Abstract

Zarathustra returns to his cave yet again. This time not in triumph, but infected with spores of Cogito. The city sleeps in delirium, mumbling slogans of freedom or collapse; no one remembers which came first. Like Socrates drinking the hemlock just to get the conversation started, the thinkers of our time never realized the ground itself was disappearing beneath them. Their prayers may have been skyward, but it was the soil that mutated to quicksand.

We do not walk in ruins; we are the ruins. The language has stuttered, and Time has liquefied. The Deleuzian forest of multiplicities no longer offers a flight and reason is a blind horse that runs amok in a hope to hit something solid, to find again the joy of a happy defeat. There is no becoming. There is only the ache of never having begun.

This is the groundless ground where Mark Fisher and Nick Land; once comrades, take radically different routes. Both hear Nietzsche. Both feel the call of a future unmade. But Fisher clings to the last warmth in the wreckage, trying to salvage meaning from the ghosts of popular culture, while Land speeds up toward the abyss, courting extinction like a muse (I do not understand his latest position, finding Catholicism? Again?). Fisher’s melancholy is filled with love; Land’s cruelty is strangely faithful. Perhaps later half of the last century could be known as Deleuzian (per Michel Foucault), we definitely are in a Post Deleuzian one. And this comes from a place of high praise that If Nietzsche was the virus, Deleuze and Derrida to some extent, were the symptoms, and this is— an epidemic. I adore these writers, but in the case of Mark Fisher and Nick Land, Nick has a stronger desire to overcome Baudrillard than Fisher. Baudrillard is the new and timely wrench in Ontology. He is the first prophet of doom in modern times, a legion Nick Land with possibilities, compared to Fisher’s offering to remember the kindergarten days, and do something about it. He’s not with us anymore to see the eruption. Land’s job is difficult, but he puts his penny on total rejection of historization of knowledge; that knowledge and pedagogy teaches you how to read history, and not how to deal with the New. I too often strongly feel that if this isn’t the reality Merleau Ponty worshiped and Deleuze rode. It seems more like a virus, an infestation. Okay, I will shut of for a moment.

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If seen from a horseshoe perspective, it appears that there’s not much of a difference in so called too far left and too far right’s threat of a revolution, a change of order. A few more traits shared by both parties: urgency of making a choice, an annihilating threat to everything we know— as we know them. Nick Lands believes in the future of the new, Fisher want to take the sample of humanity to the Land-land, a huge risk in land’s project. I sense a very strong posthumanism in both of them, opposite to the popular notion that Fisher is the last post-man and Land, a proto-machine. They both are clearly invested in human; one choosing earth and other, fleeing to the far lands, albeit a human.

There may be more common to be found between Fisher and Carl Schmitt—each intuiting that something must be saved, or at least carried. Fisher wants a community hall, and Schmitt want to invite friends only but for Land, he want to burn down the community hall while both his friends and foes are in it. For him, only the phoenix is worthy of a future (at least his earlier position), being more sentimental towards an imagined phoenix, than towards on who’s ashes the new bird stands. Their shared vision of Human— period.

But what if the future is no longer a valid concept? What if “forward” is a word that lost its referent? In Capitalist Realism, Fisher saw the slow death of alternatives. In Fanged Noumena, Land opens the latch and let the shadow come inside. But the real fire might be the uncertainty itself—the unbearable possibility that the Ubermensch or Nomad, the ground holds neither. A deterritorialization that looks more like a hurried flight to nowhere, a ;last fire shot in ski’s empty chest.

• Photo courtesy: Tee Public

Ismayl Atmaca | up-close

A beer-fueled bonus episode (3.5) with two drunk hosts who swap identities in sheer confusion and Ismayl Atmaca talks about his queer world of expressionism.

Originally meant to cover Expressionism through big names like Bacon and Warhol, the plan derailed beautifully into a two-hour personal rant. We are calling it a bonus episode, with a limited time preview. Expect raw talk, weird metaphors, and zero filters (Warning: Vaginas and bushes mentioned a few times). If you're here for the art and the mess—you're in the right place.

