Deleuze and Negri on the Spinozist Distinction Between Potentia and Potestas: A Brief Outline In Spinoza’s philosophy, potentia refers to the immanent causal power intrinsic to every mode and ultimately grounded in God/Nature itself, whereas potestas denotes the juridical and institutional authority that emerges from the organization of collective power within a political community. Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze, two of Spinoza’s most influential twentieth-century readers

Poetry, Gnosticism, and the White Whale Introduction One of the most persistent interpretations of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is that it contains a fundamentally gnostic vision of reality. Gnosticism traditionally imagines the world as the creation of a flawed or malevolent demiurge and views visible existence as a deceptive veil hiding a darker metaphysical truth. The white whale has often been understood in these terms: as a manifestation of cosmic malignity, an embodimen

All the World Was Broken [dactylic pentameter version] Light and more light: in the dawning of days it was kindled; Upward on weightless and luminous pinions God sent them, Barbary doves in their beauty and confident ravens, Great-winged condors majestically circling heaven. Over the broad and immeasurable grasslands he set there Wild sheep ranging, and bison of powerful shoulder, Also the forests with splendid eucalyptus standing, Firs everlasting and dark with their purple

All the World Was Broken [blank verse version] 4th October - World Animal Day Light and more light: the first of days began. To soar on weightless wings of air, God made Fair barbary doves and cocksure ravens, And mighty condors wheeling through the sky. For broad grass prairies he made wild sheep there, And bison strong of shoulder, white-tailed deer. For forests too he fashioned eucalypts And firs still green with dark and purple cones. He measured out the oceans and decree

Academia.edu - A Strange Hatching: Text and Commentary 'A Strange Hatching: Text and Commentary' available on Academia edu [PDF] A Strange Hatching: Text and Commentary

Potestas: Spinoza's Notion of Political Power Spinoza’s concept of political power, or potestas, is developed primarily in the Theological-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise. In these works, he examines the nature of dominion, sovereignty, command, and the institutional structures through which political communities are governed. Unlike potentia, which refers to the immanent power of individuals and corresponds to what Spinoza, in the Political Treatise, identifies

Gnosis, Repression, and the Return of the Unnamed: Psychoanalytic and Gnostic Themes in “A Strange Hatching” A speculative cosmogony in which consciousness emerges through exclusion, repression, and the return of what has been banished. “A Strange Hatching” presents a revisionary creation myth in which the origins of human consciousness are inseparable from exclusion, violence, and the persistence of an irreducible remainder. Drawing simultaneously upon Biblical narrative, Eg

Some Remarks on Spinoza's Concept of Potentia Spinoza’s Ethics is, at its core, a philosophy of power or potentia — the ontological and immanent power of being, acting, persevering, and affecting or being affected. Conceptually distinct from the juridical and institutional power (potestas) detailed in the Theological-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise, potentia signifies the causal power intrinsic to existence itself. Potentia or being-able-ness Potentia derives f

Begin, Again, Finally: Poetics of Creaturely Failure and the Birth of Human Subjectivity Begin, Again, Finally Begin Organic bodies. Competitively divergent, Striving to maintain Separation. First creature, Rat. Disgusted, self-hating, heart-horrored. Ties a string-taut wire around his skinny neck And kicks the stool. Begin again Second, Vulture. Stupidly well-fed on pride, Invests heavy in guns, Gas, nightsticks and, supercritically, All the plutonium he can lay h

Celia, the Sea Does Not Remember You Waves are not waves But the convulsions of a body That has forgotten the bones it conceals. The sea a wound that refuses to close. Celia goes there because the sea soothes her. She goes there because the air cools her. She observes gannet and curlew As one watches The slow collapse of a star. A big black sea bird stands in the surf Like an officiating priest. Its eyes are two shells Filled with the residue of night. Around it, strands of t

Tarrying with the Negative: A Second Hegelian Perspective on OCD Outline of the Problem Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is marked by obsessions, intrusive images, waves of anxiety, and rituals — sometimes visible, sometimes entirely internal — that feel compulsory even when they are not truly willed. Driven by absolutist and non-negotiable core beliefs or fixed ideas — ‘I must be certain’, ‘I can never be wrong’, for instance — the condition becomes a relentless overseer,

Uncommon One in the garden of statutes where rules multiply like weeds & stones lie about like scruples every step is a misstep in misadventure my ways are not steadfast nor my path clear fallen fruits ripen towards a crisis break a snail underfoot & the roses shiver disaster crush a flower with your heel & the frogs croak catastrophe offend the sun with a dismal glance & the heron broods at the water’s edge disturb a duck egg in the thick grass & the elms grow misty all

The Obstructed Dialectic: An Hegelian Perspective on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental disorder characterized by inviolable beliefs, mental intrusions and repetitive behaviors that together create a cycle of fixation and doubt. What the sufferer seeks is the solid ground of certainty; yet in pursuing it he undermines that very aim. Each compulsion, meant to secure assurance, ultimately drives certainty further away. And still, there

Academia.edu - Jacob Frank: A Study in Transgression Published on Academia.edu (DOC) Jacob Frank A Study in Transgression

Jacob Frank: A Study in Transgression “Only to wipe out all laws, all religions, did I come to Poland, and it is my desire to bring life forth into this world.” — Jacob Frank, The Collection of the Words of the Lord, §130 “It was said to Abraham: Go, go from his country, and then to you too it was said: That means that you should go forth from those rituals which you have kept in the Jewish estate — like fasting, mourning, cursing, pretense, one beating another — for all

Jacob Frank's Dreams of Profanation Many of the sayings in Jacob Frank's The Collection of the Words of the Lord take the form of dreams or visions — modes of speech that resist verification and refuse the binary of true and false. By casting revelation in this indeterminate register, Frank unsettles the epistemic and nomian boundaries that ordinarily separate the holy from the profane. If, as Carl Jung suggests, the unconscious might produce a dream “which proposes an irrati

Frankism's Androgynous Messiah Though Jacob Frank’s engagement with Jewish mystical literature was ambivalent, he appears to have drawn on a central motif of the Zohar. There, every soul is said to descend as a single, unified entity before being split into male and female upon entering the world, reunited only in marriage when (says the Zohar) “they again constitute one body and one soul, forming as it were the right and left of one individual.” This myth of primordial andro

Into the Field of Edom: Poland and the Frankist Imagination For three millennia the lands of Israel and Judea have stood at the heart of Jewish national imagination. They are the terrain of biblical kings, the stage on which the Judeans confronted Rome, and the ground on which the modern State of Israel now stands. Everywhere else is spiritual and physical exile. Against this backdrop, it is striking to discover that Poland, rather than Judea or Israel, held decisive signifi

Re Joyce (James) O happy days Ireland does re joyce A gnol a devol a nur reviv Upfinnegan w/ (s)laughter He hung up St Jimmy O’Sinner of Dublin, O fella no Bloom- Ing flower, petals crushed In Molly’s coddled bed His ruptfirm godlike (Ya, H C E) Twicer he hollowed onaphone Linguefiction’s penman is Shaun to a quill, Sing T, even stephen She Anna runs along the river lippy yes now Here she comes here comes everybody Now Is yes

She Stands Alone She stands alone, a single bulb lighting an entire room, the walls curved into her private sphere. No doors. No windows. No-one can break in. Her world is the only world and all things lie within her scope, sealed within her soul. Solitary appetites she pursues in consecrated isolation, in this her sacristy, her prison, her cell — an inside with no conceivable outside.