Day 555: You Know Nothing About Everything

Day 555: 5 January 2023, Thursday

Who watches the watcher?

Does it matter?

Of course, it matters to the watcher, no? But to the one watching the watcher? What does it matter, really, whether one is this or that, so long as there is still an other? 

Eliminate or dissolve the subject-object dichotomy—what happens? Where can it go? Nothing changes and everything is eternal. 

The truth is often inconsistent, especially when most consistent. See: Certainty is inversely proportional to knowledge. 

“This is why”: the desired object, however extravagant and/or mundane the fantasy, is immanent upon the body without organs. “Like this”: a dreary ghost on the periphery, or the straight lines of a contract worker in the midst of laying bricks. 

‘It is in this sense that we said we are always on this side of it or beyond. 

Our mothers and sisters melt in our arms; their names slide on their persons like a stamp that is too wet. This is because one can never enjoy the person and the name at the same time—yet this would be the condition for incest. Granted, incest is a lure, it is impossible. But the problem is only deferred. Is it not the nature of desire, that one desires the impossible? At least in this instance, the platitude is not even true. We are reminded how illegitimate it is to conclude from the prohibition anything regarding the nature of what is prohibited for the prohibition proceeds by dishonoring the guilty, that is to say, by inducing a disfigured or displaced image of the thing that is really prohibited or desired…

Jung is therefore entirely correct in saying that the Oedipus complex signifies something altogether different from itself, and that in the Oedipal relation, the mother is also the earth, and incest is an infinite renaissance.’ 

Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 162

The repressed is always also the return of the repressed.

‘The world is imprisoned in its own activity, except when actions are performed as worship of God. Therefore you must perform every action sacramentally (as if it were yajna, the sacrifice that, in its divine logos-essence, is identical with the Godhead to whom it is offered), and be free from all attachment to results.’

Bhagavad Gita, as quoted by A. Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy, p. 272

‘You don’t love yourself enough, or you would love your nature too, and what it demands of you.’ 

Marcus Aurelius

Is not the cynical reading of the above the imperative: “Do as you’re told”? The person finds themself amongst dull and dangerous things. What does nature really demand? 

Forgetfulness: curse or blessing?