Kisses of the Viper
Observations and Reflections for the Moral Education of Young Ladies of Quality
1
Love = friendship + orgasm
2
I feel sorry for sentimentalists, both godly and otherwise because they make their happiness depend entirely on someone else.
Goddists are miserable unless they find approval in some mirage in the sky. Too many secularists can't feel satisfied without the love of the other half of a pair bond or else of undifferentiated humankind.
3
Women have so many more opportunities for erotic sensations than heterosexual males: vaginal, oral, anal, DP, double vag, double anal, triple play, quadruple play, quintuple play (although I must admit I’ve never seen a successful quintuple play).
4
Theology and religion is the basso continuo murmuring beneath almost all philosophy including the most stentorian outcries of positivists and the sense data crowd. I wouldn’t mind firing that orchestra and adopting the harmonies of art and pornography as the background music of fuckosophy.
5
The thing about Italian opera is you can never tell from the music alone where you are in the plot.
6
A sugar baby is a type of pet. Maintaining her requires a great deal of expense, time, care and commitment. That’s why we all look forward to the day when sex dolls will be so lifelike they can replace the wasteful and frustrating custom of sugar babies.
7
Why when idly reading history and biography do we run across so many odd couples, pairs who just don't seem to fit, who would never be found in the same interest groups? Perhaps a biological and social mandate is at work and inner and outer voices begin whispering, "It's time. Act now before the universe goes its own way." And from any specific mismatch comes a new consciousness, born of desperation and disappointment, at war with itself.
8
Isn't it possible, probable even that the vast majority of the human species don't have a rich inner life or the ability and inclination to dream great dreams and do great things? The summa felicitas for the average guy is digging enough ditches to stay fed, breeding and watching his NFL football. Anything more is beyond his comprehension.
9
Credo quia absurdum is Latin. It translates as, "I'm stupid enough to believe any bullshit. "
10
Can god peer inside his own butthole or suck his own cock like Ron Jeremy? If not, what good is he?
11
Philosophy is dead. It died from a lack of babes. Man up and call a hooker.
- Thus Spake Domingo
12
Only pussies look for meaning in life.
13
My goal is to get rid of god, soul and mind - of metaphysics and epistemology - in order to make room for porn.
14
The need to interpret, to find meaning is a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Most interpretations appear ludicrous from the outside, but this doesn’t seem to stop us.
15
The English are the only nation I know who are simulacra of themselves.
16
Sorry Keats. Truth is nudity. Nudity is truth.
17
The struggle to remove the stigma from masturbation seems impossibly quaint today.
18
Were Elsa's nuptials prefigured in Lucia di Lammermoor? Blasphemy!!? Just askin'.
19
I wonder if Cézanne was just an old guy whose eyesight was fading.
20
Death by Fuckosophy. I want to go with a woman on her back.
21
"The Catholic inquisitors of Europe...defended nonsense by cruelty...." Gibbon
22
The Communist Hoax: Convincing artists, poets and philosophers that the proletariat was the Gold Key Club of demonic individuals and that the only way to practice authentic satanism was to play a humble role in the proletarian revolution.
23
Same sex marriage is the mob strategy for lifting once despised homosexuals from out the abyss of demonic individualism and onto the high road of bourgeois moral rectitude.
24
Revolutionaries invariably betray the early adherents who were beguiled into believing revolutions were something more than a change of masters. Behold the fate of the free love advocates after the English Civil War and the sexual reformers in Leninist Russia.
25
There are two types of philosophers: Those for whom the universe is self-referential and its being so is earth-shaking, and those for whom the universe is not self-referential or its being so is not a particularly big deal.
26
Philosophy on the Porn Set: The successor to the Academy, the Lyceum, the Garden, the Stoa, Sade's Boudoir and Feynman's Strip Club.
27
The danger in writing a biography of a wit is that the biographer tries to be wittier than his subject, which more often than not leads to ignominy.
28
It is the same with friends as with women: experience often makes one see that the merchandise is false. - D.A.F. de Sade
29
We've made it this far - got rid of personalist religion and some individual named god. Now let's take the obvious next step and dump the religion of fellow feeling whose god is the community.
30
The Domingonian categorical imperative: I don't give a shit what you do, as long as you don't interfere with what I do.
31
What characterizes the decadents is a dislike of other people and a love of material things. Des Esseintes surrounds himself in a villa alone with perfumes, flowers and bibelots. This is also true of Baudelaire, the éminence grise of the decadents, for whom the corpse is a person transformed into an object - revealing the true horrific nature of humanity.
32
A major advance in civilization will occur once we replace being in love with being in lust with someone.
33
Nothing better reminds us that individualism and alienation are a good thing than Thanksgiving dinner with the extended family.
34
Baudelaire and Nietzsche share the honor of turning misogyny into an aesthetic experience.
35
No company is so pleasant that you never want to call it a night.
36
"I've been coming to this church for 68 years asking for guidance when nothing seemed right. I never once received a fucking answer." - Meg in Sinner
37
Categories of female beauty. The genus beautiful can be subdivided into species such as hot, cute, pretty, babe, fox, goddess, honey, knockout. Species of the genus ugly include dog, woofer, hag, troll.
38
When the garden variety intellectual makes pronouncements about Sartre, he's mostly really talking about Camus.
39
Sex is an end in itself.
40
If there is a biological basis for multiple genders and individual choice of gender, why shouldn't there be a biological basis for trans-speciation and individual choice of species. An enterprising biologist could gain instant social media fame by proposing a theory that would show how this is possible. Similarly a skilled physician should, on the basis of that theory, be able to devise a combination of operations and chemical therapies that could, for example, change a male human into a female cat, if indeed the subject believed he was a female cat all along.
41
The principle of tolerance and not hurting anyone's feelings in the course of the gender wars needs to be tempered by the role the notion of gender multiplicity plays in Lesbo Left ideology. As once downtrodden groups - racial minorities, females, homosexuals etc. - are progressively liberated, the left seems to feel obliged to rev its engines by seeking out hitherto underrepresented downtrodden groups as unspeakable victims of "patriarchal capitalism." There's also a special significance in the central role given to gender and sexuality. Upon the assumption that the exemplary downtrodden group in some quarters is women, part of the strategy of the Lesbo Left is to make women more like men and men more like women. I believe the virago Fonda observed somewhere that once the first goal had been accomplished, the ongoing revolutionary imperative would be the second. Naively the world believed that this meant a few behavioral changes - non-aggressivity, practice in nurturing and a preference for baby pink polo shirts. Alas, the revolutionary apparatchiks had something more drastic in mind for which gender (if not DNA) modification provided the tools: the diminution of heterosexual desire and pleasure accompanied by male genocide in a fog of gender indeterminacy.
