Values laid by phonies and iPhone as canvas

Happy Birthday Friedrich Nietzsche from Centre Right India by Krishna Rao

Nietzsche has seen Nihilism as a necessity and not just a statement to endorse ‘Transvaluation of all values’, he believed in Nihilism as a pure form of re-birth of thought and its existence and relevance in the contemporary world. For me, Nietzsche is ‘The Renaissance’, the thoughts, the aphorisms and he didn't mince words to express them with alacrity…

Western Civilization: Nietzsche questioned the Western Civilization, its validity and perspective towards society. The conventional western thought process was in danger, at least academically. The dogma set up by the western civilization was critically exposed by Nietzsche. Nietzsche is one of the most earliest and important figures who challenged the western civilization, who predicted the future of society under western civilization, how Europe might sulk and importantly as I comprehend – he predicted the desperate need for a new civilization which departs from the dogma of western civilization and which recognizes the spirit of a man.

Relevance: Nietzsche is more relevant today than any other period in the history. When Liberalism has prostituted itself to the left, when Marxism is being shown as an alternative to the current failures of nations, when the western code of belief takes higher moral ground and when righteousness gets escaped without any questioning. It’s the Nietzschean thought which confronts the above theologies which has the ability smother the individual with morality and dogmatic values.

“I Am Not a Man, I Am Dynamite!” he said in his last work ‘Ecce Homo‘. Yes, Nietzsche is dynamite, the dynamite which can destroy the values laid by phonies, the dynamite which forces us to ask questions, which in turn demands answers, the dynamite – whose aim is to destroy the sanctity of invalidated ideas, to create a foe when ideologies shamelessly celebrate for having no enemies. The self righteousness of this dynamite is the hope for future.

How Capitalism Can Save Art Camille Paglia on why a new generation has chosen iPhones and other glittering gadgets as its canvas October 5, 2012, 7:58 p.m. ET By CAMILLE PAGLIA

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s. Yet work of bold originality and stunning beauty continues to be done in architecture, a frankly commercial field…

Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed. Thus young artists have been betrayed and stunted by their elders before their careers have even begun. Is it any wonder that our fine arts have become a wasteland?

RJ October 15, 2012 at 10:44 pm

By “American brands of spirituality” I’m referring to things like Westernized Buddhism, “integralism” in the sense of Ken Wilber, the New Age movement, and so on. These movements lip service to the physical and emotional dangers of sexual activity while maintaining the Western/American notion that “sex life” and “sexual expression” are essential parts of life and ignoring the spiritual effects of sexual activity. At the same time, this dialogue can’t, and shouldn't, go back to these repressive and puritanical notions.

New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin ii. cartographies > 6. pushing dualism to an extreme

Feminist theory has to push sexual difference as an ordinary dualism to an extreme precisely so as to push sexual difference to the limit. A sexual difference according to which women are worth-less-than men, to speak with Braidotti, has to be pushed to an extreme so as to release sexual difference as that which is virtual. This is precisely how we should read Simone de Beauvoir’s conclusion to The Second Sex, which indeed thinks through the emancipation of humanity in its most radical form. After a full description of the dialectic of sex (a dualism structured by a negative relationality), she concludes that: “new carnal and affective relations of which we cannot conceive will be born between the sexes” (de Beauvoir [1949] 2010, 765). It is precisely by thinking through sexual difference to its remotest aspirations, thus alluding to difference structured by an affirmative relationality, that de Beauvoir came to produce the revolution in thought that has made her famous (and infamous), for constituting feminism as a rewriting of modernity—that is, feminism-as-differing. de Beauvoir exemplifies a new materialist take on difference, since by traversing the (sexual) dualism structuring modernist thought, modernity comes to be rewritten and difference is shown differing. Contents Next Section Previous Section