“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


Tuesday, November 6, 2012

ZizOOOk

I'm prepping my class on horror tomorrow by reading Schelling, and Zizek on Schelling. I like this Kantian, Schellingian Zizek. A Zizek of irreducible gaps between appearance and existence, which is just what OOO is. He argues very deftly that objects just are ugly, insofar as their existence is always in excess over their appearance.

In this sense, as I've been arguing in Realist Magic, beauty is a kind of death that seeks to destroy this ugly imbalance of existing, by harmonizing appearance and existence—the ultimate harmony of course is destruction or death.

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