brunette supremacy (feat. Nietzsche, De Niro, Klaus Kinski)
26 03 2025 evening
Walking around, walking around literally forever… there can only be one good technology per epoch, the spoon, the wheel, the hat, and the digital step counter, each era has its representative technology, the one that ‘actually makes sense,’ and for us it’s this, soft blue numbers, affirmative vibrations at the wrist, the only meaningful news the modern world has left to give, and unlike stocks etc., it can only go up (c.f., M saying, instead of it could be worse, ‘it couldn’t be worse’) —
Theory of language
Our ancestors probably got frustrated with all the materiality, it was a bit too Bataillean, a bit too Sartrean, basically it all looked too French, too full of itself, to the point of bursting (a river that tries to seduce its banks by constantly asking, voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?), in this context our ancestors understandably felt the need for an extra square centimetre of interior space, between the eye and the thing, but even in their solution they perceived the risk, namely that their creation, however minimalist and negatively interiorising they made it, would ultimately end up as just another set of hooks for the blank drapery of cognition, but what the hell, they thought, it’s, like, 100,000BC, things will happen whatever you do, if we don’t invent language someone else will… our ancestors began to imagine the grotesque wretching sounds their descendents would probably come up with, as if the throat were a coal mine, the tongue a spade (German), no, they thought, if we start now, we can put in place some basic sonic guardrails, maybe even at this distance we can push back against future aberrations, and in the meantime everything will look a bit less annoying, they thought —
God sees “the Middle Ages” in exactly the same way that we see “an equilateral triangle.”
29 03 2025 evening
Philosophy, it’s worth noting, is an entirely brunette phenomenon —
For Žižek, the impassable edges of a video game are analogous to nature: both are unfinished. Blonde hair looks somehow like those edges, somehow low resolution —
Dark hair, on the other hand, reaches from the very beginning to the very end in a single ‘swish’ —
Revisionist history of the Vikings which explains all their invasions in terms of ‘hair jealousy.’
Without blonde hair, no one would have invented photography — blonde hair is a primitive example of ‘painting with light.’1 But in an ironic twist, under the gaze of the early camera, blonde hair is almost indistinguishable from grey, even from white. (As if it were overflowing with surrender — to the light or to the eye? In the Renaissance, they couldn’t tell the difference.)
28 03 2025 evening
Subjectivity is nothing more than the idea of itself being necessary; because nothing else in the universe knows how to argue with it, it reigns supreme.
Horrible feeling of embarrassment listening to Wagner — like listening to a Dostoevskian uncle who, between fits of weeping, confesses his crimes to his underage nephew.
Overheard in Vienna: ‘Yeah man I’m so sick of these pick-me mountain ranges…’ (With reference to the Alps, the Himalayas).
A writer looks at the sea for weeks and weeks, nothing happens, finally a single white foot pokes up, waves at him desperately, insofar as a foot can wave. Instead of diving in to help, the writer takes the opportunity to develop a new sexual fetish, but at the same time realises he will never be able to generalise it; he becomes a foot fetishist and a pervert of the singular in one suddenly in-taken breath.
The fetishist waits to see the same foot appear again; the artist waits to see the same foot appear again for the first time.
To will the eternal return is to be prepared to see everything not so much ‘again’ as to see it stripped of singularity; to will the eternal return is, firstly, to stop being an artist.
29 03 2025 evening
Slouching
Why have you ceased communicating with all living beings and things, she asked by SMS. I mean, look at the light for once, she added, shining, dominating but also beautifying not only every single known or knowable object but also dousing, in another kind of light, the various sneaky principles behind it all… and you’re, what, in Tregtan, Albania? Doing what? He looked down at his plate, at the too-large croissants, suddenly looking to him like some kind of tragic Sartrean in-joke. He’d ordered two for some reason, and they seemed to be looking across at each other like Sartre and Simone, who cheated on each other every week to prove they were French. Okay, and who was asking? What’s wrong with these people? He tried to think about it, ‘the interesting relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and his lover, Simone de Beauvoir,’ but the whole thing seemed out of reach, constantly slipping away into some nether zone of bathetic unimaginableness. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay he eventually replied, at intervals of one to three hours. It was the late nineties, the negative dialectics of read receipts was yet to make all conceivable forms of communicative praxis prima facie impossible.
Your body, your body, your body, woah, woah, woah, he added, allowing the intervals to drag slightly, pushing the three-hour mark, like a string about to break. But she had decided it was futile; she was already applying for a job in Switzerland as a ‘greenhouse maid’. At twenty-one, she was maximally capable of self-fetishisation, maximally capable of self-annihilation through comic over-identification with the ecosexual fantasies of random strangers. Jesus, that’s the minimum wage, she said to herself, those alpine fucks don’t know how good they have it. Minimum wage reaching Mont Blanc heights down there, facking ‘ell, she added to herself, before flicking over to Norway. Not bad, but the whole place seemed cloudy, needlessly Germanic. Switzerland is Germanic as well, but its landscape has a restraining function; the lakes of Norway get immediately swallowed up by the sick Germanic instinct to self-mythologise, but those of Switzerland, for some reason, have the opposite effect, their only function is to gradually increase net global disenchantment. Must be because of all that lawn tennis, she said to herself, the number of people wearing white shorts… the lakes and the banks, between which a single green tennis ball seems to perpetually bounce… Post-Spinoza ass country, but still better than Norway. Colony of Karl ‘it’s so over’ Knausgaard, she whispered to herself unnecessarily while type-deleting whatever bro, a message which, had she sent it, would have arrived almost a full decade before its time.