Zero Point

[Smoke Teff]

Grateful for this.

It strikes me that zero points are essentially only applied
retroactively--an undoing of some kind of history, a return to some
pre-historic innocence.

Your suggestion that there's some affinity between Descartes and the
Black Hole as having to do with subjective zero points is well taken.

Extreme suffering--of which the Black Hole is perhaps one of the
extremest ready examples--is extreme subjectivity, is often a collapse
of the ego's fantasy-making and time-building capabilities to the
present (like the spokes of the wheel have been removed) such that one
perceives momentary suffering as inescapable, eternal.

Extreme suffering can also deconstruct the entire complex edifice of
your apparent self/psyche--can reduce your subjectivity to beholding
only its own suffering and mortality. The zero point of the self.

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 4:47 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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=descartes+fiction+of+the+zero+point&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjFmN2DqaDZAhWETd8KHWRjAd8Q6AEIUDAI#v=onepage&q=descartes%20fiction%20of%20the%20zero%20point&f=false
>>
>> At Zero Point: Discourse, Culture, and Satire in Restoration England
>>
>> https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0813158583
>> Rose A. Zimbardo - 2015 - ‎Preview - ‎More editions
>> —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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