42
There's nothing like a model or porn star wearing poorly chosen makeup to cover for a hard night. Or for the bite of time.
43
Baudelaire was not a moral philosopher. He was a moral visionary and indeed one of the greatest moral visionaries of modern times. Philosophers need visionaries to take them by the hand and show them where they need to go.
44
Sometimes we shouldn't read people's biographies. Duchamp's later life, if we focus on just the externals, was spent as a suburban pipe-smoking quietist with a skeptical turn of mind. Sade strides the world stage as an aristocratic layabout and Enlightenment petit maître whose one foray into civic duty and bourgeois restraint nearly got him guillotined. He appears to have been gifted with the sort of charm which, coupled with a lack of empathy, tends to turn lovers into haters.
45
What pornography showed us, once it was free to develop without interference, is that it could be a product of light, brilliance, elegance and joy.
46
A perversion is a type of sexual pleasure that doesn't turn me on.
47
Fuckosophy: Putting the filth back in philosophy!
48
Moral nominalism: Admit as few moral maxims as possible.
49
The most difficult thing about girls is you have to pretend you like animals.
50
Baudelaire shifting from verse to prose is like a beautiful woman shaving her head.
51
Postmodernism - I'm not spending my time undermining philosophical essentialism just so some fruitcake can get his dick cut off.
52
The essence of surrealism is pornography.
53
Pandora's Box was her vagina. The evil unleashed on the world was future generations.
54
Trapped between the Lesbo Left, the Neo-Nazi-Anti-Abortion-Xtians and the Muzzies, what's a poor rock & roll boy gonna do?
55
Many of the most famous scenes of The Odyssey come from a tale told by Odysseus. Given that he is best known for deception, it is just possible that he invented the whole thing.
56
Poe was Marlowe to Baudelaire's Shakespeare.
57
To me existentialist literature isn't L'Etranger (You don't have to be a philosopher to shoot someone) or La Nausée (Nothing a couple of Tums wouldn't take care of). No, it's The Wasteland and Prufrock - despair in a teaspoon of Demerara sugar.
58
Reciprocal rights - a smokescreen for ersatz morality.
59
Until the invention of photography, visual pornography was socially acceptable in Western culture and literary pornography generally not. These values reversed at the beginning of the 20th century.
60
A melody is like a woman. It's the theme which confers identity upon a piece of music. Variations are the model's wardrobe and makeup.
61
Nudity is the right of the gods. The Greeks considered themselves to be so θεῷ ἐναλίγκιοι ἄντην their own full frontals were meant to represent the gods. The Italians of the Renaissance reserved that privilege for courtesans.
62
Solti is like coke. Karajan is like molly.
63
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unfolds like the revolving doors of Hegel's Phänomenologie. What's the connection? Schiller.
64
Music is poison to the demonic individual. Perhaps this is why Baudelaire and Rimbaud turned to prose.
65
The only music I can think of which feels like an abjuration of intimacy, community and celebration is the incidental music of classical Japanese theater. But apparently that wasn't what it felt like to the original audience.
66
Russia's greatest contribution to world civilization is babes.
67
Logical and metaphysical essentialism is utterly devoid of social or political significance. Anyone who believes otherwise is a gullible halfwit.
68
The same rule holds in philosophy as in the arts, science and mountain climbing - You do something because you can.
69
Alex Grey reminds me of Stephen Hawking. She's good at only one thing, but at that thing she's the best.
70
With the exception of the hard sciences, academe destroys whatever it touches.
71
Fucking is more fundamental than being.
72
Existentialist literature is not unique or original in depicting a world without god. That sort of literature has been current since at least the Renaissance in the modern West and since forever in China and Japan. What is somewhat novel about existentialist writers is the fact that they let it bother them.
73
There can be too much morality in the world.
74
I wonder what a heavy metal version of The Wings of the Dove would look like? Or an R. Crumb version of Pride and Prejudice.
75
He Fought the Law and the Law Didn't Quite Win
Paradoxically Sade's imprisonment and consequent isolation was probably a necessary condition for the flowering of his literary genius.
76
Philosophy tends to wobble between the indemonstrable and the unspeakable.
77
The American Revolution was a 17th century bourgeois revolution (Think the Fronde and the English Civil War) speaking the language of 18th century freedom and egalitarianism.
78
When someone appeals to religion to justify his conclusions, we immediately assume there must be something wrong with his argument.
79
Goddists play a kind of conceptual Yahtzee. They take words and scraps of words, shake the words up in a canister and toss them onto the table. Then they append “..and therefore god exists.” to whatever falls face up. This is why most of what goddists say simply makes no sense.
80
The religion addiction. All religions are cults.
81
My feelings are a self-transcendence through the agency of ideal unearthly beauty. The same feelings in someone else are gross sensuality.
82
The irony that people are often personally the most free in the anonymity of large cities.
83
Ambition is a weed of quick and early vegetation in the vineyard of Christ. - Gibbon
84
Beware the critic with bad taste and a gift for language.
85
It's hard to say whether the mavens of manga have populated the world with 21st cent. Japanese or populated Japan with Anglo Saxons and other Northern Europeans.
86
There are two types of academics, those who fuck their colleagues' wives and, of course, their counterparts.
87
The spectrum of antitheism in rock music is deep and broad, stretching as it does from the satanism of Marilyn Manson to the secular atheism of Nine Inch Nails.
88
"Friends are like boobs. Some are big, some are small. Some are real, some are fake. . ." From The Wit & Wisdom of Putri Cinta. (Are you listening, Aristotle?)
89
I wonder what would happen if Žižek and Camille Paglia were locked in a room together?
90
Language is the medium in which the hive mind communes with itself.
91
People like paradoxes for the same reason they do crossword puzzles - the tickle of the brain teaser. Other than that paradoxes don't have a great deal of philosophical significance.
92
Formalism in art and literature: Fear of the truth.
93
Eliot - Existentialism for the upper classes.
94
The triumph of science fiction is a signal that religion is finally beginning to disappear from the popular imagination.
95
It is important to realize that the Renaissance view of the extraordinary individual is not demonic even though Machiavellians maintained that extraordinary individuals could bypass some types of morality. Rather, it's closer to what's on the resume of our enterprising high school seniors vying for entrance to the Ivy League: straight A's, plays both the French horn and the bass guitar, founded an organization to save endangered Amazon tribes.
