The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Posts tagged with “Zizek”
Altered States of Reading (Part 1): VALIS, Vallee, and Vaal
Where to begin when the story is a loop? I have been mulling over a particularly rich and thought provoking entry from Jacques Vallee’s journals (Forbidden Science, Volume Two), about a synchronistic walk he took one day in October, 1973 with Hal Puthoff, head of the Stanford Research Institute program researching ESP. Vallee was telling […]
The Vicinity of the Real (Tarkovsky’s Stalker)
The Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s late sci-fi masterpiece Stalker is one of my favorite places, real or imagined. It is a landscape of overgrown ruins, where spacetime itself is uncertain and only the experienced can guide you through. It is not that the guide (the “Stalker” of the title) knows the way—because the way is […]
What Lies Under the Skin?—Psi and the Physics of Indeterminacy
I have suggested in previous posts that psi may operate not directly on actual reality, but on the unactualized quantum potential of superposed states prior to physical observation, or what for convenience I call the “Not Yet.” I don’t know if this is a widely held interpretation, although quantum mechanics is felt by many theorists […]
Trauma Displaced in Time: Premonition, Synchronicity, and Enjoyment
On the morning of September 11, 2001, my alarm awoke me around 6:30AM and I did what I always try to do before dragging myself from bed: I rolled over, grabbed my notebook and pen, and jotted notes on whatever dream images I could recall from the night before. That morning I noted dreaming about […]
The Rashomon Brain: Hunting Duck/Rabbits, Seeing Multiple Realities
“A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a coconut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and picks them up. She gets very sad of course and cries heart […]
The Passion of Einstein: Light, Spacetime, and the Holy Grail
In David Lindsay’s bizarre Gnostic allegory A Voyage to Arcturus, space travel is accomplished by means of “back light”—light rays that strive to return to their origin. A bottle of back light gathered through a telescope aimed at Arcturus is used to pull a small ship and its passengers from an observatory in Scotland up […]
“You see, Earth, it’s not that we’re lazy, it’s that we just don’t care.”
In his writings on contemporary culture, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek likes to invoke a concept borrowed from psychoanalysis, “the subject presumed to know.” Basically, we often project onto specific other people and institutions a sense that they hold the answers about us. It is derived from a patient’s inner conviction that his therapist really holds […]
“There is no center” (The Parallax View Pt. 2)
Parallax is really not new. In its social implications at least, it’s just a restating of the postmodernist truism: “There is no center.” That was always the motto, right? But we – or at least, I – always took that to mean a lack of a privileged social viewpoint, a lack of some Archimedian position […]
The Parallax View
Reading Slavoj Zizek’s “magnum opus” The Parallax View. Mixed feelings, disappointment at its difficult philosophical tone, different from his more accessible early books. The main thing, though, is his “strategic decision” to use the term “parallax” to denote the discontinuity at the heart of being, the nonidentification of an object with itself (or a subject […]
