Fanged nominals

"How much industrialism lies buried in the notion of thought! As if one could ever work things out. One does not think one’s way out, one gets out, and then sees (that it wasn’t one …)." - Nick Land, from Shamanic Nietzsche (1995)

Interviewer: Would you say that pure beauty exists? I think I know the answer, but...  Rorty: I think the Platonic emphasis on purity... The emphasis on purity seems to me characteristic of what Nietzsche called "the ascetic priest", and a bad thing. And it was an impulse I felt very strongly when I was young. And then as I went along I began writing essays against the very idea of purity. I began to agree with Freud and Nietzsche that the quest for purity was.... sick.  Interviewer: Why?  Rorty: There's something sado-masochistic about it. I can't explain it very well. But Freud and Nietzsche are always saying: "beware of the man who wants purity. Keep out of his way. These people are dangerous". And they're right! There's a kind of ruthlessness that comes from this desire, that I think is perfectly real. I don't, for instance, think purity played any role in Nabokov's life; I don't think that was one of his ideals. There's nothing...

 "Now we come to the crucial point. For even as I spoke of the extermination of the Real, I meant, in fact, the more fundamental extermination of the Illusion. But we must be clear about this concept before we go further. I don’t mean illusion in the pejorative sense, the negative and irrational concept of illusion as fallacy, fantasmagory, and evil—the illusion whose sole destiny is to be rectified. I mean the radical and objective illusion of the world, the radical impossibility of a real presence of things or beings, their definitive absence from themselves.  For nothing is identical to itself. We are never identical to ourselves, except, perhaps, in sleep and in death. Language itself never signifies what it means; it always signifies something else, through this very irreducible, ontological absence from itself. The probability, in this world, of a total identification, of a total adequation of the same to the same, is equal to zero. Fortunately. For that would be the Per...

"If you're trying to choose between free will and determinism you're so mired in metaphysical confusion that it is, frankly, comical. No-one is going to win in a free will/determinism debate, because the two concepts are mutually complicit and mutually confused, and they're both symptoms of a pre-critical understanding of time. […] Because what's at stake here, ultimately, is extremely traditional within modernity, it's just Kantian. Which is to say: Time can not be conceived of as an object in time. If you're trying to put time in time, then you're engaged in a hopeless metaphysical undertaking. The time of the future doesn't come from the time of the past… The future does not come out of the past; that is the mechanical, common-sensical error which is so tempting for everyone to make. The past, the present and the future, that structure of time comes out of time; it is transcendental. It doesn't come out of any particular part of time… […] Now...