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levi_masuli's review
Solid contributions by this familiar cast of post-Kantian mavericks.
There are some rather dense sections here, such as Negarestani's musings of an ancient Etruscan torture practice of tying a victim to a corpse. Meanwhile, George Sieg and Eugene Thacker approaches the problem of horror from theology.
Ligotti's piece is an excerpt from Conspiracy Against the Human Race, where he proposes the unthinkable - that humans put an end to the masquerade of distraction and depression and simply annihilate themselves.
Resonating Meillasoux's reframing of the question "Does God Exist?" into "Did God exist?" or "Will God exist?", Ligotti quotes Mainländer in a curious theory of God as an anterior instantiation of Will:
"God knew that he could change from a state of super reality into non-being only through the development of a real world of multiformity. Through this method, He excluded Himself from existence. 'God is dead', wrote Mainländer,
'and His death was the life of the world.' Once the great individuation had been accomplished, the momentum of its creator's self-annihilation would continue until nothing remained standing. And those who committed suicide, as did Mainländer, would only be following God's example and moving toward the end of the Creation."
I also learned from this piece that sodomy has its roots in a Gnostic sect that advocated either chastity or anal sx among its members, so as to put an end to the reproduction of humans as inherently corrupted beings and thus become closer to Divinity.
One rather interesting piece though is I. H. Grant's "Being and Slime: the mathematics of protoplasm in Lorenz Oken's 'physio-philosophy'" where he explores Oken's bizarre universe where "even thought is a natural production" which is instantiated, like gravitational pulses, from the "ur-slime" and its vertical permutations.
Funnily enough, Graham Harman's piece seems to be the easiest to digest, and his comparison of Lovecraft and Husserl, two very different characters, in the frame of their supposed 'metaphysical realism', is clear and well-argued.
There are some rather dense sections here, such as Negarestani's musings of an ancient Etruscan torture practice of tying a victim to a corpse. Meanwhile, George Sieg and Eugene Thacker approaches the problem of horror from theology.
Ligotti's piece is an excerpt from Conspiracy Against the Human Race, where he proposes the unthinkable - that humans put an end to the masquerade of distraction and depression and simply annihilate themselves.
Resonating Meillasoux's reframing of the question "Does God Exist?" into "Did God exist?" or "Will God exist?", Ligotti quotes Mainländer in a curious theory of God as an anterior instantiation of Will:
"God knew that he could change from a state of super reality into non-being only through the development of a real world of multiformity. Through this method, He excluded Himself from existence. 'God is dead', wrote Mainländer,
'and His death was the life of the world.' Once the great individuation had been accomplished, the momentum of its creator's self-annihilation would continue until nothing remained standing. And those who committed suicide, as did Mainländer, would only be following God's example and moving toward the end of the Creation."
I also learned from this piece that sodomy has its roots in a Gnostic sect that advocated either chastity or anal sx among its members, so as to put an end to the reproduction of humans as inherently corrupted beings and thus become closer to Divinity.
One rather interesting piece though is I. H. Grant's "Being and Slime: the mathematics of protoplasm in Lorenz Oken's 'physio-philosophy'" where he explores Oken's bizarre universe where "even thought is a natural production" which is instantiated, like gravitational pulses, from the "ur-slime" and its vertical permutations.
Funnily enough, Graham Harman's piece seems to be the easiest to digest, and his comparison of Lovecraft and Husserl, two very different characters, in the frame of their supposed 'metaphysical realism', is clear and well-argued.
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