We live in the most loathsome of all possible worlds.





And what is this we if not that very loathing.

 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

menschen verachten // nihil humanum alienum

if there be no means to escape it till they are perfectly under it

the law of opinion or reputation.

nor is it to be thought strange, that men every where should give the name of virtue to those actions amongst them are judged praiseworthy; and call that vice which they account blameable; since, otherwise, they would condemn themselves, if they should think any thing right, to which they allowed not commendation; any thing wrong, which they let pass without blame.

for though men uniting into politic societies, have resigned up to the public the disposing of all their force, so that they cannot employ it against any fellow-citizens, any farther than the law of the country directs; yet they retain still the power of thinking well or ill, approving or disapproving, of the actions of those whom they live amongst and converse with; and by this approbation and dislike, they establish amongst themselves what they will call virtue and vice.

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so there is quite a history of loathing as a self-important moral sense and aesthetic of political reserve.

but I think you'd prefer a strategic and/or tactical sense of loathing that goes beyond approbation.

ECW said...

Indeed, more often than not, loathing is entirely reactionary, as a mode of declaring oneself as "not one of them", as having exited the game, as a retreat that leaves untouched what's left behind.

But I'm interested in that "than not", which would be the rare case when we fully loath, through and through, AND do not subtract ourselves from the set loathed, and hence cannot negatively confirm itself as "not that".

Capital, as social relation, bears the structure of misanthropy: a disdain for the collective as such and a refusal of it in such a way as to amplify the very reasons it was disdained. Communism, among other things, is the material process of fully owning this fact and taking on the consequences.