There's a rhetorical strategy that Nietzsche uses quite a lot that I've given quite a bit of thought for a long time. Basically it works by him either stating or implying that his writings have both an exoteric and esoteric reading. A pretty cheap gambit using basic social psychology to try to force an interpretive strategy on one's readers, 'I'm in with the in crowd and I know what the in crowd knows' & all that, still the imagery of esotericism is pretty fascinating and provides for some nice effects- secret societies, secret signs, secret correspondences, the rose & the rending of the veil. Maybe I should pick up that Pynchon book after all or maybe just watch this video over and over again.
Aby Warburg über alles. The Roman Empire never died.
2 comments:
I remain unconvinced. Does a chair cease to be a chair with one leg broken? Two? When does it stop becoming a chair as it comes apart? The reality is the emptiness; the Roman Empire is an illusion; I am an illusion.upezrog
These questions and more are answered in my attractive glossy pamphlet 'Why keep hurting the chairs?'
Funnily enough a wrote a very short story a couple months ago involving suffering tables and chairs, here it is:
1. The ghosts arrived punctually at the Autumnal Equinox.
2. Shimmering and wailing, they made life unbearable.
3. The ghosts passed right through everything, but made everything they touched hurt really badly.
4. Even tables and chairs.
5. They tried cooking a Fall Feast.
6. But the ghosts came and ruined everything.
7. They tried fucking, but couldn't.
8. It wouldn't have helped anyway, the ghosts were too strong.
9. They looked into selling the house.
10. After the third agent they'd contacted dismembered five young families in five starter homes, they knew they had to stay.
11. On the Winter Solstice, they died together in bed.
12. After that, the ghosts didn't seem so bad. Some of them were actually quite nice.
13. Everybody had a party.
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