96
As the spider sees it she didn't have to build a web but she decided to do so out of her own free will. From the Saturnian standpoint humans are biologically programmed to build and drive cars.
97
If all feminism means is the rule of female commissars, then I have no choice but to be anti-feminist.
98
Difficulty in a work of art is a little like anal sex: A bit of pain is a precondition for a much more intense pleasure. It is in fact the difficulty that increases the pleasure.
99
Great beauty is not to be confused with moral worth. On the other hand, it is not something to be tossed away lightly.
100
The most rigorous sort of philosophizing would be to not say anything. That way you can be sure you're not saying anything untrue.
101
Some of us don't want to coach Little League and pitch in to build a better neighborhood. But we also don't want to expand our consciousness and just connect. What do we want to do? None of your fucking business.
102
Economic libertarians, beware. When the market (or a popular vote) is allowed to decide in matters of taste, the results are usually disastrous.
103
The average philosophy grad student is a guy who thinks that, because he got an A on his paper about "I think therefore I am," he knows something about philosophy.
104
The Lesbo Left is the new bourgeoisie.
105
Opening the home page of one of the online search engines is like being trapped in a dentist's waiting room with thousands of back issues of People Magazine and Martha Stewart plus an endless loop of Good Morning America playing on the TeeVee.
106
"Necessary" means just one thing: Deny it and you violate the Law of Non-Contradiction. Period. That's it. The rest is maggot-brained gobbledygook.
107
Def. Southern Baptist: A stupid person with a gun.
108
The perfect fuck: That entity which is the best fuck in all possible worlds.
109
Critique of Pure 'Pataphysics
110
Just as deism can be described as Xtian theology without the myth, the religion of the average Joe is the myth without the theology.
111
Trends, polls and surveys in social science - who cares what the little people think?
112
Most academic debate can be summarized in a single issue: Which ideology is best suited for removing individual freedom?
113
Between domestication and criminality the demonic individual must slash his way along a perilous path.
114
Despair is a powerful tool.
115
Fonda never had the animal sexuality of Bardot. She emanated the sort of bovine Flemish placidity that would have made her more fitting for a Van Eyck than a Watteau.
116
Cultures are not unitary phenomena even though most of the cultural histories we read give the impression that they are. Rather they are composed of several independent tendencies, institutions, customs, activities and ideologies. Often, if two of these strains conflict one will come to dominate and stamp out all or nearly all trace that the other existed. Popular culture almost never leaves a trace of its activity relative to courtly culture in pre-industrial societies.
117
Opposing strains - Botticelli and Savanarola - in the Renaissance. Opposing strains in the classical world are only now being sorted out by histories of classical eroticism.
118
What if the only records left of contemporary American culture were the art exhibited in modern art museums? What if the opposite were the case and records of that art disappeared without a trace? The history of contemporary American culture would be very different in the two cases. But these sorts of eventualities are what we have to deal with in past cultures, partly because of the destruction of records and artifacts, partly because of deliberate choice on the part of historians.
119
It's not that god doesn't exist. It's that the word "god" is meaningless.
120
There is some nonsense that it's just a waste of valuable time and intellectual energy to answer. Think of the Maoist rejection of relativity as a capitalist hoax. Or the goddist blather about how evolution doesn't happen because the Bible says so (or alternatively, because monkeys still exist - a self-referential tautology if I ever heard one!). Or the Lesbo Left slogan that meiosis is a patriarchal capitalist plot. Better to just dismiss this nonsense with an effortless and hurtful quip.
121
The key to understanding Shakespeare is the final act of The Winter's Tale where the poet misidentifies Giulio Romano as a sculptor.
122
Mind is for suckers.
123
Do we create things or do they find us?
124
Erotophobia as an individual disorder and cultural threat
125
Religion is a tool of the wicked to relieve the gullible of their money.
126
A fuckosopher is a philosopher who has lost all hope and couldn't care less.
127
A philosopher is a fuckosopher who can’t get it up.
128
While all those philosophers were waiting under Wisdom's window, candy and flowers at the ready, chanting their dithyrambs and strumming their ukeleles, the fuckosopher was in her precious box fucking her brains out. FYI Wisdom gives great head!
129
While Socrates dutifully took notes as Diotima spouted off, the fuckosopher was clit sucking the flute girl. (Sending out the flute girl and invoking Diotima are the two poles around which The Symposium revolves).
130
Le philosophe pense. Le fuckosophe dépense. Loose translation: The philosopher saves, the fuckosopher spends. Le philosophe embauche. Le fuckosophe débauche. –bauche balk (Germ.) like “fuck” Indo-european.
131
Most average people who dabble in philosophy are looking for a comforting thought which will give meaning to their wretched lives. Here are the top three popular answers to their quest: (1) Life is for shit. Let's get wasted. (2) Life is for shit. Let's hope something or someone appears out of nowhere to make us all (or at least me) happy. (3) Life is for shit. If we all just love one another, we can make a shit omelet.
132
Professor and scholar are not the same thing. Some of history's best scholars never set foot in a university. They probably suspected their work would die from lack of sunlight.
133
When anyone utters the word "epistemology" I pull out my semi-automatic.
134
Susan Sontag's greatest contribution to culture was to ignore nearly every book or article written by a college professor.
135
It is not a given that the description or depiction of a sexual act is itself arousing. On the other hand, the depiction of a sexually attractive individual is or under most circumstances can be arousing by definition.
136
Sexual arousal is produced by the image of beautiful women in situations and actions which show off their beauty to the best advantage. These can but need not include the sexual act. Nudity or near nudity is close to required. Describing sexually arousing beauty cannot really go beyond the gesture of pointing and saying, "That...."
137
There's nothing wrong with the modern investigation of deviant sex. However, one consequence is that heterosexual sexuality and the phenomenology of heterosexual desire tends to get ignored. Even worse, it is stigmatized as purely reproductive in nature or even somehow a manifestation or accessory of an unacceptable social order.
138
As early as Gautier's Melancolia there is evident a rebuff of the human beauty in Raphael and Titian and like Italian Renaissance masters. I have no doubt this helped influence the rejection of human beauty so constitutive of the avant garde.
139
Why, despite presenting a largely secular face to the world, do so many philosophy departments still stink of the seminary?
140
Dilemma: Is Pussy Liquor a great rock song or the greatest rock song?
141
The conservative bourgeoisie should probably be allowed to run government administration since that is what they do best. However part of the bargain should be that they not be allowed to impose their tastes and morality on the rest of the population.
142
The liberal arts are dead. They died of their own prejudices.
