"Foams offer a theory of the present age from the perspective that 'life' unfolds multifocally, multiperspectivally and heterarchically."
Foam is actually existing deception—the non-entity as an entity nonetheless, or a feigner of being, a symbol of the First False, an emblem for the undermining of the solid by the untenable—a ghost light, a superfluity, a mood, a swamp gas, inhabited by a dubious subjectivity.
Foam begets nothing, it has no consequences. With no life expectancy or next generation, all it knows is running ahead into its own bursting.
Hegel’s new logic, a positivization of the negative came into view, and with it a possible rehabilitation of foam: “Out of the ferment of finitude, before its transformation into foam, spirit rises up fragrantly.
Does spirit itself, the medium in which substance develops into the subject, even now owe something to foam? Does this bastard that could not be trusted transpire as the long-sought middle element in which the spiritual and the material join to form that concreteness which we call existence?
Is it the third factor through which binary idiocy could be overcome? Did Aristotle foresee such amalgams when, in Problemata physica, he classed the illness of brilliant men—melancholy—among the “air-filled ailments,” whose features include an affinity for foamable substances: black gall, which the doctors of antiquity believed to appear as an aerated mixture?
December 26th, 2024, Lodz
"It does not pass on outpourings of immediate truth; if Einstein lived next door, I would not know any more about the universe as a result. If the son of God and I had lived on the same floor for years, I would only learn afterwards—if at all—who my neighbor was.
Every point in the foam offers glimpses of the bordering ones, but comprehensive views are not available—in the most advanced case, exaggerations are formulated inside one bubble and can be used in many neighboring ones. Messages are selectively transferable, and there are no exits into the whole. For theory that accepts being-in-foam as the primary definition of our situation, final super-visions of the One World are not only unattainable, but impossible—and, correctly understood, also undesirable.
Whoever speaks of foams in this tone has abandoned the central symbol of classical metaphysics, of the all-gathering monosphere, namely the orb-shaped One and its projection into panoptic central constructions."
January 1st, 2025, Dębina
"What a "revolution" means can best be explained with reference to the breakthroughs of sixteenth-century anatomists, who had resolved to open the human inner body with cuts and publish it using descriptively adequate depictions. It may be true that the Vesalian "revolution" was of far greater consequence for the self-relationships of Western people than the long over-cited and misunderstood Copernican one.
(...)
In its cognitive habitus, cutting open the human body from all sides and graphically representing it from every perspective is the same as circumnavigating and mapping the earth. Both operations were part of the great rotation that altered the angle (klima) of knowledge about things and circumstances."
January 4th , 2025, Dębina
"Phenomenology is the narrative theory of the explication of what can at first only be implicitly present.
Being implicit here means: presupposed in a non-unfolded state, left in cognitive retirement, freed from the pressure of comprehensive mention and development and given in the mode of dark proximity - not already on the tip of one's tongue, not already available the next moment, not mobilized by the discursive regime and not incorporated into procedures. Becoming explicit, on the other hand, means: being swept along by the current flowing from the background to the foreground, from Lethe into the clearing, from enfolding into unfolding."
January 5th , 2025, Dębina
"...proliferated, new positions sprouted up and the number of career chances was multiplied a thousandfold. There is a hint of all that in Paul Valéry’s malicious claim that the French, and eo ipso the moderns, had turned the 'revolution' into a 'routine.'
The true and real basic concept of modernity is not revolution but explication. Explication is the true name of becoming."
"The twentieth century dawned in spectacularly revealing fashion on April 22, 1915, with the first large-scale use of chlorine gas as a warfare agent by a specially established 'gas regiment' in the western German armies against French and Canadian infantry positions in the northern Ypres Salient.
In the preceding weeks, German soldiers on that part of the front had, unnoticed by the enemy, assembled thousands of hidden gas bottles into batteries of a previously unknown kind along the edges of their trenches. At exactly 6 pm, pioneers of the new regiment under the command of Colonel Max Peterson opened 1,600 large (90 lb) and 4,130 smaller (45 lb) bottles of chlorine while a north-northeasterly wind was blowing, causing the 'blowing off' of the liquefied gas..."
January 11th, 2025, Lodz
"Thus terrorism applies to the "primal scene" on the Ypres front in 1915—not only because it immediately led to the usual sequence of counter-strikes and counter-counterstrikes, but also because the German side could truthfully claim the prior deployment of gas ammunition by the French and British.
