nrg

a ni.hil.ist reading group – meetings as scheduled

This is a talk about devotional witchcraft that was presented by Peter Grey, co-founder of the occult publisher Scarlet Imprint, at the Trans-States conference in 2017.

From the conference proceedings: “The transformation of the male erotic landscape through magical and witchcraft practices as constellated about the female mysteries of Babalon. Special attention is given to the pact of transformative blood rituals: menstruation, modification, ordeal and the meaning of animal sacrifice. An account of ongoing magical work by a modern practitioner following the skein of menstrual magic anticipated in such partnerships as Marjorie Cameron and Jack Parsons, Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove.”

Add-on: so far as I can tell, Grey is most widely known in anarchist circles for an essay from 2014, “Rewilding Witchcraft”, a polemic assertion that witchcraft is “quintessentially wild, ambivalent, ambiguous, queer. ” That pamphlet is available here: – Audio: https://immediatism.com/archives/607 – Text: https://scarletimprint.com/essays/rewilding-witchcraft – Also in The Brazen Vessel (linked above), and via littleblackcart.

11UTC – https://meet.jit.si/actualstallsbecomethus

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For this week we've decided to give our minds and hearts a little break, by reading some short stories by Jorge Luis Borges.

Borges and I – only 1 page (really an introduction) The Circular Ruins – 3 pages The Lottery in Babylon – 4 pages. from wikipedia: “The story is about the role that chance plays in life, whether occurrences are genuinely deserved or whether all of life is merely based on luck or loss. The story references Zeno's paradox by using the lottery as a metaphor for all the possible random occurrences that could occur between any two points in time.” we are enacting the phenomena and it us!

lastly, The Garden of Forking Paths – 8 pages

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pretty paintings

11 UTC

In an effort to decenter the so-called human, we’re confronting Karen Barad’s framework of agential realism. They propose a performative understanding of matter. The author is a theoretical particle physicist playing with time and space to propose the inseperability of ‘intra-acting agencies’. For Barad, all phenomena emerge through intra-action. Their coming-into-relation is a condition for their existence.

Barad’s wider project is concerned with the legacies of Niels Bohr, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Ian Hacking, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and others. By Barad’s account, entanglements breed responsibilities, and acknowledging that one is a part of reality demands a response in turn. Avowedly concerned with power, which they describe as an immanent set of force relations. Starting from the basic propositions of quantum physics, Barad troubles any categorical faith in the stability of things, or faith in their representations. All is intra-acting, moving, shifting.

“We are responsible for the world in which we live, not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping.”

Agential Realism, Karen Barad: http://library.memoryoftheworld.org/#/book/7ad3e8f9-3423-4e1d-9f1e-2df98abd2b81 (chapter 4, pages 132-185) (pdf pages 149-202)

Reading 132-161 for Thursday, stopping right before subsection “The boundaries of an apparatus”

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New time new place!

Since the de Castro text was so dense we have allotted time for continuing its discussion in this upcoming session.
As well, we will be doing some meta chatting about the future direction of the ni.hil.ist reading group, both for scheduling stuff and content-wise [either continuing the human/anti-/non-/trans-human question, and/or what direction to take it (anti-blackness/afropessimism being an earlier proposed avenue).] If you've got thoughts then bring em!

link to the reading

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Wacky stuff

For next week we will be reading The Past Is Yet to Come by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski. Email bugs @ ni.hil.ist for the jitsi link (due to technical problems we switched jitsi servers so if you previously had joined you may still need to ask for the new link).

link to the reading

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Cronos and the Tyranny of the Clock is the next piece in our reading series on anti-humanism. It has a picture of Saturn devouring a child, so it's gonna be a good one I'm sure!

See you at 11 pm UTC on jit.si. Email bugs at ni.hil.ist for the link.

Blog link

Saturn eating baby

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Dazai river

Following along with the theme of anti-humanism, we will explore the piece The Nihilist as Not-Man by Stefan Bolea. Through the works of three different authors, one familiar to this group, and two less so, Bolea presents an idea of the nihilist subject as something certainly not-human, which is in contrast to Nietzsche's ubermensch. The writer of this post will be curious to hear which take each attendant of #nrg finds resonant.

at 11 UTC on jitsi! You can email bugs for the link

Reasearchgate pdf Immediatism audio

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image

https://raddle.me/125299

Following a 1 week break, to begin our series addressing the topic of anti-humanism, we will discuss Absolute Typhos by Alejandro de Acosta. What is a real human? What is real humanity, with real human relations? From the perspectives of the Greek Cynics, Stirner's Unique, and Situationist International, A de A explores these questions, and how mediation informs the human.

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Vladimir Veličković

No reading for this week folks. Instead, we'd like to invite people to join in on a discussion and try to bring reading suggestions from the world of anti-humanist thought. During the July 7th session ability/madness/child liberation/race/afropessmism/speciesism all got brought up as potential avenues of attacking this topic but we aren't precluding anything.

If you are interested in the topic we'd love to hear from you at 11 UTC, email bugs @ ni.hil.ist for the jitsi link.

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For next week we will continuing our stumbling esoteric path with the piece “The Patter is The Pattern”.

From the publishers of this piece, Filler Distro:

A vast, unfathomable beast is slumbering, casting poisoned dreams through time. Our time, now, is the prelude to its awakening. There’s no such thing as fiction, it inevitably passes through us as a spectre, and forces itself upon existence. Now is the time of monsters, now is the time to see what comes of the encroaching desert.

pdf link

The cover of this zine

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