Nilsi

Have you ever watched an haute couture show? It’s not about status, signaling, or sales. It’s about art. Pure excess. It’s the surplus of creativity that spills over once all the perfume and leather goods have paid the bills. A brand name so overfull with mythic intensity that it can’t help but stage its own mythology - live, on the runway. There’s an excellent documentary on John Galliano, who was creative director at Dior during the ’90s and 2000s. In my humble opinion, the greatest fashion designer of all time. You can literally watch this on mute and still be mesmerized. The dresses alone are among the most beautiful things you’ll ever see. This is pure luxury. Decadence. Excess - for its own sake. And by the way, that Valentino suit Christian Bale wears in American Psycho? Pristine. I don’t know what you’re smoking if you think you could find anything that beautiful outside the world of luxury.

Let me be very clear about this. This is not some personal invention. It’s not a historical curiosity. It’s not a clever pastime or a niche aesthetic I’m trying to sell. It’s not just something that sounds cool. What I’m trying to describe - what I keep circling around - is something real, and old, and deeply serious. It is older than civilization. It is older than language. It is, in the deepest sense, sacred. It begins - if anything begins - with God dreaming. Dreaming not the world, but His own mask. Dreaming forms, colors, voices. Dreaming roles, costumes, veils. And in that act of creation, forgetting Himself. Forgetting that He was ever something other than the performance. The dream becomes flesh, becomes theater, becomes multiplicity. God enters the mask and becomes the character. And He never fully returns. This is not metaphor. It is myth at its most literal. The divine is not hidden behind appearances - it is shattered into them. The Greeks knew this. The Dionysian rites did not offer transcendence. They offered rupture. Ecstasy. Dismemberment. A tearing of the god into fragments - body broken into image, into voice, into sacred frenzy. The mask was not used to hide the truth. The mask was the truth. And no one understood this better, no one enacted this more completely, than Nietzsche. Nietzsche did not write from a position of stability. He wrote from within the storm. He did not interpret Dionysus - he became Dionysus. Read him through Klossowski and you see it: the eternal return is not a metaphysical thesis, but a vicious circle of appearances. A recursive theater. A sacred spiral in which the subject dissolves. Nietzsche is not a philosopher. He is a ritual performer possessed by his own thought. And in the end, the performance consumed him. The letters he wrote - one signed as Nietzsche, the next as Jesus, the next as Dionysus, the next as Richard Wagner - are not the signs of confusion. They are the signs of divine recursion. He was no longer the author. He was the play. The roles had taken over. He was being dismembered, scattered, like Dionysus. The rite was complete. And when I talk about this performance - this ritual, this sacred madness - I don’t mean illusion. I mean God entering simulation, God losing track of the script. This is not aesthetic play. It is liturgical derangement. It is psychedelic theology. It is DMT before DMT. The Imaginary is not false. The Imaginary is the zone through which the Real becomes possible. And you can even hear it, impossibly, in a pop album. I Love Jennifer B. by Jockstrap. I know how that sounds. But listen. This album is not just eclectic. It is possessed. It is a shifting vortex of masks, sounds, identities, performed with such precision and commitment that it becomes - against all odds - a ritual. It is composed like a hallucination in formalwear. One moment you are inside a crystalline rhythm - synths sequenced like diamonds. The next, a string section, European, decadent, baroque. Then her voice - suddenly girlish, or angelic, or mechanical, or obscene - sings of Champagne, Italy, sex, violence, childhood, theater. She is a stripper. She is a diva. She is a girl. She is a monster. She is no one. And every version of her is sincere. The entire album is a masquerade ball performed in a burning temple. Every song opens a new mask. But the masks are not worn - they are lived. The music doesn’t move through genres. It convulses through identities. From art school elegance to trashy club beat to something like a séance. You don’t follow it. You get lost in it. You forget yourself in it. It is grotesque, refined, camp, sacred. It is sacred because it does not mock. It is sacred because it burns. You hear lace, latex, mascara, blood, perfume, rot, prayer. It is beautiful. It is stupid. It is divine. It is exactly what it is. This is not ironic. This is not experimental. This is a liturgy of the Imaginary. Because the Real does not lie behind the mask. The Real erupts through it. This is not metaphor. This is how God lives - dreaming, forgetting, performing.

