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,

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

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 irrat

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 signi

Dark Matter: Jacob Frank and Georges Bataille Jacob Frank remains one of the most unsettling figures in the history of religious thought — not simply because of his antinomian theatrics or his deliberate profanations, but because his teachings articulate a vision of matter that resists both classical gnosticism and rationalist secular materialism. While the gnostic imagination traditionally casts the material world as a prison to be escaped, Frank inverts the schema: matter b

Trigger Warning       This article examines the lives, writings, and legacies of Jacob Frank and the Marquis de Sade, including their engagements with sexual transgression, religious antinomianism, coercive practices, and violence. It discusses explicit themes such as sexual exploitation, ritualized power dynamics, and philosophical justifications of cruelty within historical contexts.     The analysis is scholarly, but the material may be disturbing or overwhelming for some

Between Messiah and Monster: A Brief Biography of Jacob Frank   Jacob Frank — born Jakub Lejbowicz in Podolia in 1726, then a province of Poland and now part of Ukraine — was the son of Leib Buchbinder and Rachel Hirschl. Through his father he inherited a link to the scandal‑ridden Sabbateans, the heterodox Jewish movement that continued to uphold the messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth‑century Ottoman rabbi, Kabbalist, and apostate whose doctrine of redemption

Spinoza’s Hatchet and the Ethics of Objecthood      By Richard Mather       “For the only perfection and the final purpose [...] of an instrument is to duly fulfil the duties that are assigned to them. For instance, when a carpenter finds himself best served by his hatchet in the construction of a piece of work, then has his hatchet attained its end and perfection; but if he were to think, ‘This hatchet has now served me so well that I will let it rest and not require any mor

Is Spinoza’s Pantheistic Ontology a Template for Authoritarianism? OVERVIEW: ● The pantheist ontology of Baruch Spinoza (b.1632 – d.1677) is an attempt to deny the accountability of political evil. ● Spinoza’s instinct for statist control and his distrust of the common man are displayed in Theological-Political Treatise (published 1670). His masterwork, Ethics (published posthumously in 1677), is a bold attempt (in the guise of ontology) to classify minds and bodies as attrib

Thinking of Being without Heaviness or Depth Part 1: Being and heaviness People who suffer from depression often complain of a feeling of heaviness; not just in the emotional or mental sense, but as something physical — a visceral sensation pressing on the chest or wrapping itself around the body and the legs. Some sufferers say it is like having lead weights on their legs. Among the DSM-IV criteria for atypical depression is: “Leaden paralysis (i.e. heavy, leaden feelings i

In Praise of the Apollonian In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of reason, light and order, while Dionysus is the god of wine, intoxication and ritual madness. Many philosophers and writers have invoked the Apollonian and Dionysian. Nietzsche, of course, employed the concept in The Birth of Tragedy. In the literary and philosophical sense, the Apollonian represents individuality and celebrates creativity through reason and logic.

What Is Flat Poetics? Flat poetics is derived from a recent development in metaphysical philosophy called object-oriented philosophy, also known as object-oriented ontology. Object-oriented ontology is anthrodecentric and anti-correlationist. It radically challenges the Kantian (and post-Kantian) human–world correlate. Objects do not merely exist in relation to humans but are ontologically concrete and worthy of investigation in and of themselves. To put it another way, hum