Tag Archives: Nietzsche

FIVE: THE WORLD IS NEW (pages 8-11)

Posted on April 6, 2023 by Mark Kerstetter

We are now going to read three more very weird pages. We will be ten percent into the book and at the risk of wearying the reader with my repetitions, I feel that I must mark my surprise at the … Continue reading →

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Agamben on Twilight

Posted on November 22, 2022 by Mark Kerstetter

Twilight As the weight of day bears down and night’s promise advances, memory and loss in equal shares emerge in a standoff. Will and fancy, knowledge and flight become unlikely workmates and vision pushes focus against the last flakes of silver backing … Continue reading →

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René Daumal and the Impossible

Posted on January 18, 2022 by Mark Kerstetter

I am reading René Daumal again. I discovered him as a young man and he has stayed with me, a constant companion. Since most people, places, and things come and go, one should note when something has lasted. I have … Continue reading →

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What is a Man?

Posted on September 2, 2021 by Mark Kerstetter

Part One Having recently stumbled across the film When Nietzsche Wept (I enjoyed it) and encountered the idea—again—that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is his most popular book—some say his best—I felt like leaving this note here about why I think it … Continue reading →

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Gombrowicz: I & We

Posted on July 28, 2020 by Mark Kerstetter

How is it that man divides himself in two and which of these persons is real?—Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, p 123 (this and all subsequent quotations from Volume Two) Is the local related to the universal? And is a person’s situation … Continue reading →

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Gombrowicz the Liar

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Mark Kerstetter

… without esteeming, the nut of existence would be hollow.—Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra The individual is a nut so impossible to crack that no theoretic tooth will be able to manage it.—Gombrowicz, Diary Volume Two, p 216 For Nietzsche “to … Continue reading →

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Gombrowicz on Becoming a Citizen: Allow Me to Dream!

Posted on May 27, 2020 by Mark Kerstetter

I returned, but no longer as a wild man. For I had, at one time during my youth in Poland, been completely wild in relation to it, incapable of handling it with style, incapable even of speaking about it—it served … Continue reading →

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Gombrowicz on “Interhumanity”

Posted on May 7, 2020 by Mark Kerstetter

Once I was explaining to someone that in order to feel the real cosmic significance of man for man, he should imagine the following: I am completely alone in a desert. I have never seen people nor do I imagine … Continue reading →

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What’s in Your Ego Tunnel?

Posted on October 30, 2018 by Mark Kerstetter

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger is one of those books I should have read when it came out in 2009. But, like many of the books I read, I came to it by chance, in this case when a … Continue reading →

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Georges Bataille: Improvisation Within a Field of Contradictions

Posted on March 26, 2018 by Mark Kerstetter

…. two movements…. One’s in harmony with nature; the other questions it. We can’t do away with either. [109 Guilty by Georges Bataille]* “We do not have the right to wish for a single state. We have to desire to … Continue reading →

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