I see what you mean. If you want to “traverse the fantasy” for some existential sobriety - castration, really - be my guest. (Though let’s be honest: changing your avatar and username on an internet forum is hardly a cut in the flesh.) Personally, I find that posture dull. There’s a darker lineage - de Sade, Nietzsche, Bataille, Klossowski, Artaud, Deleuze, Land - that doesn’t aim to dissolve fantasy, but to saturate it. A lineage that doesn’t seek some higher clarity, but a descent - into mask, ritual, theater, erotic force. A masquerade, not to conceal identity, but to undo it. Not to symbolize, but to dissolve in intensity. This isn’t about gendered energies - masculine, feminine, whatever. It’s erotic, yes. But not in a Hallmark or Tantric sense. It’s visceral, filthy, electric. It’s base, in Bataille’s sense - a materialism of excretion, meat, pus, and sex, of sacred obscenity. No idealism, no vitalism. Just matter - convulsing, shimmering, decaying, birthing masks. That’s what interests me: the Imaginary not as misrecognition, but as a surface of metamorphosis. A decadent theater where the flesh wears infinite veils. This is the dream of Deleuze and Guattari - to tear the body from the Symbolic and set it loose on the plane of consistency. Desire here doesn’t orbit lack. It builds. It pulses. It spills. And Nick Land takes this into a blackened futurity. With hyperstition, masks no longer belong to subjects - they belong to time itself. The masquerade becomes a self-writing mythos, seeding real effects. The Imaginary becomes flesh-code. A simulation so intense it eats through the Real and shits out prophecy. This for me is a radically immanent and ecstatic metaphysics.

Fair enough - you want to move beyond relativism and absolutism into some kind of pragmatic pluralism. I get it. But then the question becomes: which purposes are worth having? How do you rank conflicting ones? You’re saying truth is contextual - fine - but then what makes one context or goal more “valid” than another? And here we’re already in Jordan Peterson territory. And while I disagree with his framework, I respect that he at least tries to answer that. It seems to me like you’re operating from a kind of spontaneous humanism - where things like slavery or authoritarianism are just self-evidently bad. But is that actually so self-evident? If you’re serious about situatedness, then even those judgments are contingent - not neutral, not universal. So here’s where I bring in Nietzsche. Because if everything is already embedded - if we’re not choosing our axioms from outside but expressing deeper drives - then aren’t we already in a world of will to power? Of Heraclitian fire? Of forces asserting, affirming, transforming themselves? That’s not relativism. That’s not universalism. That’s beyond both. And from there, maybe the only honest move is post-philosophy. Not more meta-theory. Not more frameworks. Just: this is me. These are my values, my instincts, my contradictions. What are yours? And that’s where I find Derrida’s idea of hospitality so beautiful - not because it creates shared ground, but because it doesn’t. It’s a willingness to meet the other even when no shared grammar exists. No agreement. No synthesis. Just presence. Which brings me to my critique. The kind of meta-language I see you - and others in this integral/meta space - using is too clean. Too non-violent. Too frictionless. You’re creating a universal code where everyone can speak, but no one is actually revealed. It sounds inclusive, but it ends up erasing real difference. Personally, I don’t even want clarity. I don’t want us all speaking the same language. I want people speaking in their language - shaped by their body, history, contradictions. Even if I can’t understand it. Especially then. Because only then is there risk. Only then is there life. And honestly? I think that’s the real conclusion of Heidegger. If you take situatedness seriously, you don’t describe it - you live it. You’re immersed. There is no view-from-nowhere. No stepping outside the clearing. You’re in it. No more meta. No more escape. That’s precisely where Heidegger arrived toward the end of his life. And to me, that’s where philosophy ends - and where what I take from François Laruelle as non-philosophy begins. And with it, something more human - and more dangerous - begins.