Terror does not begin with the execution of an individual attack by one side, but rather with the will and readiness of conflict partners to operate on an expanded battlefield. By expanding the combat zone, the principle of explication makes itself noticeable in warfare: the enemy is explicated."
"As an object in the environment whose removal amounts to a survival condition for the system, terrorism is an explication of the other in terms of their exterminability. If war has always meant one's behavior towards the enemy, it is only with terrorism that its true "nature" is revealed. As soon as hostility is no longer tamed by international law, the technological relationship with the enemy takes command. By advancing the explicitness of procedures, technology militarily encapsulates the nature of enmity: it is nothing other than the will to annihilate one's opponent. Enmity made technologically explicit is exterminism. This explains why the mature style of warfare in the twentieth century was annihilation-oriented."
January 18th, 2025, Lodz
"... Goebbels communicated with himself like an agitator before a crowd.
Like stupidity, evil is autohypnotic."
January 19th, 2025, Lodz
Reporting as we know it must already have seemed like temptation to blasphemy; for it stirs humans unmistakably to the impertinence of having an opinion on a matter which, in keeping with metaphysical orthodoxy, one should merely accept in mute submission.
For the ancients it was clear that like birth and death, the weather comes from God alone. In tradition, abandonment to God and abandonment to the weather are analogous indications of the willing subject’s effort to minimize its hubristic difference from fate.
If humans are, to quote Herder once again, pupils of the air, the clouds were their tutors.
What transpires as particularly dangerous are the climate poisons emanating from the affected themselves as long as they stand, hopelessly aroused, under closed communication domes in the pathogenic air conditioners of standardized and aroused public spheres, the inhabitants keep inhaling their own exhalations.
Here, what is in the air is put into it through totalitarian circular communication: it is filled with the injured masses' dreams of victory and their intoxicated, far from empirical self- elevations, which are followed, as if by a shadow, by the longing to humiliate their opponents. Life in the media state is a sojourn in a gas palace animated by experiential poisons.
February 22nd, 2025, Lodz
"Under the totalitarian dome of signs, people inhale the lies of their own that have become public opinion, moving about voluntarily yet unfreely in an opportunistic hypnosis."
"Measured against the task of such an ethics of the atmospheric, it was not only the democracies of 1939 that lived in “yesterday’s world”; even today, they are entirely blind to their acute tendency to develop closed atmospheres and aggrandize systems of victorious delusion—as if the political-psychological and moral lessons of the twentieth century had only been taught in empty classrooms."
February 23nd, 2025, Lodz
"Where self-evident truths became scarce, options had to take over their role. This initiated the age of elective world pictures and elective self-images. The long market cycle of so-called 'identities' now began. Identity is a self-evidence hypothesis on uncertain terrain and is crafted according to individualistic and collectivistic patterns. The concept of building mental prostheses expresses both the realization and the fact that the production of vital assumptions—life-guiding 'hypotheses'—in William James sense — no longer derives primarily from cultural heritage, but increasingly becaomes a matter of reinvention and ongoing reformatting"
March 1st , 2025, Dębina
Effects of ignorance. This was already recognized by classical authors such as Cicero, who declares: “Undoubtedly ignorance of future ills is a more useful thing than knowledge.”
It may be that the discovery of these connections was directly linked to the invention of the religions of salvation. Indeed, perhaps what Christian tradition called faith was initially no more than a programmatic progressive-regressive change of stance from a weakening knowledge to a strengthening ignorance, combined with a beneficent illusion. The vera religio became successful against the background of the classical enlightenment because it could be recommended as a therapeutic course given by priests to combat the sickness of imperial realism."
"(..) seem to be what one could call semantic antibodies or idea suppressors, designed to remove incompatible notions from the space of consciousness.
Where there was love of wisdom, there will be insight into the repulsive and non-integrable properties of numerous true ideas.
Epistemology will become a cognitive-scientific subsidiary of allergology.¹⁰⁸ At the time, this constituted the most extensive anticipation of the forms of rationality found in cybernetics, which asks after the internal and external operating conditions of consciousnesses.
In the light of artificial intelligence, it becomes clearer what natural intelligence does. We only prostheticize what we have understood sufficiently explicitly, and we reassess what cannot be prostheticized."
March 2nd , 2025, Dębina
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