Category: Philosophy
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French Propaganda Technique, or Why I Bounced Off of Jacques Ellul
These works of Ellul are thought-provoking but they are not works of first-rate philosophy. Ellul’s analysis in them is too limited. His observations can be made more useful but they will need someone who can go through his works line by line and elaborate the points that he touches on. As an account of these…
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What Is Divine Kingship?
It’s obvious that this includes two historical concepts — the divine right of kings in Europe and the mandate of heaven in China (and nearby regions) — but what else does it include and what does it not include? I live in the United States of America, a country whose population is officially about 70%…
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Technology of Authority
This is the theory of a theory, a pre-theory. Capitalism is not simply an economic system or mode of production, it is a method of establishing domination: a technology of authority. It is the more or less direct successor of divine kingship. When the European revolutions of the 19th century had destroyed divine kingship, at…
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Traffic, Flow, Code, and Boundary
Flow and code are not complete. When thinking about language, it’s easy to see code as just being a way to understand flow and to make it understood. However, this construction is missing one element: the interpreter or, in another sense, the destination. In the case of language, the presence of the interpreter is assumed.…
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Palestine, Resistance, and Ressentiment
When trying to make sense of the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, few among the supporters of Israel concede that Hamas had anything in mind but trying to kill Jews. The goals of the Palestinian people are always attributed to a hatred of Jews. Why is this?
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Capitalism Is a Lie
Capitalism is a lie, and when I say this I am speaking in a very specific sense. I do not mean that capitalism is built on exploitation, which of course it is. I do not mean that it falsely tells people they can have things which the system will prevent them from having, which it…
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Against Ressentiment
Few concepts which Nietzsche developed have been less controversial than ressentiment. I view this as a problem. It’s not unusual to find that ressentiment (and its cousin bad conscience) are at the core of Nietzsche’s thought. It’s also not unusual to observe that Nietzsche was stridently elitist and aristocratic. It’s interesting, then, that people never…
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Thoughts on Fascist Antisemitism
I briefly wanted to reflect on the political utility of minorities for fascists; this is expanding on a point I made in Against Ur-Fascism. I happened to be watching a video where one YouTube historian (What Why How) was criticizing another for their defense of the nazis. Specifically, what caught my attention was not anything…
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Juice: Will to Power and al-Kindi’s Stellar Rays
The concept of Juice is meant to help model how all interpersonal interactions work on an individual level: how does one person persuade another, for instance. Traditional philosophy doesn’t seem to deal with interactions at this particular level; it deals in ideals and generalities. For this reason, traditional philosophy did not give me the tools…