There’s a brilliant conversation between Slavoj Žižek and Peter Sloterdijk that, whether they intended it or not, perfectly stages the eternal conflict at the heart of subjectivity and education. Žižek, ever the dialectician, embodies the carrot-on-a-string logic of Hegelian deferral: just one more book, one more analysis, one more ironic aside, and we’ll arrive. His method feeds the fantasy that the Real can be grasped through accumulation - that if we sublate enough contradictions, the truth will eventually emerge, retroactively justified by the system that produced it. Sloterdijk, on the other hand, represents something else entirely: the embodied, ritualistic stance that says the Real is here, now, always too much - and always slipping just beyond our grip. But instead of chasing it, we train for it. Not to master it, but to expose ourselves to it again and again through deliberate intensification of life.

Also, isn’t it funny that this exact principle shows up in weightlifting? The real gains don’t come from “slow and controlled” isolation movements, but from something more intense, more instinctual - where the whole system is under pressure, not just the „muscle.“ It’s like that John Carpenter movie They Live, where putting on the glasses reveals the ideology behind the image. And honestly, if I put those glasses on in the gym - behind all the cliché posters of bodybuilders and motivational quotes - I’m pretty sure I’d see a portrait of Hegel and quotations from the „Logic of Science.“

That’s a sharp framework for exposing the fraudulence of what passes for “education” in modern institutions. It’s absurd that you can take a philosophy of science or methodology class without ever having heard of Hegel - when the entire structure of modern education still operates under the specter of his dialectic. His ghost haunts the machinery, even when his name has been scrubbed from the syllabus. The system still believes in progress through abstraction, contradiction, sublation - except now it’s dressed up as “learning outcomes” and “research clusters.” But this isn’t just some unfortunate legacy. The system’s very drive - in the Freudian sense - is to perpetuate itself. Like Freud said: a drive doesn’t want to reach a goal; it wants to keep going. Its symptom is itself. And the education system’s symptom is this: perpetual deferral of the Real. One more module, one more credential, one more method section. Experience is replaced by commentary. Learning becomes a sanctioned descent into a bottomless dialectical pit - where nothing happens but everything is “critically engaged.” That’s why Schopenhauer hated Hegel so much. He saw it early. “If I were to write a satire on professors of philosophy, Hegel would be the main character.” Because Hegel wasn’t just wrong - he was useful to the state. He gave dialectical cover to the bureaucratization of thought. And that’s still the function of most “critical theory” today: self-replicating jargon that insulates institutions from actual rupture. Which is exactly why Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator should be mandatory in any philosophy of science class. Because unlike most “methodology,” it isn’t about how to produce knowledge - it’s about what kind of person can bear truth in the first place. And the answer isn’t someone who follows protocol. It’s someone who jumps - into intensity, into contradiction, into the Real. And honestly, I’m not surprised that a metal guitarist intuitively grasps this, while so-called “philosophers” and “educators” with fancy degrees and research credentials couldn’t spell it out if their lives depended on it. The great contemporary reader of Nietzsche, Peter Sloterdijk, puts it best: “To philosophize is to exercise. To think is to train in the intensities of reality.”

I want to see Jordan Peterson vs. 20 Muslims.

How did you know?

I also think the whole Wolf of Wall Street archetype of the salesman is a complete cultural delusion. A real sales professional isn’t some chest-thumping frat boy in a suit yelling “sell me this pen.” He’s much closer to a psychoanalyst - quietly decoding repression, resistance, and obscure purchasing anxiety. Though to be fair, the shared cocaine habit does provide a certain continuity between the two.

Incidentally, that’s why sales - despite being the obvious cliché answer - is actually one of the worst possible jobs for a narcissist. It requires the complete annihilation of one’s own ego, so you can obsess over the others desire and every neurotic, logistical, and financial obstacle standing in its way. A narcissist in sales is like a vampire in a mirror: fundamentally incompatible with the task at hand.