143
Despite producing a number of major works, the Surrealist movement dealt a mortal wound to the lively adolescent herd of ideas and tendencies surrounding the decadence and budding neoclassicism of the pre WWI period. Tel Quel aspired to the same lethality, but it waved its spear over a long dead corpse.
144
Calling the average philosophy prof a pussy is an insult to cats.
145
The gift of generalizing is like a drug. In proper doses it supports survival and stimulates life. An overdose kills.
146
Beauty is the fuel that powers sexual desire.
147
The Lesbo Left wants to castrate men and the Neo-Nazi Anti-Abortion Right wants to turn women into brood sows. Not democracy's finest moment.
148
The transcendental ego is really nothing more than an external observer, a lab technician in a white coat.
149
The Neo-Nazi-Anti-Abortion-Xtians are generically different from most other political movements in that they draw bounds around the rules of liberal democracy. Once a tenet becomes an article of faith with them, they are beyond the reach of argument. At that point all they understand is relations of power. The way to convince them is through coercion.
150
People who live in liberal democracies live in authoritarian societies not because the government itself is authoritarian, but because quasi-governments are rightly allowed to flourish under the democratic umbrella, and these quasi-governments control the lives of their subjects without checks and balances and without accountability. Churches are the most evident such quasi-goverments. A democratic government cannot shut down a quasi-government unless the latter acts in a seditious manner. But it is not inconsistent with democracy to subject the quasi-governments to the same checks and balances and the same protections of human rights which restrain the general democratic government.
151
Almost all discussions of political theory begin with a simple and apparently obvious observation: There are people and there is the government they form. The people on one side and the government on the other. This picture is false and misleading. Government is just one of many organizations which influence, guide and in extreme cases run people's lives. Some of these other institutions can have a greater reality than the government.
152
Either there are multiple universes, or god favors the home team or the Super Bowl winner is just incredibly lucky. Physicists should stay in their lane and stay out of metaphysics.
153
If we have so much free will, why are we humans so completely predictable?
154
Freud's masterful analysis of conscience was the death blow which put Kantism out of its misery.
155
Beauty is the ultimate transgression.
156
Philosophy is for pinheads.
157
What trips me up in my advocacy of nihilism is that I'm biologically programmed to be a cheerful person.
158
Hemingway, the writer of choice for minds so blurred or underdeveloped that they can't retain sentences longer than two or three words.
159
Kreator, Enemy of God "Dying Race of Apocalypse": The Final hours coming / Closing chapter of time...Those who believe in gods start praying their prayers of lies.
160
Gautier: Entre néant et rien quelle est la différence?
161
Cixin Liu:...the only thing encountered by humanity thus far that absolutely could not be captured by language.
162
The decline began when Ivana Sugar went hairy.
163
Ecchi manga and anime is the commedia dell'arte of postpostmodernism.
164
In the end it doesn't matter which team wins the super bowl. They're all just different faces of a generic football team. Likewise it didn't much matter which mystery cult among the many emerged to replace public Roman religion. All the cults were the same thing masquerading under different names.
165
Freud’s use of sexual metaphors was reductionist. It was a way of cutting "great" works of art down to size by showing their origin in basic sexual impulses. That interpretative technique, however, is misleading as far as a general theory of art is concerned since it implies that artworks communicate, if only metaphorically, their sexual origin. A general theory needs to ignore meaning and interpretation and start from a sociobiological analysis of art as a sexual phenotype.
166
Ya gotta feel sorry for these Xtians. They spend their whole lives denyin’ themselves stuff and makin’ life miserable for everyone else. Then, as they lie dyin’ and the gold ring is in sight, they realize, “Dere ain’t nuttin’ up ahead!”
167
Why are there no decadent philosophers? Only Nietzsche comes to mind as a sort of dubious example.
168
Artaud - The poet shouldn't make himself the issue.
169
KMFDM:...last call on planet fucked....
170
Eliot is perhaps the only poet I can forgive for being a papist - because the music is satanist. (Gautier? Definitely not.)
171
The race is on to see who can show greater hatred of beauty and its earthly representative, sexuality - Ms. Priss the Women's Studies lecturer in Old Prynne MA or Pastor Billy Bob of the HoocheeCoochee Drive Thru Church in HoocheeCoochee AL.
172
Hegel's jokes - all the wit of a galumping Bauerkerl.
173
It's such a shame that beauty needs to apologize, that sexuality must reduce herself to the status of revolutionary handmaid in order to find political shelter against the rage of the cultural Tories who would rather that beauty be locked in the scullery but compromise at Venus Genetrix, the erstwhile nymphet doomed to the tasteless and disfiguring task of breeding.
174
Heidegger writes as if a gong should sound after every sentence. There’s nothing essentially wrong with that. Wittgenstein writes the same way. It’s a rhetorical technique just as my snide remarks are a rhetorical technique. So is the sober just-like-a-scientific-report style preferred by the hordes of minor philosophers who take up space in our universities. The stylistic accoutrements of gong philosophers appeal to anyone looking for profundity and someone to have faith in against all comers. My jokes appeal to people who like a bit of a slap and a tickle along with their medicine. The lab coat style is perhaps the sneakiest of all. It can sugar coat utter nonsense with an appearance of unsentimental objectivity.
175
Amazing how Nietzsche beat women at their own game. He found a way to be on the rag 24/7.
176
The various directors, playwrights and scholars who have attempted to recreate or understand Nabokov's Lolita exhibit the same hopeless longing as Humbert himself, though without the self-conscious irony. Truth is, Humbert's screed is itself an irresistible but untouchable nymphet.
177
Anatole France stands out among French writers as someone who is neither a religionist nor a revolutionary.
178
Does anyone write for The New York Times who is not a dried up old maid? Just askin'.
179
The difference between Locke and Leibniz, on the one hand, and Hume and Kant, on the other, may come down to a change in men's wig fashions - heavy to light.
180
The cornerstone of Freudian aesthetics: Es scheint mir unzweifelhaft, daẞ der Begriff des “Schönen” auf dem Boden der Sexualerregung wurzelt und ursprünglich das sexuell Reizende (die “Reize”) bedeutet. GW V p. 55 ftn. 1. The etymology is probably not valid, but etymology doesn’t determine meaning.
181
There isn't a boat I haven't rocked.
182
Squabbles about the transcendence of some god or other would have been incomprehensible to the classical world including the philosophically fruitful period of high classicism stretching from the 5th to the 1st centuries before the Common Era. The gods to the ancients were physical objects like everyone else. They just lived a very long time mostly on distant mountains and possessed superhero powers.
