Witnessing Others, or Soft Eyes (video)

Seeing is not neutral or natural: it is taught. As John Berger's argued in his incredible, Ways of Seeing, men have a tendency to gaze at women, at life, with a certain will to penetrate, dominate, and such — the so-called 'male gaze.'  

To see is to be undone, necessarily. Seeing takes place in the middle voice. Ask yourself: is seeing active or passive? Do you see that tree? Ss that tree having its way with you? The phallic gaze is an attempt to wrest control from the world, a transparently absurd gesture. 

The painter, psychoanalyst, and theorist, Bracha Ettinger, posits a different gaze, what she called the matrixial gaze, coming from the womb: a pre-subjective mode of holding the other as constitutive of oneself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mat... 

I refer to to this as 'soft eyes' which I borrow from The Wire: to see generously, without judgement. I also reference Merleau-Ponty's The Intertwining. http://timothyquigley.net/cont/mp-chi...

On, TV, Schitt's Creek, the Addams Family, & Don't Trust the B*itch in Apartment 23

TV as a drug — as per Terence McKenna — that finds value in how we relate to it.

I noticed that "Schitt's Creek," a show many I love love, offers a common formula: a family that's not like the others is funny but they learn to be like everybody else. I find this disappointing.

And makes me miss "The Addams Family" — an outsider family that's privileged over and against the square world.

"Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23" is a modern Addams Family in which outsider ethics are privileged over and against Mid Western banal morality. This only lasted for the brief first season but it was something.

On the Unregistered Podcast with Thaddeus Russell

This is a good one. We had an incredible conversation which I hope comes across. I think it does. And it turns out I'm bald. Who knew?

Watch and listen as Thaddeus and I cover a lot of ground including:

- What is sophistry and why I call myself a sophist

- What kairos is and ecological, embodied decision making (For ex, how do you know when to leave the sauna? When do lean in for that kiss?)

- Classical vs. Modern Rhetoric, or Fred Astaire (monumental) vs. Gene Kelly (anywhere, any time)

- The middle voice

- Psychedelics & hallucinations

- The plenum of affect (with reference to Leibniz) 

- The icky way of adamance or in defense of Socratic irony in the age of Twitter

- I confess that I voted. Egad!

- Romance and marriage refracted through the infinite

- Love and the way of attraction

- Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the Beats

- Crypto and the rise of the Information Age of Abundance

- And take my class on Nietzsche