Searching for Benjamin

I have just been informed of a sketch of an essay by Walter Benjamin entitled 'Capitalism as Religion (Kapitalismus als Religion)' that has not been translated into English. Does anyone know where I can get a copy of this on the net?

|

Insomnia.... again

Yet again I cannot sleep. I put this down to the fact that I have spent 8 hours working and so my mind switched off. As soon as I lay down to try to sleep my internal dialogue switched itself back on and will not shut up. I try to tell it to be quiet, but it will not listen... not so boring this time, just droning on about self-other relationships that I don't want to be thinking about at 2:30am. Rather than let it babble at me I have decided to give it it's voice, smoke my last cigarette and write something about self-other. It may become garbled as internal dialogue never seems to make as much sense when written down but I need to sleep and writing here might make it go away.

So anyway, I was thinking the usual before sleeping nonsense, thinking about conversations and people and relations with other people. I ended up thinking about how I think about myself, and how other people percieve me; these things must be entirely different I think. Then my self becomes 'self how I see myself,' and 'self as others see me.' What then constitutes my relation to the other, and I as an other in respect to other people who are selves. The 'self how I see myself,' would be bound up in the same, yet at the same time it is the other for it as an other that cannot be grasped as people will never know how I see myself, just as I can never grasp how it is that others see themselves. When I thought about the 'self as others see me' I wondered whether this self was same or other. This self would be same and yet not same, other and yet not other. It would be same as it constitutes who I am, but not same because it's not something that I can ever really know and attribute to my self. Other because it comes from the other, yet not because it is also from me.

Then the self that I think I am can never really be the self that I truly am because part of what I am is already other and unable to be comprehended fully by the self that is same. What my self is then is never really whole but fragments (thats assuming that a self does exist at all) and to know my self in its entirity I would have to become the Other which I can't do so I'll never really know it.


Apologies for garbled madness of internal dialogue but it needed to be freed. I should really write about something by some philosopher or other, everyone else seems to be writing sense. But despite my being proved wrong about it, I can still not bring myself to blog about Kant or Hegel (might write about Heidegger or Levinas sometime) and they're about all I'm reading.

|

Money

I find myself in a very strange relationship with money. I love to spend it, it's great; very much aware that the feeling that 'I want something but I don't know what it is so I'll go and engage in capitalism,' is bound up with a nonessential lacking that is foisted upon me I am quite happy to try to satiate the unsatiatable by buying larges amounts of shit (proverbial, not literal... though if shit were a commodity I would quite likely desire it as well). I have a frequent fantasy which involves my winning the lottery. If I won a few million I would squander it by hiring the lobby of a hotel (similar to the one that Christopher Walken dances in in the Fatboy Slim video), pay Pink Floyd to play 'Money' while I danced about naked, rolling gratuitously in piles of notes with small children throwing notes from the balcony to flutter through the air like the sweetest of capitalist rain.

On the other hand, I hate money. Not just because it inspires me to buy things that I don't want, but because of what it does to relationships between persons. Despite my dire money problems I try my hardest to not borrow money from friends. The lending of money seems like a fairly innocent exchange, when I am feeling flash I'm quite happy to lend friends whatever amount that they wish. This brings the level of the friendship, if not explicity then definately implicity, to debtor - debtee. a contractual relationship becomes formed on the abstract quantity. Things continue happily enough until debtor needs some cash and asks debtee for their money back. Sometimes the debtee is unable to give the debtor back their money and an argument occurs. A argument based up the breaking of a contractual relationship which capitalism forces us to engage with. I have had such arguments myself 'How dare you not return the flow of capital which I so willingly gave you?' Debtor is put in place of feeling bad for having to ask for money back, debtee feels bad because s/he is unable to return the amount which has little founding in any reality beyond the machine of capitalism. Thus friendship, along with everything else, falls within the sphere of money. Why can't we just exchange things that matter rather than abstract quatities... 'I give you 3 sheep for your cow.' (Though maybe the Pink Floyd 'Money' / hotel fantasy wouldn't work so well with a herd of cattle stomping about and shitting over the balconies).