183
Multiculturalism must not imply an uncritical acceptance of religiosity. Atheism is an authentic universal.
184
Madness and philosophy are unlovely bedmates. Living at the edge of the familiar and the intelligible, the philosopher is always tempted to go beyond. (The common sense tradition with its insistence on never leaving the way the ordinary man sees things merely exhibits a pathological symptom, a hysterical recoil from putting a single foot beyond the bounds of experience and the entirety of the known world.) - Tasio the Madman.
185
KMFDM Blitz, "People of the Lie": "Don't call it your faith/ Another way to justify hate/ ....Don't push your deity on me/ Reality is bullshit." One of the best songs on the Blitz album.
186
Saying an alternative reality is all there is while insisting on calling it alternative is like pretending your nose doesn't hurt while wearing an Oculus.
187
If you are a continental philosopher, your duty is to choose between Marx and god. There are no other alternatives.
188
The good shepherd - Don't these Xtians realize that shepherds, even the best among them, tend their flocks not out of some sort of benevolence but for the sake of a hearty side of mutton or a delicious lamb stew. I understand that even today shepherds in the Aegean Peninsula eat their lamb shanks raw and freshly killed. The picture that emerges is of a Saturn-like Jesus devouring his own children.
189
Philosophy and literature are historical antagonists incapable of informing the same culture.
190
Valéry: Mallarmé Lite
191
There just aren't any attractive Americans any more. They're all immensely fat with hairy armpits and vaginas.
192
Henry Miller - Ya have to honor the man. He died with his dick in his hand.
193
Hegel wasn't the only romantic to engage in incoherent ramblings. Emerson and George Sand come readily to mind.
194
Sorry guys, Leonardo is a seriously overrated painter who had surprising misconceptions about the mechanics of fucking. Sadly the myth that the middle aged Ms. Lisa is a beautiful woman was an invention of Victorian homosexuals. In fact she just looks like someone's pissed off mom on a bad hair day.
195
Sprinkling pepper and vinegar on your crême brulée - How would young Marcel react if Artaud were to wander into a mondain dinner party? Or what would be the conversation if he stumbled on the Tarahumaras getting wasted?
196
Saul Kripke is an idiot souvent (Tip 'o the hat to M. Warhol).
197
To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths. - Poe
198
I'm not sure what Žižek's Sex and the Failed Absolute has to the with sex unless by the latter he means the perverted courtship ritual embodied in the Lesbo Left War on Men.
199
Ya gotta credit Mallarmé for one thing: He scrubbed French poetry clean of the god detritus left over from the Romantics so it could finally catch up with Englishmen like Shelley and Byron.
200
Shelley is one poet I know I should like, but I just can't keep my mind from wandering when I read his work.
201
Steering one's way between the avant garde phonies of the art world and the slobbering simians of reg'lar guyhood is as perilous as mastering the narrow path between the Lesbo Left and the Neo-Nazi-Anti-Abortion-Xtians.
202
A Ph.D. is a grad student who has proved he might be nothing more than an idiot savant.
203
What doesn't kill you might lead you astray.
204
The common or garden logical positivist behaved like a bumptious Bloch mistakenly or mischievously invited to the Duchess' afternoon and who bellowed an insouciant laugh to show his disdain at tracking street mud into the drawing room.
205
It was quite normal for romantic poets to invoke god and wear their religion on their sleeves. After Baudelaire that all came crashing down and lyric stepped boldly into the invigorating sunlight of secularism. Hugo and Gautier were the last remnants of the old guard. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were the first explorers of the new world.
206
It is perhaps to be regretted that empiricists are rebuffed by the common run of postmodernists given that the two share many of the same anti-philosophical goals. Perhaps that distaste will linger as long as the image of the average analytical philosopher is that of a pimple faced weenie who annoys real scientists.
207
I always thought of myself as the Beaver. Imagine my shock to find out I was Eddie Haskell all along.
208
The debate over beauty occurs in a kingdom beyond language.
209
Baudelaire is to modern poetry as Petrarch was to Renaissance poetry. He not only effectively introduced the prose poem, he also enriched the poet's world view. Interestingly enough he wasn't the theoretical father of modernism. That was Wagner, despite the latter's reliance on Gothic and pre-modernist mythology. Even though Baudelaire filled his poetry with la vie moderne, he always thought his work belonged to Romanticism.
210
Love is evil. Sin is sincere. - Marilyn Manson
211
Poe practically invented the Surrealist bagatelle, a literary form perfected by Artaud (Les Tarahumaras, Le Théâtre et son double) that is not traditional fiction but does not have the one-to-one correspondence with reality which is the assumption underlying most journalism. A good example can be found in the first few paragraphs of the report, "The Premature Burial." "Marie Roget" takes the opposite tack - an explicit fictional form which cites apparently actual news reports in such a way as to undermine their reliability.
212
I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time. - Isaac Asimov
213
The more I think about Freud the more I come to believe that he was the most important philosopher since Aristotle and one of the greatest minds in human history. He was the incarnation of the radicalism of scientific positivism.
214
Nearly every attempt to "improve" upon Freud from Jung to Lacan has been motivated by one thing: get rid of the sex. Which means get rid of biological reductionism.
215
High Art - a bucket which includes literary journals, university humanities departments, avant-garde music and assorted museums and galleries - is shorthand for Only Fruitcakes Allowed.
216
The soft atheism of cold indifference.
217
Just as philosophy departments today are divided between the analytical and the continental, I suppose one day there will be an administrative divide between creationist and gender neutral biology faculties. The burning question for biology will be why predictions fail and experiments return indecipherable results.
218
Delenda est universitas - so the arts and scholarship may flourish.
219
What's an example of a semantic paradox? "All trannies are schmucks."
220
Lacan's contribution to philosophy? Replacing sex in Freud with some sort of neo-Hegelian transcendental signifier obsessed with death.
221
Oxford and Cambridge are just as subject to fads as any Parisian bistro and it was Quinton's rotten luck that he published right before the Davidson-Dummett fad was about to break.
222
Bataille and Klossowski - Why don't we turn things around? Instead of saying that there is a type of sexual experience which is mystical in nature, why don't we realize that mystical experiences are really a deviant sort of sexuality? The kind with an empty placeholder as the sexual object.
223
It should come as no surprise that formalism arose concurrently with the capture of writing about art and literature by the academy. The "stirrings of the heart" just like feelings of sexual excitement are largely beyond the sensibility of the average academic, scientist or otherwise.
224
Emotive intersubjectivity - We can become sexually aroused from observing someone else's sexual arousal.
