Weird Mysticism: Bataille, Cioran, Ligotti with Brad Baumgartner
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- Brad Baumgartner is a theorist and writer. He is the author of several works, including Dead Man's Switch: Glissades (Orbis Tertius Press, 2022), The -Tempered Mid·riff: A Play in Four Acts (Schism-Neuronics, 2020), Celeste: Our Lady of Flowering Marvel (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), which was a semi-finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award, and Quantum Mechantics: Memoirs of a Quark (The Operating System, 2019). Additionally, Stylinaut (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021), a hybrid work of experimental fiction, aphorism/fragment, and poetry, was a finalist for the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award. Other recent work can be found in the edited collections Acéphale and Autobiographical Philosophy in the 21st Century (Schism Press, 2021) and Art Disarming Philosophy: Non-philosophy and Aesthetics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). He is on the Editorial Board of Cyclops Journal: Contemporary Theory, Theory of Religion, and Experimental Theory and is Fiction Editor of Coffin Bell: A Journal of Dark Literature. In this episode we discuss his book Weird Mysticism: Philosophical Horror and the Mystical Text (Lehigh University Press, 2021)
Book link: www.amazon.co....
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Bataille penetrated the inner truth and greatness of Christianity
"Perhaps Christtianity is even fundamentally the pressing demand for crime, the demand for the horror that in a sense it needs in order to forgive. It is in this vein that I believe we must take Saint Augustine’s exclamation, “Felix culpa!,” Oh happy fault!, which blossoms into meaning in the face of inexpiable crime. Christianity implies a human nature which harbors this hallucinatory extremity, which it alone has allowed to flourish. Likewise, without the extreme violence we are provided with in the crimes of one Gilles de Rais, could we understand Christianity?"
A god who could forgive anything is a god who'd permit everything, indeed for those worshipping such a god there could exist a drive to affirm him by reaching ever further extremities of transgression, a forgiveness of which would affirm their god's infinity. If every religion secretes its own atheism, what then of religion which seeks its affirmation in its negation and its integration? The religion of absolute good as the religion of deepest evil, religion of life as religion of death upon death.
This is the true horror of Christianity and its brethren that I've yet to see faced.
Gilles de Rais apparently attracted worship from the catholics of his region soon after his execution. To think that for some such a man is a more genuine “god-seeker”, a “better christian” than simple believing youths whom he tortured and murdered, that the only value in the later's life was in being a means for affirmation of him and ultimately his god's in forgiving him, and that this is what their religion ultimately leads to…
@@grbl8756 u sound quite hysterical..
@@mostlydead3261I think he makes perfect sense tbh.
Scratch a certain kind of pessimist and a vitalist bleeds...
11:00
19:20 highest immaterial plane,mystic
19:50 language of apophasis 21:30 B/escape , C/inability yet, L/DEFEAT-determinist
27:00 L/ horror of consciousness
39:00 deletion to realization
this title and intro is super exciting. damn ligotti and cioran!?
hell yeah
Brad seems like a top man! And what a collection of thinkers to write a book on! Thoroughly enjoyed the podcast! 😊👍
Baumgartner and Pageau in dialogos when
would love an episode on David Myatt and pathei mathos as well..
Steven Norquist's "The Haunted Universe" is an interesting parallel to this discussion.
Illuminated darkness, yes yes:
“There are among us daylight ghosts, devoured by their absence, for whom life is one long aside. They walk our streets with muffled steps, and look at no one. No anxiety can be discovered in their eyes, no haste in their gestures. For them an outside world has ceased to exist, and they submit to every solitude. Careful to keep their distance, solicitous of their detachment, they inhabit an undeclared universe situated somewhere between the memory of the unimaginable and the imminence of certainty. Their smile suggests a thousand vanquished fears, the grace that triumphs over all things terrible: such beings can pass through matter itself. Have they overtaken their own origins? Discovered in themselves the very sources of light? No defeat, no victory disturbs them. Independent of the sun, they are self-sufficient: illuminated by Death.”
The Temptation to Exist
Some Cioran's aphorism related to the discussion at 12:00:
“I long ago used up whatever religious resources I had. Desiccation or purification? I am the last to say. No god lingers in my blood . . .”
Drawn and Quartered
“No easy matter, to speak of God when one is neither, a believer nor an atheist: and it is undoubtedly the drama we all share, theologians included-no longer capable of being either one or the other.”
