There is no law that says nature must produce beings who are happy. If the Spinal Catastrophists are to be believed, it is really quite the opposite. There is no law that says nature must produce beings who are happy. If the Spinal Catastrophists are to be believed, it is really quite the opposite. Sliding out of the somnolent positivity of inorganic repose and into evermore exquisite forms of determinate negation, the evolution of life—or the phenomenology of Spirit—charts nothing more than the autoproduction of increasingly complex neural systems—and their concomitant experiences of excruciation.
In many ways, Spinal Catastrophism is a brother-book to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Both chart an essentially pessimistic intellectual history, though where Ligotti excavates horror-fuelled melodrama from the tradition of philosophical pessimism in order to argue in no uncertain terms that life is MALIGNANTLY USELESS, Moynihan is most at home synthesising ideas from minor and forgotten figures of intellectual history and (broadly) letting the horror construct itself, showing how ideas intended to demonstrate the dignity of the human being, the beauty of Spirit’s self-construction and the organic rationality of the cosmos inevitably transform into their opposites: if rationality invades nature via the spinal crucifix, it is ultimately nothing more than a violent infestation; if Spirit requires intelligence as a testament to itself, then abiogenesis is nothing more than the birth of a hyperalgesia whose endless capacity for intensification can only inspire Spirit‘s rueful suicide.
I’d be remiss not to mention Moynihan’s book-spanning engagements with Kant. Like Land, Moynihan brings the Old Jacobin’s delightful intellectual schadenfreude to the surface. Reason is not a gentle arbiter of the conscience—it literally pulls the human body into upright poise, cursing us to skeletomuscular breakdown, aneurysms, heart palpitations, haemorrhoids, and many other maladies. In exchange, we puppets get to embody the dictates of eternal, crystalline rationality. It takes going beyond Kant, of course, to see that reason’s true categorical imperative is the destruction of the universe itself, total reality collapse, ontological extinction, so that nothing even resembling a nervous system can ever exist again.
Intelligence runaway and temporal acceleration are exactly the same. This is as true for Our Own Personal CNSes as it is for the superorganic global brain inexorably capturing us from our tailbones to our skulls. It could never have been different, and it never will be. Far from being a tale of the accidental “locking on� of intelligence onto technological singularity, human cognition does nothing more than waste the very time it makes in increasingly extravagant fashion—nothing alien, perverse, or fundamentally interesting is happening here. There’s no use protesting. What Burton said of melancholy, we could say of the spine: “Get thee gone hence if thou canst not brook it.�
Of course, this is the cheapest, most unambitious solution. The destruction of the local, fleeting, individual spine is a petty palliative. Even Ligotti’s dream of the depopulation of the Earth and the arrest of its rotation brings little comfort when we reflect on the possibility of an entire universe populated by trembling vertebrae. What explosive could blow the universe apart? What machine could permanently secure the sleep of cosmic annihilation? There’s a project worth pursuing. One can certainly dream....more
What does it mean for the manuscript of 120 Days to be seized (or rather, bought at gunpoint) as a national treasure? Sade wrote as an absolute enemy What does it mean for the manuscript of 120 Days to be seized (or rather, bought at gunpoint) as a national treasure? Sade wrote as an absolute enemy of the emerging French liberal order—and was certainly punished as one in his time. Not too long ago it would not have been legal for me to even own this book. What changed? How was Sade domesticated, neutralised? Whatever explosive charge this book once possessed, it no longer does now. That our society has become tolerant of its all-annihilating libidinal economy is certainly something strange, but it has nonetheless happened, and the modern moralising around this novel is truly uncanny. What is present in Sade that is not present in a much worse form in modern hyperviolent horror films and video games, or a sizeable portion of smut fanfiction for that matter? And yet, there is still something significantly disturbing about this book.
But what does that all mean? How is it possible for Sodom to be anything other than a lengthy exercise in trolling? After all, this is the book where four psychopaths take off into the wilderness with a group of abducted children and perform every conceivable horror on them before murdering them all. What's the point in that? Who would try to teach a lesson in this way? It's a good question, but it is worth remembering: Sade feverishly drafted Sodom during a 13 year period of imprisonment at the Bastille. If Sodom uncritically and unironically preaches the right of power to do as it wants and take pleasure while doing it, then it doesn’t glorify its author, it glorifies his jailers.