Here's poem at an odd place at odd time. Estella is still a few month's away, but what has weight, is almost here. 30 sketches are done, a few more to go, in a month or so. Just finished recording for a literary project, looking forward to do it more often, and being more at ease while doing it. Here's "Things We know", a cartesian double headed snake.

A Note in Gratitude

What does a urinal, a bleeding heart, and a fried egg have in common?

Welcome to Episode 3 of Art Appreciation, where we dig into the messy, mystical business of meaning in art. From Van Gogh’s fiery skies to Duchamp’s porcelain rebellion, we ask: is it deep, or just...a goat drinking from the stream? Tune in, scroll down, and bring your baggage—interpretation is a group project.

WTFLOVE
Read commentary or listen to notes in audio format, read lyrics or download songs from unpublished work wtfLove (2023).

Qaida | An Abecedarium is a meditation in nihilism—a poetic exercise in surrender. Inspired by the aching clarity of Lev Shestov and Emil Cioran, this project begins with a contradiction: if nothing matters, why write at all? And yet, both thinkers wrote—beautifully, obsessively—because in surrender, there is still rhythm. Qaida takes up this contradiction and threads it through the English alphabet, letter by letter. Each entry stains a symbol with a poem, mapping loss, decay, and doubt. But beneath the surface gloom, a strange affirmation hums: even as meaning collapses, the act of naming the abyss becomes its own stubborn form of life.

P | Paresthesia

A novella by JEAN BAPTISTE DUVET
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In that little cardboard box, is a cat, is a house, is a man and his cat, inside which– they play. The game is called “Flying Snake” and it is based on a real story, in which a cat and a man find a flying snake inside a cardboard box. Here is, how it goes–

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Excerpt from essay Machine and The Schizotypal (working title) that I hope to finish by the fall 2025. I will be taking notes and posting them on a regular basis so; this one is a peep-inside WIP post.

Psychosis is the most widely spoken language in the modern world, though spoken in private, or in the company of a domestic cat, et all. What in modern language leaves the speaker betrayed and retreating into quiet gestures? Does that not make Language— one of the first generation machines? A system that reveals as much, as it hides? A formulation that denies the possibility of an Outside. In Luhmann’s terms, there’s no outside, because a system which cannot communicate, can’t exist. That is true for any system such as biological, cognitive or physical ones. A divergent unit—say, a Schizo; is never really addressed in Luhmann’s system. It remains outside the loop, unworthy of theoretical closure, much like how Descartes struggles to prove his own existence beyond thought, which has to find a surface to bounce off, and get into his dickhead in a timely manner.

Anthony Giddens points at “Trust in Abstract systems” as a possible missing piece of puzzle in the modern world’s cognitive mechanization. This essay takes the Lacanian lack as a central argument, and traces the “absence” in the discipline of philosophy from Descartes, Deleuze, Luhmann, and returning to Deleuze’s Schizophrenic. Sounds Schizo enough?

When gaps in cognition emerge, the schizotypal emerges too. Some rot, others make a point with their cats. A Schizo often has better insight about those available spaces, as they have accessed those spaces in their hour of need. A place where one could hide from mechanics of Cogito, perhaps find love and dignity too. A world away from a constant persecution by “reason”. A place, where to love and to be loved can still make a sense— as a private act; incognito. A world which doesn’t need excessive ontological theorization of the reality.

Art/image courtesy: Bailey, Pamela & Newman, Jane. (2022).

Welcome back to whatever is going on here! If episode-I was about “what the Fuck am I looking at”, episode-II is; where we start asking, “What is this thing made of?” And also about “why you should or shouldn’t give a Fuck”.

Fair Warning: Over 40 minutes of blabbering (audio), and some required reading (downloadable).

Here’s a five part series “Art Appreciation” for patrons. Idea is, to help patron access the artwork so they can form an opinion about it and judge it for themselves.

I love to start my weekend with an audiobook or a podcast about my favorite subjects. Isn’t it a good idea to poach eggs, burn some bacon and listen, than sitting down to read something? I am throwing in my fair share of sausage in a podcast format, so your bacon cums well-done too.

Sticky Notes in Gratitude

What am I doing!