225
One annoying thing about Strawson is he so frequently says "logically" when he really means "analytically." This is particularly evident in his argument against what he calls the no-ownership theory of private experiences.
226
It's probably worth noting that Freud's observational sample was probably not much smaller than Darwin's. And neither produced laws in the strict scientific sense, namely mathematically measurable inductive regularities. Rather each had an insight into a mechanism which lay behind a mass of apparently haphazard data. Darwin's mechanism was natural selection and speciation. Freud's was the phenotypic expression of aspects of developmental biology.
227
The Phänomenologie des Geistes is pretty much an endless flood of repetitive gobbledygook. Is this the young Hegel struggling to express new and perhaps exciting ideas as many academics including Hegel himself came to see it? Or is it the birth of a non-referential literature whose meaning derives from the interaction of the words he uses, as Mallarmé and any number of differentialist thinkers would have it? Cf. my "Meaning in the Art of Duchamp."
228
Gautier's Pour veiner de son front la pâleur delicate... Landscape as woman.
229
Contemporary art - Boring is the new kitsch.
230
My goal is to merge Baudelarian morality and aesthetics with scientific reductions and atheism.
231
An extrovert who gets irritated by other people - Is that a thing?
232
Academic psychologists are tabloid advice columnists who fancy themselves scientists.
233
Dawn Dunlap - Passing from Laura to Forbidden World one understands how Pooh must have felt when he said goodbye to Christopher Robin.
234
If Baudelaire is to modern poetry as Petrarch was to Renaissance poetry, then who is the modern Dante? The Count of High Water.
235
We have all these critical movements saying the English aren't as bad as they seem compared to the French when it comes to art and literature. But then we run up against the roadblock of English cooking. Buck up, lads! Who do the French have to compare with Mick Jagger? Chantal Goya?
236
The accusation that some philosophers are logic choppers who lose themselves in the weeds is appropriate in cases where philosophical thinking leads to no actionable results or gets lost in a maze of distinctions. However, this accusation is too often a cover for someone who prefers to draw highly contestable generalizations without taking the trouble to think them through.
237
Even if I thought humanity could be saved and was worth saving, I can't be bothered.
238
A dadaist is a nihilist who likes to show off.
239
Where Heidegger notoriously burbled, "How does it stand with being?" Sartre had to worry about how his latest article stood with André Stil.
240
A good porn pic is tactile as well as visual. You don't just see form and color. You feel the model's flesh.
241
Is BEING just a suppository which sneaks the deity back into philosophy via the back door? In the cloudy minds of most Heideggerians being is god in mufti.
242
It really pisses me off that music’s not dangerous anymore. - Marilyn Manson allegedly quoting Trent Reznor,
243
Was a time when civil libertarians could live in uneasy alliance with the left. Well, with the bloodless putsch engineered by the Muzzy loving Lesbo Left, that's certainly a thing of the past.
244
Some people write from a love of humanity. I write from excess adrenaline and feelings of irritation.
245
The Marxian Foucauldian approach did us a service by replacing the great man approach to writing history with histories based on the collective mentality. I would like to take this a step in a different direction by looking at occasions where there is conflict between extraordinary individuals and the mass or majority mentality. To be fair, some of this is adumbrated in Foucault's work on insanity and on prisons.
246
Winckelmann the homosexual laid the basis for our understanding of classical art. Quite naturally he focused on depictions of the male nude. The same respect and acuity has not been manifested by heterosexual critics of the female nude.
247
The repressed fear lurking in the professorial amygdala is: No Necessity, no philosophy. That's why they tie themselves into knots trying to devise ways to concoct necessarily true statements.
248
There are only three genders: men, women and babes.
249
Freud's fault lay not so much in the theory of sexuality as an explanation of neurotic disorders but in his claim that the recognition of sexual causes in individual cases could bring about the alleviation or disappearance of neurotic symptoms. Drop the latter claim and we have a theory much more in line with contemporary evolutionary biology.
250
Montaigne was to ethics as Copernicus was to physics. In this light Kant was the ghost of Roger Bellarmine.
251
Was a time when the New York art world was divided into two camps: (1) People who hate Morris Louis and (2) Michael Fried.
252
"Seduction is an art, and tonight, I am the artist." From The Wit & Wisdom of Putri Cinta.
253
The difference between Harvard and Yale. Harvard men got straight A's in high school French. Yale men spoke French with the nanny.
254
The fundamental theorem of evolutionary biology: Everything comprised in an organism's phenotype can be explained by way of its role in species or genetic survival and propagation.
255
Unquestionably Ekaterina Skaredina (porn name Mango/Katya Clover) had the most sublime butt in the entire universe of Callipygia.
256
In the world of ecchi anime the upper crust sip tea from Wedgewood while an English butler hovers in the vicinity. Ordinary slobs slurp instant ramen in the Japanese equivalent of a 7-11.
257
If you don't like getting into the weeds, then don't become a philosopher. Just stand on a street corner and proclaim your opinions.
258
Porn stars and rock musicians are the gods and goddesses of the modern pantheon. They are the glorious elect concerning whom Honni soit... remains a firm warning.
259
Any porn star older than 20 needs to have silicone inserted. All porn stars need Brazilian waxing.
260
There are only two reasons people seek you out. Either they want to mate or they want to sell you something. If someone wants to buy something, he is not seeking you; you are merely a means to buy what he wants. This is why Aristotle's φιλία should be revised or retranslated (depending on what Aristotle actually meant) as benevolence. The psychological (as opposed to the normative) side of Hume's notion of benevolence should be rephrased as everything-else-being-equal-benevolence, i.e. benevolence unless I am harmed or discomfited in some way.
261
Marx was the theory. Soviet gulags were the practice. Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze were theories. They were monopolized by the Lesbo Left and the War on Men is the practice.
262
We need to distinguish between rational behavior, which (if natural selection is a valid explanation of behavior) is universal, and supposedly rational behavior which does not guide a person's actions when it conflicts with another more rational feature of a phenotype. In principle, close inspection should reveal the conflict. A person might pursue a course of action not in his rational best interests. But we find there is an underlying reason for why he acts the way he does.
263
What we thought was essence is really a placeholder.
264
Bouguereau is the new Manet, the flashpoint for intense hatred - and finally equally intense appreciation.
265
Future tyrants are at their best when they represent an oppressed minority.
266
The two greatest threats to individual freedom in a nation are the mob, sometimes called the majority, and governmentally structured associations permitted to operate in a nation.
267
Aesthetic value is a mark of the repression of sexual feeling.