Let’s take another look at the story: Sodom tells the tale of an aristocrat, a bishop, a judge, and a banker—they use their wealth and power to kidnap 16 children (many snatched from the depths of poverty) and disappear into the Black Forest, where they spend the next 120 days listening to the stories of four middle-aged prostitutes—most of which concern wealthy and powerful men exploiting vulnerable and poor women. The four libertines then act out what they’ve heard on their victims. The satire barely needs to be spelled out: what else is Sodom but a mirror held up to a society that refuses to acknowledge its own profound moral corruption even as it congratulates itself on its progressive, rational ethical development? What else is Sodom but the story of how the vices and excesses of the rich and powerful spread through social contagion, of how little it matters when a few poor girls and boys disappear from the streets, of how social asymmetry distributes suffering and shame to the bottom, pleasure and honour to the top? It is not a question of right, it is never a question of right, but of might, and of reason's collaboration with might, of reason being only a mode of might in the Spinozist sense. One of the recurring images in Sodom is the judge who condemns a criminal to death and masturbates to the spectacle. More than the acts described, what offends in Sade is the force of the argument that says: “Reason is not democratic. Reason is power in monologue, justifying itself to itself.�
None of this is to say that Sade wrote Sodom to condemn. There’s no way to know if he did, but I suspect it’s unlikely. He was a “libertine� after all. Sodom’s premise was inspired by Sade’s own repeated excursions to his own chateau with young boys and girls whom he kidnapped and abused. More likely is that Sodom is a text that tells us to be “honest� with ourselves about what reason is, what the powerful do, and stop trying to make life into something it’s not; that is, meaningful, purposeful, and worth living. Sade shatters the illusions of morality and virtue and the loving God, but the exaltation of unrestrained power as good is ironic: Sodom’s protagonists are miserable and pathetic, they are never and can never be content or at peace; their tempers are constantly flared and their bodies are worn out by their "libertinage". Sodom's protagonists seem to have truly gained nothing from their power. Defined entirely by their negativity, they nonetheless are contingent, dependent beings. Under the surface, vice, hatred, violent misanthropy, is felt as a burden—life is felt as a burden, a tremendous weight, a terrible dream. “I would, thank God," says Madame Duclos as she recounts the tale of her sister's death, "watch the universe perish without shedding a tear.� The grim rants of the Sadean protagonist are attempts to infect the hopeful with pessimism. It often fails. If there are any victors in Sade’s universe, it is the dead, not the living who, wretched or rich, can never know peace.
And that brings us back to the question of comparison. Hugo teaches us to love God, to hate injustice, to cultivate virtue, to be charitable. Sade claims these teachings are all plasters on the festering wound of nature. People “see the better but follow the worse�, as Spinoza said, and since it is Nature that made us this way, endowing us with the capacity for vice, to condemn vice is to condemn Nature, to condemn the very universe itself. What good can come of this condemnation? Nothing at all, for there is no good. Sade invites us to recognise that there is truly nothing to be gained from vice or virtue. Decaying even as we live and breathe, rotting from the moment we come into the world, we drift irreversibly towards zero....more
“Scientific studies show that people will judge you literally within milliseconds of seeing you. Make them see what you want them to see.�
This quote s“Scientific studies show that people will judge you literally within milliseconds of seeing you. Make them see what you want them to see.�
This quote seems to imply Ben Shapiro actually does want me to see a hideous shill with highly dubious opinions, but I suspect he’d counter that I only think that because I’m a leftist, like Andrew Neil. Or that insulting him is an ad hominem. Or [enter nasal complaint here].
This book is basically about how debating isn’t about being right, or nice, but about DESTROYING your opponent. And he’s right. But Shapiro‘s writing is, true to form, whiny and annoying. So this book oscillates between being unintentionally funny and hyperbolically bad. Just like everything else Ben Shapiro says or writes.
(You can generalise his advice to everyone else, by the way, not just leftists. QED. Thanks Ben!)...more
Loading...
