Yearning

As I was watching the new Del Toro film on dvd, Hell Boy II: The Golden Army, it was impossible not to think of a riff on Heidegger's writings wherein the status of the human (and presumably the constitution of the perception of not only our being/ontology but those forces which escape us and yet somehow still seem to participate in our formation) was to proceed from gods (in terms of, e.g., ancient Greece/Rome), then in medeval times to creatures, then to modernist abstractions of fields of force. Somehow that tripartite series I attribute to Hubert Dreyfus. In searching for that movement, I came across the Dreyfus website, an article on Heidegger and Foucault, which I think addresses at least the latter part of the declension (I use 'declension' purposely but as a more ambiguous term than simply deterioration or degradation - though perhaps there is that - but also in this sense of the dictionary: a bending, sloping, or moving downward: land with a gentle declension toward the sea, keeping in mind Foucault's declining nature of the human face as it is washed away at the edge of the ocean in The Order of things):

The history of being gives Heidegger a perspective from which to understand how in our modern world things have been turned into objects. Foucault transforms Heidegger's focus on things to a focus on selves and how they became subjects.

And yet. our tech seems intent on reviving all manner of creatures. And for that matter, for the subject, and consciousness, to become another species of matter, the great death drive of the human, if we can be some Freudian about it for a sec.m meeting up with the great 'yearning' of matter to become conscious.

Dead Writing (discontinued) --move to 'creatures'

at least for now. I was going to discuss the NY Review of Books article by Zadie Smith and some of the work around hauntology and the new world of objecthood and it's (and materialism generally) co-terminus fabrication of both in 'selfhood' (and vice versa). But I've lost the urge. Besides the dead (and the undead, and the never-dead) are always there, waiting., both ahead and behind us. So no fear there of being surpassed/sublimed/sublated or any other aspect of -rosa becoming sub- or super-. Check out some of the (European) blogs on 'speculative materialism.' Funny how place is not erased even on the net.

Dead Reading

Three different items have recently oriented me to the title above. 'Nekros' mean 'dead body' in the original Greek. While not an oxymoron, the term 'dead body,' from the point of view of a die-hard materialist would have to seem somewhat problematic, perhaps needing to find a necessity to disavow life as any special category . Or for that matter, 'dead' as a special category, both being (for that hard-dead materialist) simply positions on a continuum of some sort of movement/non-movement. And while there can be forms of life, can there be forms of death? One would suppose that our straw materialist would reply that is a barrier (not even a barrier really, which after all assumes that there is something, a threshold, abyssal/abyssmal or not, on another 'side': there would only be here, within an imminent monad I suppose.

But nevertheless, necrological concerns abound, popular forms of death-in-living, such as vampires, and zombies, as the chiasmatic form life-in-death. In fact we would not be too remiss to say that these two forms (that is, death-in-life and life-in-death) set up the polar co-ordinates between which most of thought and culture moves. (One might also say in concordance with this that the mostly-hidden CONVERGENCE and folding of those two forms into the apocalyptic, forms another massif under modernist western archepelagos: various fundamentalisms and/or the technologial singularity seem to escape from all sides of the valley of consciousness and genealogy. leaving us to wax nostalgically about when we were alive, or, in the case of our objects and gadgets, when we were not-alive.

I just finished Lucius Shepard's The Golden, a fabulous tale of intrigue within the vampire world ... and if you've read any Shepard you know that the writing itself is often fabulous and with a tinge of the hysterical which only a vampire novel can provoke in its depictions of the realms of the dead. But of course hysteria is somewhat appropriate, since the term itself denotes an ecstatic wandering of desire outside of itself, a dislocation.

The other two items are a changing of the status of the object (material) in some art discourses and a recent literary review by zadie smith in the New York Review of Books on the changing (or not) nature of narrative ...but next time.