Here’s the ontological question that will keep me up at night: Can anyone truly be 0 degrees of separation from themselves? Has Kevin Bacon achieved a level of spiritual unity that is beyond our current epistemology?
Kevin Bacon is fully transparent to himself; he transcends the bar that constitutes and grounds the impossibility of subjectification. Kevin Bacon is the World Spirit.
"Those who seek a basis for decoding…whether or when abortion might be justified often have recourse to a moral conception of ‘personhood’ to determine when a fetus might reasonably be called a person. Persons would then be understood as subjects of rights, entitled to protection against harm and destruction, whereas non-persons—or pre-persons, as it were—would not. Such efforts seek to settle the ethical and political questions by recourse to an ontology of personhood that relies on an account of biological individuation…The debate restricts itself not only to a moral domain, but to an ontology of individualism that fails to recognize that life, understood as precarious life, implies a social ontology which calls that form of individualism into question. There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered."
—
Judith Butler, Frames of War
I want to take JB to the RNC and just see what happens.
Žižek has famously been called ‘the most dangerous Philosopher in the West’. To make him deserving of this title, I have come up with the most dangerous drinking game of all time. I am about 300 pages into ‘Less than Nothing’, and if I had followed this one rule, I would have had at least 300 shots by now.
We play a slightly different variation. Watch a recoding of him speak, when ever he touches his nose, strokes his beard, sniffs, ajusts his t-shirt or any other of his ticks, drink.
We nearly died.
I once played a drinking game to go along with the recent and terrible Atlas Shrugged movie. It was called “Atlas Chugged.” It was like bingo, except you’d cross out squares and drink for things like “Someone shows contempt toward the poor.”
I could hardly move the next day.
"Sharing comes down to this: what community reveals to me, in presenting to me my birth and death, is my existence outside myself. Which does not mean existence reinvested in or by community, as if community were another subject that would sublate me, in a dialectical or communal mode. Community does not sublate the finitude it exposes. Community itself, in sum, is nothing but this exposition. It is the community of finite beings, and as such is itself a finite community. In other words, not a limited community as opposed to an infinite or absolute community but a community of finitude, because finitude “is” communitarian, and because finitude alone is communitarian."
— Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community
Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler
"A theory of subject formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can serve a conception of ethics, and indeed, responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, not fully translucent and knowable to itself, it is not thereby licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its obligations to others. The contrary is surely true. The opacity of the subject may be a consequence of its being conceived as a relational being, one whose early and primary relations are not always available to conscious knowledge…If we are formed in the context of relations that become partially irrecoverable to us, then that opacity seems built into our formation and follows from our status as beings who are formed in relations of dependency."
— Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler
