What if the values we hold; love, sin, restraint etc., aren’t universal truths, but artifacts of how the Cogito was wired to think itself into order? Kant’s model of mind declared certain truths “a priori”—as if reason could legislate reality, bypassing experience. Eroticism, however, exposes the fracture: desire arrives where law cannot reach, and the body resists being theorized.

I was laughing recently at a Hindi song: “प्यार करने वाले कभी डरते नहीं , जो डरते हैं वोह प्यार करते नहीं ”. Lovers never die; only the fearful fail to love. But this too, is Kantian in disguise: declaring its own value structure as necessary and universal. The song mistakes feeling for proof—just like Kant did. This is not to insult lovers or Kant, but to take a sassy shot at the Kantian poet who has no fucking clue, but must rub the pen in the groins— “It is so, because so it is”; finding Reason in an act of pure transgression. Fear can accompany any other emotion and more so, if what is held against it and also held high must fall with a greater thud. Must not such thinking cause self-injury? To bite your own tale and pity thy miserable life? What caused what? Point a finger at such Reason, other four point back at you. What convoluted reason and its bastard child, new-found Morals? Why blame only Kant, Schopenhauer offers a quiet death, much like his eastern counterparts who advise not to strangulate but die slowly— by sitting under the tree you could have hanged yourself from? Kant isn’t the first to test those waters after all. Is Love a matter of habits, or is it an external force that makes matter coagulate in certain manner, manifest itself as love? Long story short, neither love nor fear define each other, but become prisoners of Kantian categorization (Reza Negarestani’sSpeculation On Anonymous Material is a good listen, though he ends up eating his own tail around the midway). A value system sold as a guiding map, yet works like a trap.

If one imagine a total moral collapse with such cognition, what emerges is not clarity but recursion. In this blurted out thinking about thinking, one can only defeat old values to rediscover them, dressed in new justifications, posing as revelations.

Erotic thought becomes that irrational force that demands an autopsy—where we don’t just examine what we desire, but how desire itself is formed, filtered, and disguised by the thinking subject. If the Cogito is the instrument by which we imagine freedom, we must also admit it is the very thing that invents restraint. Ironically, Kant made a declaration of freedom of soul by erecting a personal reason to guard the values which make such emancipation possible. A prisoner guarding another prisoner?

To move beyond the moral loop, we need to ask: can the Cogito un-think itself? Can thought suspend its own recursive stupidity and allow for something else to arise; something that doesn’t aim to define love, fear, or ethics, but dares to live them in the collapse of the old? This section begins where philosophy often ends: with an erection and cognitive failure.

Limited Print Edition and audiobook coming out in Winter 2025.

What. Has. Weight. out in fall. Postponed until till.

An arrested yawn, in pivoted shoulders. Drink some water. Turn your head 180° and look for a latch at the back of the neck (usually C2 or C3). Look hard with finger tips. Use a screwdriver or a knife, turn anti-clockwise. Remove the head and dry the tube with paper towels. Look inside, and say something. Wait for the echo. Drop a tiny pebble inside, the size you can shit out if it hits the bottom. Listen for a thud deep inside. If not, follow through.

Talk to someone. Wait for the echo. If not, hurl a stone at them and wait for it to stop flying, and hit something solid. Listen for echo. If not, follow through. Climb down manually. Feel your hands from inside of your body. If only fingers there, hands are inside too. Talk to fingers. Ask them stories about things they have touched. If none, follow through.

Look for something familiar. Pillow covers, towels sex toys, photos, a person, anything, even money. If not, follow through. When in dark, keep walking. The smoke is thickest where a door or a window is. Walk right into it. It’s all in your head, so imagine a hole, let it appear and follow through it. It will be too small to go through, but let your death drive work. Summon the heavenly blessings and turn them into a tidal wave. Push! Push! Push! Shit it out or let it be born again.

(cont.)

When a crystalized “Outside” inside one’s head comes in contact with Lacanian backwaters, it erodes and degenerates in peculiar ways. Every serpent is summoned, beheaded, and squeezed off the last drop of venom; a concentrate suitable for sickness of a different kind. Following the defiant scripts of De Sade and the symbolic economy outlined by Lacan, eroticism here becomes less about physical contact and more about the re-staging of prohibition within the psyche. Reimagined, the law is not merely broken, but re-invented, re-inscribed and dissolved as a purely symbolic act.

The pleasure, then, is not in what is permitted, but in what is forbidden and yet mentally enacted. In these backwaters, taboo and solitary arousal aren’t considered “cultural filth” deemed lower than the divinity bestowed upon man, but a phenomenological framing of mind’s work to produce a space for transgression. Here, the focus shifts from ethical norms to libidinal ethics. What kind of value is charged, inverted, or made volatile in the erotic? When imagination trespasses the socially guarded boundaries of age, consent, monogamy, or morality, it reveals not a moral failing, but an affective truth—that pleasure, when thought through its limits, may expose the structure of desire itself.

Sometimes, something as small as lighting a cigarette out of habit can open a trapdoor in thought. I found myself lighting one before stepping outside, and suddenly remembered I had decided not to do that anymore—because the smoke lingers in the stairwell. That moment spiraled. It wasn’t just memory—it was memory of having reflected, of having once decided otherwise. A thinking about previous thinking.

That’s where this began: the mind folding back on itself. Descartes meets Deleuze in the stairwell. The Cogito, stripped of abstraction, replays through muscle and memory. Habit, I realized, isn’t just repetition—it’s a hole in memory. A bypass. And when it breaks, something floods in: not just the past act, but the past decision, the past reflection. And now, a new chance to act again—but differently. Deleuze called it “repetition with a difference.”

This little cycle is where philosophy breathes. Where the Cartesian “I think” trembles before Deleuze’s return of the virtual: memory not as stored data, but as a virtual presence layered into the now. The flip/switch happens when the real contacts the remembered—and suddenly, you're free again. That space, fragile and flickering, is where I want to look next.

At stake is more than a passing habit—it’s how thought returns, how memory doesn’t just recall but reanimates a prior decision, and how a moment repeats with new weight. The essay will follow (still a draft) how Descartes' clarity of self meets Deleuze’s layered echoes of the past, showing how even the smallest slip can reveal the machinery of reflection, the loops of choice, and the quiet possibility of doing it differently. Now, is always an empty moment with a potential for all things possible.

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.

or to work.

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.

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.

D | Death

A name for unthinkable
Thing and no-thing thing a nothing
Certitude primordiale
Once only
Prime abundance
A flatline
No subject
No
N
n
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*n – sound of death

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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