“We can say that Nietzsche and Bataille invented a new type of...
R.Сам 🦋🐏@Logo_Daedalus
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Mar 22, 2025
~2 min read
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“We can say that Nietzsche and Bataille invented a new type of hypocrisy—vitalist hypocrisy. The subject of this vitalist hypocrisy pretends to be carried away by vital energies towards impossible ecstasies but at the same time cares about their workplace, their home life, and their mortgage.”
-Groys
e-flux.com/notes/580609/m…
-Groys
e-flux.com/notes/580609/m…
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“In the era when modernity was ascendent, the contemplative attitude, vita contemplativa, was radically rejected. Only vita activa remained—political activity and work that served the success of the individual and society as a whole. The main imperative for humans became: be useful! Contemplation was rejected because it was accused of being a useless waste of time. In reality it was suppressed because it was dangerous to bureaucracy. The subjects of contemplation are ascetic. They supress the “natural” needs, desires, and fears by which power manipulates humans—and this makes them unreliable, ungovernable, and spiritual. Contemplation is the manifestation of a different, “unnatural,” metaeconomic desire—the desire to escape the body and all its needs and desires. It would be too easy to say that this different desire is unrealizable and, thus, should be abandoned. Indeed, we have already learned that desire cannot be abandoned but only suppressed. That is also true for metaeconomic desire—the desire for liberation from economic slavery. This liberation is the actual goal of all forms of ascesis: by imposing self-chosen limits on bodily needs and desires, the subjects of contemplation liberate themselves from economic servitude—at least partially.”
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“Even if, in the era of modernity, the contemplative attitude was suppressed, it was not completely lost. Avant-garde art emerged in the place of contemplation. Avant-garde artists subjected the artistic tradition to reduction, simplification, and minimalization. They followed rules and a discipline that they imposed on themselves. In this sense, the art of the avant-garde was ascetic. It avoided being pleasant and seductive. It did not want to be liked—but only appreciated. In this sense the avant-garde was also anti-commercial, anti-economic. It was the expression of a desire to escape economic dependencies that stemmed from the dependence of artists on their public. The public was not considered as a mass of people expected to like and buy a certain artwork, or to reject it. The proper reaction of the public to avant-garde art is not to like it but, rather, to join it. In this respect the avant-garde is similar to the spiritual practices of the past: you could join them or ignore them, but it made no sense to like or dislike them.”