Comics crit: Magneto and Sartre edition with bonus ill-conceived insomniacal condemnation of what pigs we humans are

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

(Jean-Paul Sartre.)

Magneto: I remember my own childhood … the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the guards joking as they herded my family to their death. As our lives were nothing to them, so human lives became nothing to me.

Storm: If you have a deity, butcher, pray to it.

Magneto: As a boy, I believed. As a boy — I turned my back on God forever.

(Uncanny X-Men #150. October 1981. Qtd in Jacobs, Rivka. “The Magneto Is Jewish FAQ.” 11 Nov 1998.)

Right?

I think it’s interesting that while Sartre takes it as given that there is no God, Magneto doesn’t say he doesn’t believe in God: just that he’s turned his back on God.

Do you believe there are events so breathtakingly beyond our tiny human processing powers in their scope that even the fallout we ourselves witness is tiny compared to the ripples they create in the universe? Do you think those ripples can become so powerful as they reverbate out in their effect that they can negate the existence of God? I’m not explaining my question well.

Okay. Obviously there are events that can make a person declaim God’s existence, as Sartre does, just as those same events might crystallize another person’s faith, reaction to the primal scene taking a different effect on each in their turn. That part I do not question or debate. But suppose that there was certainly a God: could something happen that was so bad it could kill God? Would not the events of the second World War, the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima, be such a thing? And have we not compounded that as humanity daily ever since with the usual million atrocities and ungrateful offenses that people have committed toward one another and their environment since they first slithered on to land and grabbed hold, just continually jackhammering cracks in the material of the universe? It’s like two in the morning, why am I even writing this. I guess if Nietzsche’s right and God is dead, I’m saying we killed Him. Right? Don’t shoot the messenger, baby.

Advice: Scholarly women edition

Kind of a sequel to the “asphinctersayswhat” pearl of Freudian wisdom from a few weeks back.

Photographed by David Samson.

When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality.

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

You have no idea.

via suicidewatch on the tumblr.

Percent of women in the U.S. with a Bachelor’s Degree or higher, according to the recent United States Census: 10.9, versus 9% of males. Folks who dig deviant dames, it is looking good for you!

William Blake Month: Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: “The Tigers of Wrath”

Berlin, Germany

The quote comes from “Proverbs of Hell,” a chapter in William Blake’s gnostic text The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The book has been interpreted as an anticipation of Freudian and Jungian models of the mind, illustrating a struggle between a repressive superego and an amoral id. It has also been interpreted as an anticipation of Nietzsche’s theories* about the difference between slave morality and master morality.

(the wiki)

*cf: in particular Nietzsche’s camel – lion – child model of human thought and behavior as outlined in Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen / Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883-1885).

Portions of this post appeared originally on December 5, 2009.

Daily Batman: Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior

“Catwoman Warrior,” by PurgatorioInferno on the deviantart.

“Courageous, untroubled, mocking, and violent — that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s true, I think I don’t have a great enough store of anger, or, if I do, I sublimate it into something else, repress it so it snaps out in an unguarded moment over something unrelated, or manifests itself in a sleepless night. I’m not saying I want to be rage-filled in perpetuity. But a little bit of healthy expression of displeasure would be good. I haven’t got enough anger. Not enough to defend myself when I maybe should, that’s the thing of it. I let myself get bulldozed. I don’t fight back. I need to work on that.

Beginning to look a lot like “X”-Mas

Picture via littleredhead on the tumblr: many more X-Files features to come thanks to her screencapping wonderfulness!

“Amor fati.”

גם זה לטובה

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Blake in Berlin edition

Berlin, Germany

The quote comes from “Proverbs of Hell,” a chapter in William Blake’s gnostic text The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “The book has been interpreted as an anticipation of Freudian and Jungian models of the mind, illustrating a struggle between a repressive superego and an amoral id. It has also been interpreted as an anticipation of Nietzsche’s theories about the difference between slave morality and master morality.” (the wiki)