Library
There are a number of writers who collectively define my perspective, and whom I feel comfortable enough with to speak of. This list serves as both a resource for those interested in reading great thinkers, and an indication of the discourse I ally myself with.
Nick Land
“[[ ]] Level-l or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.
Garbage time is running out.
Can what is playing you make it to level 2?”
—Nick Land, “Meltdown”, in Fanged Noumena
I consider myself a Landian scholar. My favorite author, Nick Land is a robot sent from the future to bring about the apocalypse, and his writing reflects this. I am writing a book called Unleashing Nick Land's Time-Sorcery System, which collects and makes accessible the subversive theoretical work he and several others did from 2004–2005; I am also writing a second much slimmer volume called Comparative Qabalism, which acts as a key to the larger work and to the numerology of occult symbolism. Land's use of language has liberated my tongue and mind like no other writer has. His primary works are Fanged Noumena and The Thirst for Annihilation.
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer our selves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.”
—Deleuze & Guattari, the first paragraph of A Thousand Plateaus
Their work A Thousand Plateaus cannot be missed—mere exposure to a few choice exerpts and word such as "deterritorialization" and "rhizomatics" are enough to drive anyone mad. I am still working through this mind-altering work in an online reading group, /r/Reading1000plateaus.
Jacques Rancière
“Neither. It is ‘indisciplinary’. It is not only a matter of going besides the disciplines but of breaking them. My problem has always been to escape the division between disciplines, because what interests me is the question of the distribution of territories, which is always a way of deciding who is qualified to speak about what. The apportionment of disciplines refers to the more fundamental apportionment that separates those regarded as qualified to think from those regarded as unqualified; those who do the science and those who are regarded as its objects.”
—Jacques Rancière, when asked if his work was inter- or a-disciplinary
Jacques Rancière is a writer I admire profoundly, because each of his works is completely different in its framing of a very specific and uniquely crystallized problem. Rancière's insight is critical and profound, and his way of moving across problematique surfaces in his writings is so lateral and so saturated with truth and good as to draw one into ecstasy. The Ignorant Schoolmaster is a lifechanging book that makes good on its subtitle, "Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation".
Carl Jung
Jung's gentle humanism continues to inspire, and his complex depth psychology continues to serve as a treasure trove of healing tools and intriguing puzzles (how many archetypes are there, exactly?). His two most accessible and popular works are Man and His Symbols and Memories, Dreams, Reflections, but the reader would be better served by picking up one of his heftier works—I look forward myself to digging into Aion and his alchemical works as soon as possible. Of modern Jungians, David Tacey is my favorite, and Robert Moore has also written inspirationally on the masculine archetypes.
Michel Foucault
Although I am not yet as familiar with Foucault as I would like to be, mere exposure to a few of his concepts has influenced me radically, such as governmentality, and power as productive of the forms of society. Like myself, Foucault was a homosexual who was also imprisoned by the psychatric institution, inspiring him to study Madness & Civilization and the institutions that Discipline & Punish in order to create new thinking tools that critique the foundations of power.
Friedrich Nietzsche
“He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.
In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route thou must have long legs. Proverbs should be peaks, and those spoken to should be big and tall.”
—Friederich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a textual epiphany, and his Genealogy of Morality helped to crystalize my illuminati dialectics, which attempts to go a small step further than Nietzsche in the practical manipulation of the concepts he articulated.
R. D. Laing
“As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavor; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world: we barely remember our dreams, and make little sense of them when we do; as for our bodies, we retain just sufficient proprioceptive sensations to coordinate our movements and to ensure the minimal requirements for biosocial survival—to register fatigue, signals for food, sex, defecation, sleep; beyond that, little or nothing. Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.”
—R. D. Laing, "Normal alienation from experience", The Politics of Experience
R. D. Laing is a critical psychiatrist, and his clarity of language and critique opened my eyes to both the profound depth of the brokenness of modern psychiatry, as well as to the influence that confused and invalidating discourses have upon thinking, as compared with Laing's lucid argumentation that rings of common sense and decency. His Politics of Experience heavily informs my Politics of Reality, which attempts to go beyond Laing's interpersonal analysis to look at the ways entire experiential realities are programmed by hostile institutions and family structures.
Alan Watts
Another prominent 70's philosopher, Alan Watt's The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are is revelatory and a good place to start with him.
Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson, a more erudite version of our friend Timothy Leary, is no joke: but he is very funny. His Illuminatus! trilogy is a hilarious and profoundly virulent initiation, and Prometheus Rising presents an intriguing model, but is more impressive in the liberatory rhetoric it enacts. RAW has also written a work on the persecution of Wilhelm Reich, Reich in Hell.
Søren Kierkegaard
“Most people live dejectedly in worldly sorrow and joy; they are the ones who sit along the wall and do not join in the dance. The knights of infinity are dancers and possess elevation. They make the movements upward, and fall down again; and this too is no mean pastime, nor ungraceful to behold. But whenever they fall down they are not able at once to assume the posture, they vacillate an instant, and this vacillation shows that after all they are strangers in the world. This is more or less strikingly evident in proportion to the art they possess, but even the most artistic knights cannot altogether conceal this vacillation. One need not look at them when they are up in the air, but only the instant they touch or have touched the ground–then one recognizes them. But to be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian–that only the knight of faith can do—and this is the one and only prodigy.”
—Søren Kierkegaard, Fear & Trembling
This remarkable passage from Kierkegaard's Fear & Trembling is what got me started in my research: as a scientist, his provacative claim that "Knight of Infinity" were identifiable by empirical observation inspired me to begin looking for Knights of Infinity in my daily life. Was it true that some people stuck out, were different because of their existential orientation? How could they be spotted, and where would they congregate? These questions eventually led to my study of sapience and my illuminati dialectics.
Links not working? The above links to books are to the site libgen.org. This website sometimes goes down, so please check back later or try one of these mirrors: [1] [2] [3] [4].
Further reading: I keep a much longer list of recommendations for books, movies, and other media. This more extensive library is viewable here.