Zero Point

[Jemmy Bloocher]

Mark,Smoke, many many thanks for this. Actually this has given me a lot to think about. I was unaware of the Zero Point, but not of the idea, so it’s great that it now has a name to the face, so to speak.


> On 14 Feb 2018, at 19:10, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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