Zero Point

[Mark Kohut]

Amazing, sometimes, what looking up a phrase can bring one.

Remember your Descartes? That guy who
thought that getting to pure existence, pure subjectivity, happened as soon
as you reflected that you were
at least reflecting...(I won't repeat the famous cliche).

Well, seems that some have referred to that as the Zero Point. Of
existence. Which TRP seems to
use and play with with his Black Hole of Calcutta image in the section
Smoke put up for us....I mean,
crammed in with all those other people with nothing, nothing at all---is
that not pure 'existence' and subjectivity
only?....(well, yes and horribly NO in Thunder).   The link below shows the
above usage and then the next an extension within
cultural history.

Also, remember that TRP satirizes Descartes savagely (the words always go
together when most write) elsewhere in his
work, most particularly, AtD.....the case can be made that he sees
Descartes as the fountainhead of Ultra-Rationalism
in philosophical history, a severed head in Murdoch's image dividing we
humans from our full selves,
 and *therefore* a major cause of the problem of modernity.

Others have.




On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 5:28 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> https://books.google.com/books?id=kJRFDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA91&dq=de
> scartes+fiction+of+the+zero+point&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjFmN
> 2DqaDZAhWETd8KHWRjAd8Q6AEIUDAI#v=onepage&q=descartes%20ficti
> on%20of%20the%20zero%20point&f=false
>
> At Zero Point: Discourse, Culture, and Satire in Restoration England
> <https://books.google.com/books?id=56UfBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA22&dq=Zero-Point&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjI9OjDmKXZAhUHvVMKHa5-CqoQ6AEIWzAJ>
>
> <https://books.google.com/books?id=56UfBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA22&dq=Zero-Point&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjI9OjDmKXZAhUHvVMKHa5-CqoQ6wEIXDAJ>
> https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0813158583
> Rose A. Zimbardo
> <https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&safe=active&tbm=bks&tbm=bks&q=inauthor:%22Rose+A.+Zimbardo%22&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjI9OjDmKXZAhUHvVMKHa5-CqoQ9AgIXTAJ> -
> 2015 - ‎Preview
> <https://books.google.com/books?id=56UfBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA22&dq=Zero-Point&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjI9OjDmKXZAhUHvVMKHa5-CqoQuwUIXjAJ> -
> ‎More editions
> <https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&safe=active&tbm=bks&q=editions:TA9zNnE7iekC&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjI9OjDmKXZAhUHvVMKHa5-CqoQmBYIXzAJ>
> —Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs Following Blumenberg, I have named
> as “zero point” the moment in late seventeenth century English culture
> wherein medieval/Renaissance epis– temology collapsed under the weight of
> questions it had itself raised and simultaneously the new epistemology of
> modernism was constructed. We have briefly considered some implications of
> the process in discussing the turn to mimetic discourse in the
> Introduction. To appreciate the full extent of ...
>
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