of taking a lot of time with this, but can you just clarify exactly what is a rational judgment in that case? Sure. Let's begin with this. For example, I start with saying that what is actually a judgment? And then we build it toward a rational judgment. What is a judgment?

is judgment something that's subjective for example if you have a judgment that this rose is pink is not a rational judgment essentially i want to track you here you know I was thinking of Zola's, the character Lantier in the Human Beast as a kind of maybe a good device for maybe illustrating this situation, right? Like, I mean, I don't want to introduce spoilers. Zola's hero.

This, of course, comes from Zola's, you know, proclivity as a writer. Zola essentially does not take any form of judgment as rational. That's actually quite scary. Do you know why? Precisely because he thinks that all species of judgment are part of are heretical genetic stuff. That's why Zola was a naturalist in the literary sense, you know, a kind of really staunch Darwinian person or perhaps even Lamarckian.

Zola, being such a great writer and I love him, but he absolutely doesn't believe in such a thing. He has a rational judgment. Everything that every character does in any of these novels is always a reaction to a gene. Yeah, this is precisely why I brought him up. I thought you wouldn't have any truck with him whatsoever on this. Sorry, I couldn't hear. Would you be able to repeat? I was just saying this is why I brought him up. I figured you would not have any truck with this character given what you just said. Yes, yes, yes, yes. No. I think that you see Zola is essentially coming from

a long... he was a great man by all accounts. I mean, the guy defended Dreyfus, right? He became a hero. He nevertheless had a certain kind of philosophical proclivity. that this allowed him to think about the future of humanity. Essentially, this is why that if you read all Zola's books,

they always lead to a certain kind of what you might call to be meltdown. very much like Dostoevsky, you know, demons, known from underground, rather Kramasov, so on and so forth. The only person that is actually exceptional from this kind of folks, who are ethical people, So, nevertheless, using or inclined towards certain kind of naturalistic tendencies as the engine of ethics is Tolstoy. Tolstoy was the greatest man of all.

Fuck Tolstoy. I mean, sure, you know, he was a lesherer and so on and so forth in his youth. But when you read a story by Tolstoy, you don't get this kind of ideas. He doesn't give you a resolution either, just like these people. He's not that kind of shetty, happy ending literature kind of guy. But he gives you a certain kind of arsenal for you to understand that exercising rational will

can get you into a wrong neighborhood, you know, and you might get executed for that, but it's worth it. It's totally worth it. Unfortunately, Dostoevsky and Zola, my other two favorite writers don't think like that but Tolstoy thinks like that and this is why that there is a certain kind of cosmological vibe about Tolstoy. You can get it in war and peace, you can get it in his shortest story, so on and so forth. It's the

moment that the rational will become self-conscious, the cosmos becomes different. It becomes reality engineering. Sorry to Stan Tolstoy in the summer. One of the greatest points that Tolstoy ever pointed out to is actually not coming from

his novels or short stories. You know that he was one of the greatest educators. He basically created one of the first, perhaps, first modernist school. So he has written this number of essays about what it means to educate a child. And one of the points that he always reiterates is that, you see, a royal child, a wealthy

child has all the means to be a better, you know, someone who can learn better. But then the question that he asked, why is it that the peasant child is always better in education? The answer that he gives to this, I think, is the most majestic one. It's very, very, very much the very idea of how we should think about the problem of ethics. I'm not going to talk about it, but you can see it in the collection of his essays.

It's called About the Education. Yeah, we'll have to look into that because I'm not, I'm not super, I haven't read a lot of Tolstoy, so I can see where you're coming from. Certainly. I was also kind of, I mean, I don't want to, I know we're kind of gone. No, no, no, please go on. Please go on. I mean, I was just curious. Also, I guess this is, I haven't really worked out the consequences of this, but I'm not But I was thinking about in Dostoevsky's Idiot, this is the story begins from after the point of having had his sentence commuted, his death sentence right before.

And this kind of like, maybe the ethical, what sort of ethical position emerges from the, from after the, sort of like having overcome the contingency, right, in a sense, or having overcome the contingent event or? The bad future, yeah, the fickle tomorrow, the fickle tomorrow. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know, it's a whole other question that would probably, yeah, a big... Dostoevsky actually, Dostoevsky is not, I wouldn't say that he's like Zola in terms of his naturalistic tendencies.

