“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, February 28, 2011

iSurrender


I can't do better than this fantastic comment by Alex Reid on my previous:

I am reminded of a related tradition, the Tarot, and the figure of the Hanged Man, which represents the willingness to submit the self to the other. Letting go of our mental addictions is never easy as we tie our ego to them as you point out. For this reason surrender, an insouciant turning away, can appear an almost magical intellectual gesture.

I wonder whether there isn't something speculative realist in this card. The willingness to look outside the correlationist circle is a kind of openness to death. The sudden flipping upside down of Heidegger so that a universe of objects is revealed, or the exhaustion of the manifest, or the humiliation of the human. The readiness to cooperate in postcritique, for instance Reid's compositionalist ideas for humanities work.

And lo, Alex himself has a much more extensive post about this very thing.

1 comment:

daz hastings said...

yes. this death theme has been fascinating. it's affected me. kind of, (dare i say it?) weirdly. (and "nicely").