\u201cOn Seduction\u201d is the title of this blog, and Jean Baudrillard’s<\/strong> ironic motto, \u201cDon’t let yourselves be seduced!<\/em>\u201d will accompany us throughout this cultural history. We’ll examine many areas of thought, we’ll jump across and through philosophies of the arts, histories of psychology, from sociology to politics. I come myself from the Frankfurt School, with Karl Otto Apel<\/strong> (which whom I studied for many years in Saarbr\u00fccken) and J\u00fcrgen Habermas<\/strong> as my mentors. I want to start off this new form of communication \u2013 our new form of meeting, perhaps of relating to, one another \u2013 on the subject of sexuality. My new book, which I’ve been working on for half a year so far, is titled \u201cOn Love and Lust.\u201d It deals with the sexuality of the future; less so that of the present or the past, from the point of view of man and woman. Rather, it also deals with relating, encountering, and whether the family as a social institution will survive, at least in our western cultural sphere. But how should we \u2013 here and now, in this new medium \u2013 communicate, how should it be written? How should the whole thing proceed? Each according to how he\/she wants to, or can? With or without a designed language? Hegel, in his philosophy of law, includes a treatise on the necessity of signatures (i.e., at the bottom of contracts). Without a signature, there is no subject, no \u201cme,\u201d no person: nothing but lifeless machines. Communications-machines, eventually replaced entirely by computers (which are themselves gradually learning to speak).<\/p>\n This brings us to another subject, that I’ll be discussing shortly: communication, mis-, and meta-communication, by means of electronic media. Perhaps I should relate this to the subject of my book: On Love and Sex marked by SMS (not marked by [BD]SM! That is nowadays probably hopelessly archaic!). For now, we’ll have to wait and see. I still have to learn everything, test it, try it out. Maybe I’ll end up instead staying with my TwitLonger messages, with the printed book, or my illustrious performance-presentations, of which I’ll be posting reports (including reactions from the press and my contemporaries). What a terrible language and formulation<\/em>! some might object: this is supposed to rally readers, like-minded collaborators, commentators to our cause? As a Saar-Frenchman (as some of our rightward-leaning neighbors have tended to describe me), I have a soft spot for French authors and their particular way of thinking. I love constructed language: the more difficult, the less comprehensible, the more complex and abstract it is, the better! The longer the sentence (with further parenthetical subordinate clauses interposed [and yet further subordinate clauses interposed in them]), with foreign terms, and the floridness of heavyweight imagery (\u201cheavyweight\u201d imagery; what’s that supposed to be?), it should be exactly that! What?<\/p>\n It’s sufficient, with certain texts like those of Serres, Derrida, or Baudrillard, to read just half a page\u2013 that’s enough! That leads further: to new ideas, new questions, new ways of thinking, which are presently ever more atrophied. If language atrophies, so does thought. Humankind atrophies. Thus the French philosophers set against this creeping impotence, even idiocy and ignorance, their linguistic over-complexity; who would provoke us, even shock us and jolt us out of our somnolence: that we might remain human, become human once again, and not atrophy into machines, or into some sort of machine-like existence (without resorting to speaking of \u201cdegeneration\u201d). Reductionism will be a major topic for us!<\/p>\n And here I come to one of my other favorite topics: technocracy, by which people find themselves imprisoned and helpless things within an Internet of Things\u2122, who wish themselves molded, controlled, and manipulated by whoever. I don’t use the \u201ctechnocracy\u201d in Boulevard’s sense, but rather how its discoverers \u2013 namely J\u00fcrgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School \u2013 would use it. Ave atque Vale! A warm welcome to my new blog, created with the help of Alexey Chibakov for edition weissenburg.\u00a0Andrew Walsh has undertaken the admittedly difficult task of translating this blog into English. Many thanks to both! \u201cOn Seduction\u201d is the title of this blog, and Jean Baudrillard’s ironic motto, \u201cDon’t let yourselves be seduced!\u201d will accompany us throughout this...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allgemein"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WFkG-1ns","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edition-weissenburg.de\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5298"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edition-weissenburg.de\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edition-weissenburg.de\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edition-weissenburg.de\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edition-weissenburg.de\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5298"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/edition-weissenburg.de\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5376,"href":"https:\/\/edition-weissenburg.de\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5298\/revisions\/5376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edition-weissenburg.de\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edition-weissenburg.de\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edition-weissenburg.de\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBut I also draw perhaps significant inspiration from the French philosophers, especially Jacques Derrida<\/strong>, Jean Baudrillard<\/strong>, and Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard<\/strong>. Not the least, I am especially drawn to the lives and thoughts of the late Hellenistic and Roman periods. My exemplar from that period is Sextus Empiricus.<\/strong>
\nSo now you know how to set me and this blog in context, do you not? Even though I will gladly attempt, from time to time, to spring out of whatever pigeonhole you might place me! Be ready for surprises; they’ll pop up often!<\/p>\n
\nI suspect most likely not.<\/p>\n
\nThere’s also the problem of anonymity and transparency. I have nothing to hide, and we also shouldn’t have anything to hide. How do we want to keep in direct with one another, if nobody has a name, and we keep hidden from one another?<\/p>\n
\nThere will be several main topics\/categories. \u201cGeneral<\/strong>\u201d is for the continuation of my Twitter messages; better formulated, my earlier TwitLonger-Texts. \u201cLiterature<\/strong>\u201d is provisionally concerned with my new book, perhaps also with my already-published texts. The category \u201cJournalism<\/strong>\u201d covers my various interviews, as well as the more illustrious of me newspaper articles (such as for the Berlin \u201ctageszeitung\u201d) and others. The last section, \u201cPoetry,<\/strong>\u201d contains poems from myself and others. Not the least, I also work as a composer and musician (my favorite hobbies of all!).<\/p>\n
\nBut this is, foremost, a beginning; our beginning.
\nIf publishing by mouseclick works, even without the siteadmin’s help, then the tracking, which might help or hinder us in covering our tracks \u2013 or better yet: the trail, which traces us covering our tracks, or doesn’t \u2013 is already at hand.<\/p>\n
\nThat is certainly something other than respectable \u201cpurpose-oriented rationalism,\u201d that Protestant-Prussian and easily-understood reasonableness so often found in this country. But that’s enough to say, to pronounce, to promise, to doubt!
\nAdieu for now and thanks for reading!<\/p>\n![\"twitter\"](\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/edition-weissenburg.de\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/social-media-feather\/synved-social\/image\/social\/regular\/96x96\/twitter.png?resize=48%2C48&ssl=1\" "\\"Share")
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