268
The hatred of Bouguereau by the fruity elites and the little people who trail along in their wake is, in its virulence, a neurotic symptom - something like the violent outlashing of the repressed homosexual against his William Wilsons.
269
So art world art is all about actually being philosophy? And here I thought it was all about being smug self-indulgent college boy pranks.
270
Absurdist techniques have become such a commonplace in even the best films and literature that it's increasingly difficult to spark the feelings of uneasiness which usher in the modernist marvelous. It's like the elderly having lost even the memory of the first wild stirrings of sexual desire.
271
Sometimes I think I would like to live forever, because there is no end to what I intend to write. At other times, I would like to die now because I could use the sleep.
272
Hey freshman sitting in Phil. 101, look at your teacher standing at the blackboard. He's an academic faggot. But you shouldn't feel superior. You are a sniveling careerist pussy.
273
Watch what you wish for. A female who's high is kinda cute. A female addict is just as repulsive as a male addict - perhaps more so,
274
The courtly picture of love endorsed and revived by the Romantic movement portrays love as irrational behavior directed to the goal of achieving orgasm with a specific sex object. Striking that Rousseau's Julie already cast doubts on this model.
275
Mohammed worship - or the religion of camel shit.
276
What Heidegger got wrong: Being is an entity.
277
The choice is not between individual freedom and oppression. It is between varying types and degrees of oppression.
278
I don't know why people get so excited over "The Raven" and "The Bells." I would hardly qualify them as horror and the prosody reads like amateurish kitsch. The elegies for dead girls, on the other hand, are lyric poetry at its highest level and surely served as melodic if not thematic models for Baudelaire. But I wouldn't call the elegies horror or Gothic either. A better word would be "disturbing."
279
The products of Dada and Surrealism and whatever else came out of them no longer horrify the high art elites. What does horrify them? Pornography. Consequently pornography (as Man Ray and Jindrich Štyrský might have foreseen) functions within culture in exactly the way the Dadaists and some Surrealists had intended for their art works. Conversely the museum pieces they produced are now praised as the high art some wished to bring down. The case of Duchamp is a particularly sad example.
280
What appears as a circumstantial change in attitude, sensibility or focus rarely happens by chance. The Zeitgeist can be guided, usually under the radar. The Lesbo Left stranglehold on culture is an example. It began with the seemingly unrelated attacks on J.S. Mill and Margaret Mead, the bastardization of anti-essentialism into one of the shibboleths of radical politics and the decentering of Freud from intellectual life.
281
What I like about Marilyn Manson is that no one can say about him, "Down deep he's a good kid."
282
Heidegger was one of any number of philosophers who misused metaphysical terminology to score ethical points or to support some empirical claim. Plato was the first and worst offender.
283
Refuting proofs that the Führer is the greatest thing since sliced bread does not make room for simple faith in the Führer as the greatest thing since sliced bread. This is the sense in which both Pyrrho (if we can believe ancient commentary) and Kant were crackpots and the American Second Great Awakening provided the model for Nazi irrationalism.
284
Sometimes I think the only thing more boring than a bad scene in a porn flick is the kind of artist movie they show at MOMA.
285
Man is born free, so why does Rousseauism lead to the chains of mob tyranny?
286
High art avant garde music is a fraud.
287
Formal logic and formal ontology are tied at the hip.
288
Shakespeare's histories are not just a sort of agitprop justifying Tudor legitimacy. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans professed the absolute power of royalty because the alternative (the Puritans) professed a threateningly oppressive morality and social system. (The subtle Shakespeare of course saw there could be bad as well as good royalty.) Hobbes' political theory is the Elizabethan world view become self-conscious.
289
We're living in a post-religion world. That's why the last redoubts of feudalism are sharpening their rhetoric and raising their levels of violence.
290
Endless regress is to certainty as paradox is to universality.
291
Virginia Woolf gave new meaning to the phrase "toothless crone."
292
Freud taught us that supposedly irrational behavior occurs for a reason. That is, it is rational and we simply didn't understand the motivations.
293
No matter how brazenly the English could flaunt their imperial power around the world, because of the concurrent decline of their own culture, they remained little more than vulgar arrivistes.
294
Heidegger is his own worst disciple.
295
The trouble with visual art as "philosophy" is that it doesn't say very much. Mediaeval cathedrals pretty much all said the same thing. You might call this reverse metaphoricity. One signified, many signifiers.
296
The intensity of the aesthetic experience is evidence that it is a variant on sexual feeling. The two may not feel the same. But that is due to evolutionary history. A horse does not look like a phenacodus but one is a variant of the other.
297
Instinct is just a label for uniform patterns of behavior.
298
The only reason natural scientists aren't academic faggots is that they're simple calculating machines. Or perhaps they know how to stay in their calculating robot lane.
299
Art is immoral or it's nothing.
300
Derrida: We can't be sure about anything.
Julie de Lespinaasse: Are you sure about that?
301
The quite good paintings of Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Remedios Varo have the perhaps unintended effect of removing the danger and negativity from surrealist art. They deteriorate into modern day fairy tales, which may explain their great influence on cartoons, manga, comedy videos and films and the graphic arts in general. Something similar could be said about Kafka.
302
Who is the greater composer, Brittany Spears or Pierre Boulez? Despite the obvious soporific advantages of the latter's compositions, I must award the palm to Ms. Spears because she is - or was - cuter than M. Boulez.
303
Praxiteles' Aphrodite was controversial when it appeared but gradually won recognition as a celebration of female beauty. When darkness descended on Europe and the Mediterranean world, this beauty was smothered under a thick sludge of Xtian and Mohammedan morality which choked Western creativity for centuries. We are now in the initial stages of something similar in which ironically one of the forces is secular while the other remains religious. How long this will last and whether it will have the same deadly effect on civilization is a story waiting to be told.
304
It looks like Mary Beard has shifted the approach of her moralism and instead of ignoring or repressing the abundant examples of the female nude in antiquity, she has swallowed Lesbo Left ideology, with nary a crumb left over, in order to condemn that art as sexist (viz. immoral).
305
People with underdeveloped emotional sensibilities tend to prefer art and literature calibrated to adolescent levels of appreciation. I have more than once been taken aback by political types - grown men - swooning over romantic comedies. Natural scientists shamelessly slap their knees in public over rollicking good farces. On the other hand, there might be an evolutionary advantage to emotional dullness. Proust was so sensitive to external stimuli that he died out after a single generation.