“Creative Director” is, functionally, a polite euphemism for terminal narcissist with a Pinterest addiction. Unfortunately, I’m professionally obligated to interact with a depressingly high number of these “visionaries.” Each encounter being a test of my gag reflex and moral restraint. CEOs and MDs, by contrast, wield exponentially more power and money, yet manage to behave like actual adults. It’s almost as if the less you care about your „aura,“ the more tolerable you become.

My epistemology is that some broke-ass programmer, oozing resentment toward any resemblance of success and actively accelerating his own inevitable replacement by AI - by turning even his private life into AI-powered cheerleading for his narcissistic cult leader - is definitely not a credible source on anything, let alone the „most capable sleep specialist on planet earth“.

The only one putting themselves on a pedestal here is you. Really copying Leo all the way, huh?

This has to be a parody, right?

The moderator Integral’s intelligence is child’s play, a monkey could mimic whatever his cult leader tells him without questioning anything. The mark of stupidity is that he thinks blind following is originality, and that because the echo chamber that is this forum has validated him as being at the pinnacle of something very important, he must be intelligent. Yet Integral has never questioned what originality or individuality is, revealing the lack of both - coming, predictably, from someone who can’t even write his own posts and has to rely on AI to do it for him.

Do people actually try things before they talk? I’ve been training like this for years and consistently putting on muscle. So what are we even talking about?

I much prefer Nietzsche and Camus - and also post-structuralists like Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze. Their thought really frees life from the burden of self-realization. It honors life in all its beauty and miracle - not as a problem to be solved, but as a possibility.

That’s also, by the way, why I don’t care for Sartre. He basically takes Heidegger and then circles back to Hegel. So nothing’s really gained. You’re still stuck - not as spirit realizing itself, but as a human incapable of realizing itself yet still trying. Like... why?

I appreciate him in the same way I appreciate Heidegger - he’s offering the preconditions for escaping the nightmare of dialectics. And yes, at the core, I’m trying to move beyond dialectical thinking. And I claim existentialist thought at its best - and particularly Deleuze, with his insistence on thinking as productive and creative - is such an authentic post-phenomenological and even post-Enlightenment stance. That’s what I’m most interested in.

That’s the entire point I’m trying to make - and it’s super important and fundamental. So how is that nitpicking?

There are plenty of female psychoanalysts who’ve developed these ideas independently of Lacan. Jessica Benjamin argued that mutual recognition is always unstable - there’s always a gap or asymmetry in desire and relationality. Luce Irigaray critiqued phallocentrism and argued that women’s desire is multiple, non-unitary, and resists being fully captured by male-centric psychoanalytic structures. Julia Kristeva, though focusing more on the semiotic and abjection, also emphasized the irreducibility of desire and the impossibility of full relational closure. So what now? Are they just not "real women," or have they been coerced by the patriarchy too? And honestly, I even get that psychoanalysis itself is often framed as a patriarchal discourse - which is why I aligned myself with Deleuze and queer theory from the start. I already anticipated this might come up.

Good song - I love Björk, I’ll give you that. But what do you expect me to say to this? I’m not going to argue against your experience. Maybe we’re just using words differently. Anyway, my experience is completely different. I’ve never observed the kind of difference you’re describing. I’ve been with women who actually shared your views to some extent, but nothing I saw in them made me believe anything like what you’re describing was really at play. Take that Björk song. What makes it so good? Can you put your finger on it? People have been writing about her for decades and could keep doing so for millennia - and still, that je-ne-sais-quoi would remain. It’s the same with desire. A woman might love her man. She might even grasp him in his entirety. But his being changes. It’s fluid, not fixed. And so is desire. What you desire is just a temporary assemblage. There’s no stable correlation between signifier and signified as you’re making it out to be. Desire can proliferate in all sorts of directions. Even now, you probably desire something particular to this moment that keeps your experience moving forward. And it’s the same when you’re with your man. He’s not the embodiment of desire itself. Some of that desire gets projected onto him - when you’re thinking about him, spending time together, passionately making love, or whatever. Yet there’s always an element of the yet-to-come in desire. That’s why it’s impossible to fully desire the concrete, the already, the embodied.