|

A word of advice

Never install an Asus Radeon 9200se onto an AMD Athlon Motherboard. It will be an absolute fucker to get it working properly... hours of frustration and anger, blue screens, freezes and all sorts of messing about. They are just not compatible.

|

Just watched an advert for Roc Moisturising Cream. The woman at the start intones in her sultry voice 'I never thought I could fall in love after 50;' Sexy man's voice says 'It's amazing what you can do when you look 10 years younger.' Made me laugh. When I was 13 I used to think 'imagine what I could do if I looked 10 years older.' Shall we never be satisfied with who/where/what we are at a precise moment or do we always attempt to project ourselves to another moment in time, existing in one moment of now and an ideal moment of before/after? It seems to be a very silly conception of time (before/after/in a few years/back in the day)... must go forwards, must go back. What about all things in one moment (moment being a shit word too.. goddamn signifiers); not just I as now, I as ideal, but I as hangover, I as bad mood, I as ecstatic, I as what I want to be, I as what I despise? (Perhaps even I with bad skin not wishing that I looked like I did 20 years ago).

|

I have been attempting to get online with my dial up connection that doesn't work but unfortunately I've only been able to get viruses. I had planned to write something about Derrida but the mass amounts of posts about it has left little for me to say (especially since I have read so little Derrida and my interest has always verged a little towards hailing him as the most attractive of philosophers rather and about anything he has written.... my my glueboot, so crass). Having not realised that he had died, a friend and I were speaking on Friday night about the 'father of deconstruction.' Said friend planned an assassination attempt so that Jackie D couldn't bring out any more work while he wrote his PhD. I haven't seen him since, I believe he may be at home saying a penance of 15,000 Hail Marys and an Our Father.

All that flipancy aside, it is very sad but not unexpected. Sad to see that last of his generation vanish. Where for philosophy now?



Also thought that I should write something brief about what has been happening in the wastelands. I have been a very very bad student. Before I came here I decided that it would be a good idea for me to be a friendless recluse who just read philosophy all day. This has not worked out the way that I planned and I have been drunk for quite a lot of the time that I have been here. That said I have read some Kant and thought that it would be a good idea to be reading Hegel so I'm not a completely hopeless case. Anyway.... I think that it may get the point I reached during my last drinking binge as an undergraduate when alcohol ended up making me very ill. The mother was shocked when I said this but at least I would be forced into sobriety and be a sickly student of philosophy which is probably preferable to being a pisshead who's unable to tell the difference between Kant and Hegel. (Seriously though, Kant class with guy who attempted to disprove the Critique in 3 easy steps).

I may write something philosophy related soon, or I may not. I don't feel that Kant and Hegel really lend themselves to blogging although I may be able to pull out some random comment.... does anyone else find the Introduction to the 1st Critique funny? Not all of it, just occasionally when Immannuel is getting annoyed with metaphysics and dogmatists.

|

Unforeseen circumstances have meant that I don't have a cable connection yet though will have one next week. I've managed to get a nasty dial-up connection for them moment but don't really fancy blogging in the stone age so I doubt there'll be much here until I get cable sorted. To leave you with something to think about here is a quote from Odo de Cluny quoted in Michel Surya's Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography ( a review of which I'll stick up when I'm finished ):

The body's beauty lies entirely in the skin. In fact, if people could see what lay beneath the skin, blessed like the lynx of Boeotia with eyes that can see within, the very sight of women would be sickening to them: this feminine grace is nothing but suburra, blood, humours and gall. Consider what is hidden within the nostrils, the throat, the belly: filth everywhere. And we who find it repulsive to touch vomit or manure even with a fingertip, how could we wish to hold in our arms a mere bag of excrement!

|