306
Lichelle Marie - Was a time I mooned over this talented artist as a paradigm of the contemporary ideal of beauty. Glancing back, having now become acquainted with so many more performers, my opinion about her physique remains largely unchanged, though her butt is a degree too prominent. Her facial features, however, or more properly speaking, her choice of makeup has not stood the test of time. Poor Porn Valley makeup makes her face look like one of those bejewelled Aztec masks, all teeth and scary mineral surface.
307
Art works which are "all about" some burning political issue or other are not art as philosophy. They are art as agitprop.
308
If philosophy is logic and morality, then scientists "refute" philosophy by ignoring it.
308
Corydon - Gide plays Proust's coy game of "I'm not gay myself, mind you, but I've got this friend..."
309
Artists don't say anything. They make. This is also true of those pseudo-demiurges the poets.
310
Beauty - speaking Barthesishly - is the gap between the edges. Or, if you prefer cliches, it is the unsaid chasing the ineffable. Eff as in Fuckosophy.
311
Convert to what? I prefer to subvert.
312
Sometimes I wonder if Lou Andreas-Salomé had one of those callipygian Russian butts. Sadly Dominique Sanda did not.
313
I can't decide between Alexandra Dovgan and Nata Lee as the shining hope for Russian youth after Putin. I guess it's a tie.
314
You can cast skeptical doubts on any assertion and philosophers are mostly justified in distinguishing between skeptical arguments which deserve attention, such as Hume's skepticism about causal laws and biblical witnesses, and Pyrhhonic skepticism which crosses some sort of line. However, there is an angelic twin to skepticism to the effect that necessary or unassailable assertions are a philosophical myth and all those attempts to create doctrines of some greater degree of validity than the formal games of mathematics or the provisional axioms of empirical science are a waste of paper.
315
There's something putrid about the idea of loving your fellow man.
316
You can saw through almost any metal bar. It might just not be possible with the tools you have on hand. The world is accessible as it is. It might just not be accessible with the language we have.
317
Epistemologically humans are little more than parrots in a covered cage facing a row of buttons. We peck at them with our beaks in any order we want. If we peck in some orders we are rewarded with a snack. Pecking in other orders results in a painful electric shock. That's reality pushing back.
318
...the Art-scarred surface of the earth...its rectangular obscenities.... - Poe
319
Fifteen minutes of reflection should have made obvious to any clear thinking 4th century Roman that a science of everything is self-contradictory or to any dispassionate philosophe that the ideal of certainty is an unending and foolish project. Yet otherwise intelligent individuals managed to hide these truths from themselves, motivated most likely by fear - fear of not fitting in, fear of moral anarchy, fear of death.
320
When you get old you start to look weird. - Charlize Theron
321
It is hard to imagine an orator in the Athenian assembly using sophistic classifications to advocate attacking Sicily, or Demosthenes using Aristotelian category theory to warn against Philip of Macedon, without the carpenters in the audience getting a bit glassy eyed. Speaking personally, I too after the fifteenth distinction would start wondering when Phryne or one of her successors would make an appearance. However, when a politician says something like "Empire building and self-defense are not the same thing," he is reasoning in the spirit of the sophists and Aristotle.
322
No writer, it seems to me, is so un-American as Poe. His work - through the intermediary of Baudelaire - served as a touchstone for the European decadents but had not a single major imitator in his own country. Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Furniture," on the other hand, reads like a draft for A Rebours.
323
The limited role for philosophy today consists in struggling against moral repression by way of scientific and logical counter arguments.
324
There are four styles of sexuality in art and literature: the bawdy, the decadent, the romantic and the callistic.
325
Barthes - La modernité...veut résister...à la bonne sexualité...par la perversion, qui soustrait la jouissance à la finalité de la reproduction. Yet modernity is not the only choice and perversion is not the only means to this end. It is a strategy in the decadent style. There are corresponding bawdy and vénuste strategies.
326
It can be affirmed with little to no hesitation that the French language contains more terms for variations on sexuality than Arabic does for parts of camels.
327
Good is the thing that you favor, evil is your sour flavor. - Marilyn Manson
328
The scarifying images of the gods of most primitive societies are meant to inspire terror and obedience. The Greeks discovered something previously hidden about terror and obedience: Beauty. The vision of beauty more than any other phenomenon inspires reverence and terror.
329
If it weren't for Marx Hegel would probably be a footnote to philosophical history somewhat on the order of Fichte and Schelling.
330
L'Université, je n'en ai rien à foutre, qu'elle crève. - Gabriel Matzneff
331
The blessings of breast implants (and more recently AI): Big tits are no longer associated solely with age and maternity but fitting for youth and vitality.
332
Decadents play a dangerous game of chicken with goddism.
333
Decadence, libertarianism and scientific positivism can form a powerful alliance.
334
Contemporary painting is either illustration or decoration. There are no alternatives.
335
The need for a meaning of life is a neurotic disorder. It may be caused by traumatic fear.
336
Large swaths of the literary community both in the US and France profess themselves hostile to literary academics. I find this amusing since by and large non-academic literary types tend to be just as fruity as their university counterparts.
337
There is a gap between literature and visual art in Western culture. Most females identified as sexually attractive in traditional literature are between the ages of 12 and 16. Most female nudes which are depicted in painting, sculpture and the graphic arts as sexually attractive appear to be in their mid-twenties (This includes Playboy and much porn), well into or a bit after their period of optimal fertility.
338
Hamlet - "...the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness..." Le fou assied la beauté sur ses genoux et, puisqu'il la trouve amère, il l'injurie. d'après Rimbaud
339
Great beauty, as we have all experienced, inspires religious awe. The fact that great beauty also inspires religious terror is not so familiar an experience largely because with terror comes repression.
340
Much of the greatest art in history is an aggression, a hostile defacement of beauty.
341
Dada - Where does earnest negativity leave off and schoolboy hijinks commence?
342
What scientific positivists say is not so much untrue as intolerably vulgar.
343
Gide was a homosexual first and therefore a pederast. Matzneff was exclusively a pederast both homosexual and heterosexual.
344
What is distinctive about Chinese intellectual life is it went straight from animism to secularism.
345
C'est l'excès même de nos passions qui les rend invivables, intolérables. - Gabriel Matzneff
346
The First Fundamental Error of Philosophy: Everything and some thing are equivalent. The Second Fundamental Error of Philosophy: Certainty is an acceptable substitute for universality. The Third Fundamental Error of Philosophy: Linguistic revision is tantamount to moral revision.
347
There is only one word to describe modernist poetry and post-modernist visual art - dainty.
348
Demonic sexuality is one variant of the decadent.