He's just a cynical man, right? The thing is that, like many other writers, you should gauge him by the experiences that he has gone through. So who is he? He's someone who for the most shitty excuse sent to the gulags, right? and being sentenced to death. But that's just a mock execution. He never gets executed. He goes through it. So he's like a child of Seneca and Zola, someone who understands

that even if you are basically sentenced to execution, death sentence, you might not actually get killed. So he has that kind of idea, a playful idea of contingency. But nevertheless he's far more cynical than Zola. Do you know why? Precisely because for Dostoevsky everything that he sees is the context of Russia around his age and that context is fundamentally

morbid. Whereas Tolstoy is being surrounded by peasants who hope for a better future, children who see some other world. Dostoevsky doesn't have that, unfortunately. It doesn't make him a bad writer, it's just that the context in which he was active was fundamentally morbid. But since we talked about the idiot, isn't the novel idiot exactly an attempt on Dostoevsky's

part to somehow transgress beyond this morbidity of his Russian... He does, but by inducing more morbidity. That's what Dostoevsky's trick is. No, Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky, I think the most, you know, what you might call the softest novel by Dostoevsky's brother Karamazov. He doesn't have that kind of general vibe of total doom that is descending upon us,

but nevertheless you see it in the characters as they grow old. Now Dostoevsky was formidably a doomer. Have you guys watched the movie One Day in the Life of Dostoevsky, where Dostoevsky is played by Anatoly Sulzhenistin. You know the guy who played in Stalker stuff is really good. It's a magnificent movie.

Is it based on Dashevsky's works or is it an adaptation? No, it's based on Dasevsky's diaries. So Dasevsky, you know that Dasevsky is a very, very turbulent, marital relationships. And he comes across, he's a speedwriter, right? A very, very beautiful young girl, almost 40 years younger than him. And this is basically the gist of this movie.

So he hires this woman and she tries to write his latest novel and they get into some sort of romantic relationship. It's absolutely superb, superb movie. I don't know if it's true, but allegedly both, I mean at least Freud was a big fan of Dostoevsky, Yeah, of course. Especially notes from the underground

with regard to the conceptualization of the psyche, IEP, the trans... The majority of the early psychoanalists were massive fans of Dostoevsky. Precisely because, as I mentioned, Dostoevsky didn't have the kind of Schopenhauerian, Dumerism, but he still held a certain kind of cynicality. And the origin of that cynical idea was how he was looking at the nature of the human

big. But for which Dostoevsky was grilled in modern times. I remember when When, what was it, Solaris, Solaris, the movie was made, Stanislav Len told Tarkovsky that you motherfucker. Did you just made crime and punishment out of my novel?

Reza, since we were talking about psyche and demons and Nietzsche and this kind of stuff, what do you think about the movie Sacrifice from Tarkovsky? sacrifice is good. There is a better movie that I have in that vein. It's also a story by Anatoly Solzhenitsyn. I will send it to you, or actually I will send it posted on the sidebar. It's about this partizan, Ukrainian partizan, who gets arrested by the Ukrainian

collaborators during World War II. And suddenly the Ukrainian collaborator realizes that, Oh shit, this was my classmate. Back in the day. It is one of the greatest movies. I always thought that it was made by Tarkovsky, but apparently not. Sacrifice is good, but this is far, far better. What's it called? Let me see. Anything by Anatoly Zulzhenitsyn is a great movie.

That's his name by the way. I'm going to put it on the sidebar. One sec. I think it's called trust. What is it with you and Russian cinema, Reza?

I'm starting to get the situation. Some people ask me what is with you and Italian cinema? I mean, it's just like I'm a cinema freak. What am I supposed to say? Reza, can I ask you then if you like Elen Klimov and Alexi German? Which ones? Of course, Hard to Be a God, for instance, or Come and See, or Farewell. I actually love that old version. You remember the 1980s version of Hard to Be a God? Isn't that a British production or something? Yes, yes. I haven't seen that. Really?