The Trouble With Being Born
“If He who is called God were not the symbol par excellence of solitude, I should never have paid Him the slightest attention. But ever intrigued by monsters, how could I neglect their adversary, more alone than any of them?”
Anathemas and Admirations
“You speak of God frequently. It is a word I no longer use,” an ex-nun writes me. Not everyone has the good fortune to be disgusted by it!”
Anathemas and Admirations
“I abuse the word God; I use it often, too often. I employ it each time I touch an extremity and need a word to designate what comes after. I prefer God to the Inconceivable.”
Anathemas and Admirations
This is Cioran's most "optimistic" aphorism:
"That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we were separated."
The Trouble with Being Born
Gnostic af
It is so impeccable!!!
The price of some academic texts is ridiculous.
there be more anarchic ways of getting yer hands on em.. yarr matey..
hell yeah
The Trouble with the Conspiracy Against the Solar Anus
Ligotti called stomach illness a "metaphysical illness". Baumgartner"s book on stomach sounds cool.
It's insane how many of these ideas were ones that were in my head these past several weeks, especially the end and the intersections with sufism. Actually was spooky to me lol. Great talk
I’ve been waiting for this ep forever!
Thanks for the podcast man
Bataille is an interesting writer. So is Leon Bloy. I've read a couple of short stories from Ligotti. He is pretty good.
The Sacred Conspiracy is an excellent roundup of all accessible Acephale (Bataille's Publication/Secret Society) material.
@@LinuxUser00 Gonna check that out. Thanks!
Cioran mentioned Georges Bataille in Cahiers 4 times:
1, p. 111: 'Flicking through a journal of young writers. Literature is out of the question: nothing that flows from direct experience, from something seen or from a personal drama. Everything revolves around certain writers, and always the same ones: Blanchot, Bataille, blabberers of "profundities," confused and verbose minds without sparkle or irony.'
2, p. 301: 'Sade is neither a writer nor a thinker: he is a case-study and nothing more. (The surrealists, Blanchot, Bataille, Klossowski have completely misunderstood their subject.)'
3, p. 375: 'I am not interested in the Sartre-Bataille generation, except perhaps Simone Weil.'
4, p. 950: 'I was saying yesterday evening to R.M. [Roger Michaux?] that Georges Bataille had been quite interesting, complicatedly and curiously imbalanced, but that I didn't like his way of writing; that he didn’t have means equal to his imbalance.'
You've read the Cahiers? Does he ever mention Spengler? Or Albert Caraco?
those are p lame takes tbh..
@@mostlydead3261 no. Cioran loved french thinkers but he loved moralists. He said one must use ordinary language to say profound things. Cioran was against gobbledygook philosophical language. checkout this quote:
Excrept from a Emil Cioran's interview:
>You’ve said that Sartre and others, in employing a German mode of discourse, did some harm to philosophical language. Can you elaborate on this?
>Well, first I’ll tell you that when I was quite young I myself was affected by this German jargon. I thought that philosophy wasn’t supposed to be accessible to others, that the circle was closed, and that at all costs one had to employ this scholarly, laborious, complicated terminology. It was only little by little that I understood the impostor side of philosophical language. And I should say that the writer who helped me tremendously in this discovery is Valéry. Because Valéry, who wasn’t a philosopher but who had a bearing on philosophy all the same, wrote a very pure language, he had a horror of philosophical language. That jargon gives you a sense of superiority over everybody. And philosophical pride is the worst that exists, it’s very contagious. At any rate, the German influence in France was disastrous on that whole level, I find. The French can’t say things simply anymore.
>But what are the causes?
>I don’t know. Obviously Sartre, by the enormous influence he had, contributed to generating this mode. And then, it’s the influence of Heidegger, which was very big in France. For example, he’s speaking about death, he employs so complicated a language, to say very simple things, and I well understand how one could be tempted by that style. But the danger of philosophical style is that one loses complete contact with reality. Philosophical language leads to megalomania. One creates an artificial world where one is God. I was very proud being young and very pleased to know this jargon. But my stay in France totally cured me of that. I’m not a philosopher by profession, I’m not a philosopher at all, but my path was the reverse of Sartre’s. That’s why I turned to the French writers known as the moralists, La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, and all that, who wrote for society ladies and whose style was simple, but who said very profound things.
@@LinuxUser00 I have read the google translated version. Cioran mentioned Spengler three times. There is no mention of Caraco. Google translate is good. I have measured Cahiers google translation with Richard Howard's translation of few of aphorism from Cahiers and results were pretty close.
Sounds promising