Yeah, I mean, Hard to Be a God is probably one of the greatest sci-fi. Fantastic story. Magnificent, magnificent. I remember when I read it, I thought that, you know, a Sunislav lamb is total fucking shit. Great, great, great novel. No, no, I actually know quite big deal of, you know, these esoteric Russian sci-fi movies and books.

But, you know, they're not Michael Bayo, are they? Okay, can I ask you another one then? This is pretty obscure though, but it's the Stogatsky brothers as well. Have you seen the Estonian movie called The Dead Mountaineer Hotel? What is the English title? The Dead Mountaineer Hotel. Oh no, what is it? It's the Strogatsky brothers and it's by an Estonian guy called Grigori Komanov.

I think he only made this and two other movies but this is a fucking duel and it's pretty hard to obtain but it's fantastic. Will you be able to post it on the sidebar? Yeah, I'll just post you a link for it. I was just going to ask a link, not movie link, somewhere you can pirate it. I only use it as a tool for finding the right stuff. But isn't movie, oh, to find the stuff, because it's like they write monthly movies, right? Oh, yeah, but I only... Oh, shit. One of my favorite Russian actors is...

Okay. This movie is fantastic. Do you remember, I don't know, there was this Russian TV series. I can't remember the name, about the SS, right? So there is this guy who is deep into the SS ranks, winter of something or something. And then, and then he's basically going through the ranks and it's actually coinciding with the fall of the Nazis. And then he also has a a mule who is a woman and she's also Russian like him and the thing is that

she gets pregnant and they say to him that remember if a pregnant woman goes to a hospital she screams in her original language. It is one of the most famous Russian tv series of all times. I know that. I haven't seen it. Can you remember what it's called? Okay okay one sec. Was it being shown in Iran? in iran what was it called in persis and something like winter or something it's black and white i think i've seen it

it is truly one of the greatest shows last time you recommended the tv version of edge of darkness and i started watching it and it is pretty grim i like it a lot do you remember the scene where he kisses his daughter's dildo that was up i really like that you know it really just makes everything so weird if you okay if you are into that kind of stuff i really recommend the greatest bbc show of all time secret army oh yeah i remember oh you reza your propaganda persian tv here

secret army is the greatest and also edge of darkness oh my god the secret army is truly the best is essentially a story of some Belgian Nazi collaborators who are actually spreading away you know shut down British RAF pilots. Truly, truly magnificent. I put it on my list already. I'll look into it. I will find the title of that Russian MTV series for you. It is absolutely majestic, truly one of the greatest. And I remember I read IMDB once about it and Russian people

were saying that, oh my god, who doesn't like this? I remember back then Secret Army was like a ritual to watch it like... Oh, Secret Army, Secret Army is absolutely nothing, nothing is compared with Secret Army. The thing is that have you actually watched the sequel? No, I didn't even know there is a sequel. Come on, you idiot. Now, here, here. The sequel is called Kessler, you know, the kernel.

Kessler was the best. So essentially, it's, you know, Monique is becoming old. It's like in the early 60s and she sees this footage of old Kessler with mustache. And she reports him into the Interpol. I like the plot though. Is it newly made or? No, no, no. it was it was made back in the early 80s okay

now look it up it is top notch it's absolutely top secret army is absolutely the greatest bbc show ever made Like you want to learn the idea of being twisty, shady? This show is for you. unfolding plot at the end, right? Magnificent, magnificent show. I mean, I remember when there is this scene that,

so essentially this whole thing as I mentioned is revolving around this Belgian collaborators who are actually partisans, but pretending to be Nazi sympathizers, because there's a goddamn fight in Belgium, you know. You can get away with it. And then there is this Gestapo person called Kessler, truly one of the best characters ever created in the history of drama. I think my favorite Nazi is the guy from Come and See. Have you seen that by Klimov?

Sure, sure. Which Nazi? The guy with the little limo. It just shows so well how the mayhem of war kind of attracts these crazy psychopaths that has all of these weird idiosyncrasies and stuff like that. It's just... I remember... I... You remember... Let me tell you that I was 11 years old when I first saw this movie. Ah, that must be heartbreaking. It was a trauma. Yeah. I remember this very specific scene. I should watch it again. when basically the Soviet partisans, the Ukrainian partisan come and they